Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399900
Bruce Timm has drawn numerous DC comic book covers including variant covers (top) and convention exclusive covers (bottom). remarked approvingly on a blown-up cover of The Shadow over Timm's desk. Because the show was pitched toward kids, Batman: The Animated Series had to keep things family-friendly enough to get past Standards and Practices. That meant no nudity, no choking, and carefully constructed violence. Anytime a villain fell from a great height, a shot had to be included to show that he was groaning and therefore still alive. Several years later, when he was piloting a teenage version of Batman through adventures in Batman Beyond, the iconic superhero took on new dimensions. "I am always kind of amazed at how versatile and resilient Batman is as a character," Timm says. "It's not even just, 'Oh you can go light or dark.' There's all kinds of weird degrees within the dark sphere. The most recent version, Batman: Soul of the Dragon, was set in the 1970s, and was kind of a Blaxploitation Kung Fu movie. And Bruce Wayne was a lot younger and more relatable than any version I had ever done." F E AT U R E Images courtesy of DC. 38 KEYFRAME HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO Examining a superhero's younger years, before the character becomes a hero or is in training, has proven popular and opened up new storylines and conundrums for animated superheroes. When she took the helm of the DC Super Hero Girls franchise in 2019, writer and Executive Producer Lauren Faust was excited at the prospect of showing not just an ethnically diverse slate of heroes, but also depicting them as flawed, insecure and, yes, even violent. Supergirl lived in the considerable shadow of her more famous cousin. Wonder Woman, coming as she did from a different culture, didn't know how to act like a typical teenager. Batgirl felt she was a better sidekick to Batman than Robin. In one of the show's early meetings between two future superheroes, Wonder Woman punched Supergirl in the face so hard that she took out the floorboards