BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

Production design porn from the Topps Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine

Long before movie studios promoted their tentpole releases through elaborate sites or postings of HD trailers on Apple's trailer site ("Watch the Avatar trailer a day before its premiere in theaters or James Cameron will shoot a puppy!"), there were these things called official movie souvenir magazines that were exactly like the studio sites promotional material-hungry film geeks can click to nowadays. When I was a kid, either Starlog Press or Topps would devote an entire one-shot mag to an upcoming blockbuster and fill the mag with a spoilerrific photo summary of the movie, fluffy cast interviews, slightly less fluffy crew interviews and the only part of the mag I liked, behind-the-scenes pictures and concept art. Starlog Press did tie-in mags for the Star Trek, Rocky and James Bond franchises, while Topps focused on blockbusters that it produced trading cards for, like Tim Burton's Batman and Touchstone Pictures' wannabe Batman, the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy reboot.

Do mag publishers still put out official movie souvenir mags? I wouldn't be surprised if High School Musical: The Musical or whatever it's called recently had one.

In 1989, Batman was my favorite movie. Twenty summers later, uh... not so much. But both score music-wise and production design-wise, the film remains one of the most impressive from that decade. Production designer Anton Furst's bleak vision of Gotham City won him an Oscar and was so pitch-perfect for this incarnation of Batman that DC incorporated the late Furst's architectural designs into the early '90s comics.

Here are several interesting photos and drawings from my well-preserved copy of the 1989 Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, which I still like to occasionally leaf through even though the Pop Art-colored backgrounds and frothy late '80s fonts are a poor match with the photos from this darker-toned Batman movie--the mag looks like it was designed by the Saved by the Bell opening titles designer.


A visual effects crew member inspects the miniature Gotham set that was built for the Batwing attack sequence.


Was this where the Gotham Central police headquarters name and comic book series title came from?


The Batman shoot in England encompassed most of Pinewood Studios' 18 soundstages, including the stage where this opulent office for Jack Palance's Carl Grissom character was constructed, and Pinewood's 95-acre backlot.


Batman co-creator Bob Kane poses with either Michael Keaton or one of Keaton's 80 stunt doubles from the movie.


"Top speed... unknown"? Judging from the sequence in which Batman and Vicki Vale escape from the Flugelheim Museum in the Batmobile, it looked like its top speed was 40 mph. Batman's ride moved so slow it looked like Aunt Harriet was behind the wheel.


Burton and Furst sit atop the Furst-designed Batmobile. That's the first and last time we'll ever see a giant dildo in something published by Topps--unless the company does a series of cards for the Sex and the City sequel.


The Batmobile apparently has a detachable penis.


The nerdiest of nerds still can't look at pictures of the Furst-designed Batcave like the ones on these two pages without getting riled up over Alfred letting Vicki step into the Batcave to see Bruce Wayne. That moment actually doesn't bother me as much as the revelation that a pre-Joker Jack Napier murdered Bruce's parents (a last-minute script change that Batman co-screenwriter Sam Hamm hated and was unable to fight against) or the sight of Batman, who has a strict code against killing in the comics, continually slaughtering the Joker's thugs like he's Rambo in a funny-looking gimp suit.


Why wasn't it called the Batplane like in the comics? The Batwing sounds like something you find inside a box at Popeyes Bat and Biscuits.


How the hell did Batman get his thick cape to fit in that cockpit?

He looks like a cosplayer who wanted to mash up the Tom Baker Doctor with the Joker.


Kim Jong Il is... Batman.

Hurley's a Y: The Last Man fan!

My favorite in-joke on the most recent Lost episode--besides the rabbit cameo during the retirement home sequence, clearly a reference to the DHARMA Initiative lab rabbits--was Hugo Reyes' choice of reading material at the airport. Dude was checking out the Spanish-language edition of Vertigo's Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step TPB. One of my favorite comic titles of all time, Y, which ended its run last year, also happened to have been created by Lost staff writer and co-producer Brian K. Vaughan.

This isn't our first peek into Hurley's comic collection. Back in the first season, Walt leafed through Hugo's copy of the Spanish edition of Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1. (Then a couple of seasons later, in an episode that BKV scripted, Hugo and Charlie got embroiled in a debate about Superman and the Flash.)

Because Y is back in the spotlight thanks to "316" episode co-writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's little shout-out(*) to their colleague, I'm cross-posting "Y: The last issue," a piece I wrote for another blog last year (January 30, 2008, to be exact). Some things have changed since I wrote that post: I was critical of Torchwood, but that show has improved since then, and Eagle Eye director D.J. Caruso now wants to split his planned adaptation of Y into three movies.

(*) Is Hurley's Y TPB also a foreshadowing of future events on the island? The Y issues that were collected in that TPB involved the crash-landing of a team of cosmonauts who were in space while almost all of Earth's male population perished. The sole survivor of the crash was a pregnant female cosmonaut. The Oceanic Six Five has returned to the island in similar fashion, and many fans suspect that Kate, who had hate sex with Jack before the Ajira flight, is prego.

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Y: The last issue

It's a sad week for comics. The brilliant and addictive Vertigo series Y: The Last Man is wrapping up its five-year run this week with its 60th and final issue. Written by Brian K. Vaughan (whom I met at WonderCon last year--he's a nice guy and he gave me some good advice about comics scriptwriting) and pencilled by the underrated artist Pia Guerra, Y is the saga of Yorick Brown, a twentysomething slacker who embarks on a globehopping journey to find his missing girlfriend and to find out why he survived a mysterious plague that killed all the men on Earth. In 2003, the superb writing in then-new titles like Y, Gotham Central and Sleeper reignited my love for comics after a low creative ebb during the '90s drew me away. (I stopped buying comics in the mid-'90s because I got fed up with the fugly-looking "enhanced" covers, the inane costume changes and the unwieldy crossover events--all '90s Marvel and DC gimmicks to boost flagging sales.)

What does any of this have to do with TV or film? If Y were a TV show, it would have been the best mythology show on the air. (It's because Vaughan didn't have network execs meddling in his vision or forcing him to keep his series going for another few years. Aw, the creative freedom a comics creator gets to enjoy when he owns the rights to his project and answers to no one.) Maybe the writers from inconsistent and unfocused mythology shows like Heroes should start taking notes from Vaughan's comic about how to build an intricate mythology and keep it from falling apart or how to do any of the following:

Unlike Lost, no ill-conceived, one-dimensional Nikkis and Paulos have ever been awkwardly added to Y's large, predominantly female cast. Every character in Y has been richly drawn, from 355, the world-weary, kickass African American government agent (and knitting aficionado!) assigned to protect Yorick, to Dr. Allison Mann, the surly Asian American lesbian biochemist who must unravel the mystery of the plague, to Col. Alter Tse'elon, the driven and enigmatic Israeli soldier who wants to capture Yorick as part of a plot to repopulate Israel. No character is overlooked. Even Yorick's pet monkey, Ampersand--the only other male survivor of the plague--was given his own flashback issue.

Unlike Heroes or 24, Vaughan's post-apocalyptic series has never taken itself too seriously, despite its exploration of gender politics. (Vaughan once said in an interview that "the level of discussion [of gender issues in comics] was never very sophisticated. If written by men, they were either this gross sex fantasy or, alternately, the surviving women would all go down to the U.N. building and hold hands, ending war and suffering. Both were insulting to women. I wanted to subvert the fantasy.") Speaking of attempts at subversive writing, Y is genuinely adult sci-fi, unlike Torchwood, which pats itself on the back for doing "adult sci-fi," but with the exception of the standout "Out of Time" episode, it has come off more juvenile than the show it was spun off from, the family-friendly Doctor Who. It's interesting that Y has been loaded with more T&A than Torchwood--Y wouldn't have been a Vertigo comic without them--and yet Vaughan's series is still more intelligent and grown-up than Torchwood, because of thought-provoking (but not preachy) dialogue like Dr. Mann's brief and startling discussion about how the plague fixed China's gender imbalance problem and caused the crime rates in that country to drop.

And unlike the showrunners of mythology franchises that wore out their welcome--I'm looking at you, X-Files--Vaughan set an end date for Y (as well as his other creator-owned comic, the equally enjoyable WildStorm title Ex Machina, a 50-issue saga about a disillusioned ex-superhero who becomes mayor of New York). From the start, Vaughan promised to conclude Yorick's quest after 60 issues and has stuck to that promise, so Vaughan's single-minded, Col. Alter-like devotion to reaching that end point hasn't resulted in filler storylines like Galactica's Apollo/Starbuck/Anders/Dualla love quadrangle or the repetitive Heroes-goes-El Norte arc involving Dania Ramirez's endlessly weeping character, Maya the walking Ebola virus (in Spanish, "Maya" means "basket case").

It's no wonder that Vaughan's knack for straightforward storytelling, his ear for witty dialogue and his clever but never gratuitous or pointless pop culture references (I love that Yorick is a fan of The Last Detail--his reaction when he stumbles upon a DVD of the Hal Ashby flick is priceless) landed him a spot on the writing staff of Lost last year. Vaughan co-wrote the "Catch-22" episode about Desmond's past as a monk, and of course, it was one of several highlights of Lost's third season.

Before the writers' strike caused it to slip into development limbo, Vaughan worked on the screenplay for a feature film adaptation of Y, with Disturbia director D.J. Caruso scheduled to be at the helm and Caruso's Disturbia lead Shia LaBeouf as a frontrunner for the title role. Like most other fans, I think Y is better suited for TV. It would have been perfect for HBO. But Vaughan disagrees and has said, "I never felt [that it can only be a TV series to be done correctly]. Maybe because I'm the only person who knew exactly how Y ends and I've always been able to see it as something with a three-act structure--something with a clear beginning, middle and end."

Despite Vaughan's involvement in the Y feature film--he said the feature is an opportunity to improve on material that he felt he bungled in the comic's first few issues--the film can't avoid paling to the original comic. For two hours, the feature will likely be a globetrotting action thriller elevated by sharp dialogue about gender roles and amusing pop culture references. For 59 awesome issues, the comic has been a globetrotting action thriller, a thoughtful exploration of gender issues, a satirical critique of sexism in the comics industry, an all-girl gang flick, a simian slapstick comedy, a medical drama, a floor wax, a dessert topping...