Decisions, Decisions: The ‘Batman: Knightfall Part 1’ Review

DC Comics is reentering the animated arena under James Gunn and Peter Safran with another entry, Batman: Knightfall Part 1. Creature Commandos was very cool and very ensemble-driven, like many of Gunn’s projects, but this one has huge Bane-sized shoes to fill. Does this new era of DC have the juice (or the chops) to pull off an adaptation of one of the most impactful Batman stories ever? Let’s get into it. If You Don’t Know, Now You Know Quick history lesson first. You gotta know why this saga matters. If you didn’t know, Knightfall is an adaptation of one of the most significant comic book stories in the history of genre. In the early 90s, Batman was riding high on the popularity of the 1989 Tim Burton movie. But in that stretch of time, a shift had occurred in comics. Fed up with Marvel, some creators formed Image Comics and brought the ultra-violent hero era into being. From there, you get Spawn, Savage Dragon, WildCATS, and Shadowhawk (my personal fave as a kid). All classics, don’t get me wrong, but all designed to appeal to a ‘popular’ aesthetic of hypermasculine fantasy. Enter Dennis O’Neil, Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan, and Joe Quesada. This group had a summit of writers and artists come together to critique the wave of wildly violent comics with a ‘story as commentary’ epic that centers Batman. Let me be clear, they were flaming Rob Liefeld’s style of ‘bad built, butch body, small feet’. The character, Azrael, is used to personify the look and feel of those kinds of com…