Humor

Welcome to Wayne’s World, the latest ComicsAlliance TV recap series, jumping right into the middle of the third season of Fox’s Gotham, the show about the childhood of Bruce Wayne and the world of Batman before Batman. This week, the city of Gotham plunges into chaos as Jerome takes Bruce Wayne out to the carnival in the Gotham winter finale.

There’s a certain theatrical nihilism to Donald Trump that lends itself well to Batman’s greatest nemesis, as we’ve seen Mark Hamill repeatedly demonstrate with his Joker-ized take on Trump tweets. As it turns out, the parallel works eerily well with other Jokers, as The Daily Show discovers with horrifying precision.

The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow follows a time-traveling team of misfits that includes historian Nate Heywood, Arrow’s Atom and White Canary, both halves of Firestorm, and Flash rogue Heat Wave. Recappers Matt Wilson and James Leask are on hand to deliver our Legends of Tomorrow post-show analysis, Stuff of Legends. The show returns from a brief hiatus this week with "Raiders of the Lost Art," in which the Legends find an old friend and save Howard the Duck from being erased from movie history. No, really. The episode was directed by Dermott Downs and written by Keto Shimizu and Chris Fedak.

Last week, I wrote about "Manhunt on Land," an Aquaman story where he drove around in a pickup truck full of fish to track down a sea crook who had taken to land for the express purpose of avoiding being dragged back to jail by Aquaman. That in and of itself is a solid premise, but what really makes it interesting is that it was a strange little rarity of the Silver Age: It was actually a crossover with a Green Arrow story in the same issue. Sadly, the second half doesn't have the immediate hook of a pickup truck that's also an aquarium, but it's definitely a story worth talking about --- not just because of the unusual crossover element, but because it has one of the most shocking endings I've ever read. And for the Silver Age, that's saying something.

Welcome to Wayne’s World, the latest ComicsAlliance TV recap series, jumping right into the middle of the third season of Fox’s Gotham, the show about the childhood of Bruce Wayne, and the world of Batman before Batman. Your Gotham guides are Dylan Todd, an old hand at the recap game, but completely new to the show; and Tara Marie, a new recapper, but a dyed-in-the-wool Gotham fan. In this episode, Barbara schemes, Selina gets played, and the proto-Joker's face gets taken out for a spin. "Smile Like You Mean It" was directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, and written by Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt.

At some point we’re all going to have to stop asking, “Is this real life?! Is this really happening right now?!” The daily proliferation of surreal news headlines will never feel normal (nor should they), but it’s the frequency our country is operating at now, and it will likely continue at this pitch for the next four years, which officially kicked off today. In the latest episode of The Surreal Life, Donald Trump basically plagiarized Bane, Tom Hardy’s mush-mouthed villain from The Dark Knight Rises, in his inauguration speech.

I've made my share of jokes about him before, but I'm really starting to think that 2017 is going to be the year that I do my best to get into Aquaman. As much as I love DC's Silver Age, he's my biggest blind spot of the entire era, and it's time to fix that. There's just one problem: I don't think I actually like reading about underwater adventure, and that's... that's gonna be an issue. But maybe there's hope. This week, Twitter's own @YellFeat and Local Aquaman Expert Megan Nielsen alerted me to the existence of "Manhunt On Land," a story where Aquaman takes on a landlocked crime spree by loading up a pickup truck with his underwater friends and driving around with a fishbowl on his head. And it's amazing.

Welcome to Wayne's World, the latest ComicsAlliance TV recap series, jumping right into the middle of the third season of Fox's Gotham, the show about the childhood of Bruce Wayne, and the world of Batman before Batman. Your Gotham guides are Dylan Todd, an old hand at the recap game, but completely new to the show; and Tara Marie, a new recapper, but a dyed-in-the-wool Gotham fan. In this episode, Gotham returns with a bang. We've got the return of the Joker, Penguin's descent into madness, and Zsasz shooting a bunch of different guns. "Ghosts" was directed by Eagle Eglisson and written by Danny Cannon.

The most widely recognized iterations of Batman’s constant foe the Joker would probably have to be Heath Ledger as the unchained mad-dog of The Dark Knight, Jack Nicholson as an urbane creep in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, and to a lesser extent, Cesar Romero’s campy turn in the goofy TV series from the ’60s. But Mark Hamill logged more hours as the Clown Prince of Crime than the rest of them put together, voicing the Joker in the long-running animated series and its many spin-offs. The man with the greatest claim to the Joker persona dusted off his special crazy-voice this week for a more pointedly political purpose than the usual cocktail-party entertainment.

If you read through enough back issues of Detective Comics, you'll run across a guy who seems an awful lot like a rough draft for Maxie Zeus. The only difference is that instead of fighting Batman, this guy decided that it would be a good idea to try and recruit the Martian Manhunter, who has all of Superman's powers plus the ability to read your mind and turn invisible. And it works out about as well as you'd think.