The year was 1986, and two of the comics industry’s powerhouse creators — Frank Miller and Alan Moore — were busily deconstructing the dominant discourse around superheroes, poking at their flaws and suggesting a less sanitized, and more actively political way of thinking about them.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns broke the rules of mainstream comic books, presenting complex takes on how modern society might actually respond if handsome gods fell from the sky, and vengeful vigilantes emerged from the shadows. They argued for a darker and more mature style of comics, with morally ambiguous heroes operating in a fallen world.

And then there’s Zack Snyder, who came along in the mid-2010s with the idea of taking scenes that he liked from The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and stringing them together without thinking much about what they actually meant.

As we can see in 2016’s high-flying failure Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder mostly likes the growling and the punching, in a doomed world where strength is everything. Snyder’s characters are obsessed with dominating every situation that they’re in, from Batman vowing to make Superman bleed, all the way down to Perry White telling Clark Kent to shut up and write about sports.

This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Stephen Robinson from the hilarious political website Wonkette and the podcast The Play Typer Guy to deconstruct this deconstruction, and figure out why audiences didn’t take to this cartoon character fight club between superheroes that we can hardly recognize.

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible and lots of other places. Come check it out!

Continue reading Episode 12: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice →