I am a sucker for this kind of image.

Four months pass, and all I give you is another lazy repost. Thank you, Daily Batman:


OK, OK, you deserve more from me after such a long silence.
So here is yet ANOTHER lazy repost from the same place:



Granted, this makes more sense if you know the game or see other video pieces by the same guerilla performance group, but who needs context? It's still pretty funny, even on its own. And I would quite enjoy seeing a real-life Batman creating an exploding bat-logo outside my local Ben & Jerry's.

It's funny cuz it's hot

Surely it was the '66 Bat-series that instilled in me a lifelong love of things that work on at least two levels--ideally the kind that make me laugh and make me hard at the same time, or nearly the same time.

Latest examples:

•The Daily Batman, in which the mastermind behind the long-entertaining Beaucoup Kevin serves up a fresh dish of out-of-context bat-ephemera every day, including this tasty morsel of bound and unbelted Batman:



•From Cracked (which I remember as a second-rate Mad, though its online incarnation seems to work blue fairly often), a list of "The 20 Most Ridiculous Batman Comics Ever Released". It's a nice trip through the Caped Crusader's more embarrassing adventures (the kind Grant Morrison made such mind-blowing use of in killing off Bruce Wayne). Again, a beltless Bat:



•Finally, a link I've been saving for ages now (and I see it hasn't been updated in years): a YouTube channel devoted to Live Action Comic Book Superheroes. It's a grabbag of trailers and clips from Hollywood movies, fan films, TV commercials, vintage serials, and various odds and ends. There's some Bat-stuff, all of which I think I'd seen before, but what really caught my eye was the only fan film devoted to Hourman I have ever seen. The outfit is a bit cheesy, but there's plenty to recommend it to perverts like me 'n' you:

No shit, Sherlock

Lots of recent odds and ends, connections between which I largely leave to you:

1. An episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted to Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives. For the record, I admit to a mild Holmes fetish, particularly when he is portrayed by Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone, and particularly in the WWII-era Rathbone films like SH and the Woman in Green and Dressed to Kill. The real reason I like that series--films in which Holmes is moved into the present day, surely to the horror of true A. C. Doyle fans--is that they are lower than the "real" stories on detective work and higher on, you guessed it, delightfully kinky deathtraps. In many of them (I think there are at least four made back-to-back in the mid-1940s) Moriarty gets to be a Joker-style archnemesis bent on our hero's demise, more overtly than in the canonical novels and tales.

2. Another public radio show, RadioLab, recently rebroadcast an episode devoted to the subject of morality. This summary lays out the terrain:

we’ll explore where our sense of right and wrong come from. We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.

3. And speaking of morality (see, these items are connected after all!), here's a nice piece on the demise of (and ethics of) the pirated-comic-panels extravaganza Scans Daily from Johnny Bacardi. I admit it--I visited often (though never daily) in search of images that floated my bat-boat. But apparently I didn't check it that often, or I would have known that SD was no more. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

4. Finally, a link that has nothing to do with morality, but if I don't post it now I'll forget about it: Bat-Blog tipped me off to a Flash animation of Batman's utility belt. Here's a direct link to the project, which was originally intended for tech geeks and vanilla-flavored comics fanboys, but I say, bring on the belt-fetishists, too!

I assure you, the animated version is more fun than this mere frame grab:

This probably calls for a "spoiler alert" ...

... except I figure anyone who is actually following this whole Batman's-dead/no-he's-not business is probably way more up on all of this than I am. All I care about is, this is a very sexy panel, for more reasons than I can count:



Note: You can find the whole issue here, on Scans Daily. But beware, it truly will make no sense unless you really, really care about this stuff.