With all the recent excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, it’s easy to forget that DC / Warner Bros. is busy putting the finishing touches on the TDKR movie that anyone who was reading comics in the late 1980s really cares about: the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

As someone who owns the first print issues of The Dark Knight Returns, plus the first print of the trade paperback, and the Longmeadow Press leather-bound Complete Frank Miller Batman from 1989 (including both The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, and no, it is not for sale), I am damned excited for this flick… and yet disappointed that we are getting it as an animated feature. Because any comic fan around 40 years old had dozens of conversations between 1986 and say, 1996, about who to cast in a live-action version of Dark Knight. My 1988 money was on Lee Marvin as Batman, Anthony Perkins as The Joker, and Christopher Reeve back as Superman… and given all their current availability, I guess I’ll stick with the animated version.

Anyway, DC and Warner Bros. have released the first complete clip from the first part of the movie (It’ll be two DVDs or Blu-Rays), and despite being only a minute or so long, I think you’ll see at least one familiar image… from both The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Rises.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Well, it wasn’t so bad in relation to the July shootings that led to Batman Incorporated #3 being delayed for a month. From a storytelling standpoint, it’s another matter, but I’ll get back to that.

Batman Incorporated #3 has a lot going for it, and that is a surprising thing for a guy who hasn’t been digging Grant Morrison’s Batman stories to say. Morrison delivers us a 70s style detective story, with Batman spending a large part of the issue undercover – Batman doesn’t appear in full costume in a single panel of this issue –  trying to root out Leviathan and Talia Al Ghul. It’s not a perfect issue, but it’s generally a refreshing throwback to Neal Adams / Dennis O’Neil stories from the 70s, with the weirdness for the sake of weirdness that Morrison can’t seem to help himself from chucking into his Batman stories dialed back to a dull roar. Not no roar, but it’s subdued enough for me to alternate between hoping Morrison might be mellowing, and suspecting that his mescaline dealer coughed up a weak batch.

With that said, this issue suffers from a few storytelling problems, and requires a few voluntary leaps in logic if you want to truly enjoy it… which means that the “weak batch” theory is getting more of a foothold with me.

You might have heard that, starting in Justice League #12, writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee will be starting a storyline where Superman and Wonder Woman take their relationship, shall we say, to the next level. They go from friends, to friends with benefits, provided my “benefits” you mean “The Kryptonian Armpit Gank.”

We didn’t jump on this story here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because, after nearly 40 years of reading comics, this isn’t our first rodeo – we’ve seen these two crazy kids bump overidealized comic book uglies in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and saw it intimated in Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, plus if you can spell the words “comic” and “slash” and find the enter key on your laptop, you can get all the super sucky-fucky you can shake your stick at. Besides, these things come and go in the comics – remember when Batman almost chucked the Bat Meat to Zatanna? These things never last, and we figured we’d address it in our review of the issue.

That is, until DC decided to hype the story by setting up profiles for Superman and Wonder Woman on Match.com.