Okay then, so much happened in Cat-Tales last week I didn’t even manage to get a blog out. I had another chance to play my friend’s Lego Batman game, and as Classic Catwoman, I opened a can of whoopass the goggled pretender—not once but many times, shocking my friend with the violence of a purple cat crossed. It would have been a very cute and entertaining entry, but nobody got to read it because I was more than occupied prepping for the big rollout over the weekend. In case you haven’t seen it:
- The website got a makeover, including some spiff video wallpaper that did not shoot or edit itself.
- Armchair Detective and Not My Kink are out for Kindle and Mobi.
- Cat-Tales opened a virtual Visitor Center in Second Life (otherwise known in these parts as the TBA that ate Tokyo).
- Shane Sahr, the rockstar bartender at Seattle’s famous Tini Bigs Martini Bar, released a quartet of Cat-Tales Cocktails that are too sinfully indulgent to be believed.
Now, that’s a lot to get ready, particularly when one of my clients had a press thing and needed a little extra web-work himself. Pulled it off though, got everything together, produced the triple launch without a hitch. Got some nice screenshots of the visitor center, got a new headshot of myself as a pixilated person IN the visitor center, got pictures of the criminally indulgent Cat-Tales Cocktails that should have you all on a plane to Seattle just to order one of these babies. I was all set to get up this morning write up a killer entry about the whole thing when…
Picture a close-up on Chris with a strange little twitch above her right eye. "That’s… Sean Hayes… That’s… Radio City Music Hall… That’s…"
I’m a theatre-gal, folks. Remember
Reputation? It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with an idea like "Cat-Tales: An Evening with Catwoman", and that’s a mind who’s spent an awful lot of time backstage. I’m also hip deep in comic book superheroes. Sean Hayes hosting the Tony Awards, covering Streisand, dressed as Spiderman, that’s not something someone like me can me can just IGNORE! For the love of God and Stan Lee, that’s like… for 30 years we’ve all assumed the ’66 Batman was lightning in a bottle, a product of time and place that, if there is justice in the universe, should never be attempted again. But Sean Hayes? Don’t Rain on My Parade? CAMP LIVES, folks. Superhero Camp is alive and well and heading for the Lunt-Fontane.
And y’know what? I’m fine with it. Perhaps the most resilient aftereffect of Miller on the Bat mythos and comic books in general is this overblown seriousness. Maybe it’s not as corrosive to the soul as the other stuff, but it is every bit as damaging to the genre as a whole. It simply isn’t necessary to take this all so f-ing seriously 24/7/365. It is permissible to lighten up and have a little goddamn fun, and by NOT doing so, a lot of people who would be fans are shoo'd away - because unlike the fanboys who keep enabling this crap, we demand our our entertainment make us FEEL GOOD. The new Brave and the Bold cartoon gets that. The DC vs Marvel guys on YouTube certainly get it. Hell, even the uber-realistic Nolan movies get it. Look at Liam Neason’s face when Bruce finally makes his costumed entrance in Batman Begins. They get it. They ALL get it.
Perhaps that's why Batman can thrive in movies, in cartoons, in games, and (humbly) in prose fiction, in everywhere EXCEPT the comics medium where he began, is because those guys are the only ones locked into this mindset that Batman is a serious-fucking-business. Maybe if we can just get them to unclench, to embrace the lip twitch and all that it implies, there’s hope. If not, we can just keep showing this:
and get days of free entertainment watching them try to prevent their heads from exploding. That could be fun too.
Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com
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