Today marks the 35th anniversary of the release of Batman.
Our final episode of The Signal Watch PodCast covered this movie. I invite you to join Jamie and me through a chipper discussion of the movie and the forces around it. And I've previously written about me and Batman.
To repeat some of what's the podcast and maybe elsewhere - I very much recall my excitement around Batman in 1989.
I'd really come to comics in 1986, and like a lot of readers at the time, I mostly read X-books and the Bat-titles. Bat-comics were kind of exploding at the time in the wake of Dark Knight Returns and with the arrival of the terrific talents of folks like Alan Grant on writing chores, veteran Jim Aparo and fresh talent Norm Breyfogle on pencils. I think this era is one of the many well-loved eras for the books, and with good reason.
Even in the era of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, Batman was the first movie I ever followed through development and to release date - then through box office and into home video. It was not the first movie I ever loved, but it was the first movie I felt a level of personal attachment.
I recall articles in Comics Scene, then the paper. Reading Nicholson was the Joker and feeling uncertain how that would go. Prince would be on the soundtrack, which seemed bizarre.
So excited was I - I purchased the novelization prior to the release of the film, and was half-way through reading it when I realized "this is a very dumb thing to do" and I cast the book aside. I didn't know the term "spoilers" then, but I realized I was going to maybe ruin the experience a mere 4 or 5 days prior to seeing the movie.
My memory of seeing the film itself will always be tied up with a few unrelated things.
