10 Comic Announcements From Comic-Con 2014 You Need To Know‏

5. Harlan Ellison's Lost Batman Resurrected

Harlan Ellison is an interesting man. By which we mean Harlan Ellison seems like kind of a jackass, but he's also written some of the most inspired pieces of science fiction in the history of genre literature, a reputation which has seen him courted by people working in industries apart from that of the SF short story. One of the more unusual real-life tales from the writer of such feel-good hits as I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was the time he got roped into penning an episode of the campy sixties Batman TV show starring Adam West. Presumably not off the back of that story about a supercomputer that wiped out humanity and viciously tortures the remaining poor sods. That's less campy, more soul-destroying. Ellison finally published the outline he wrote for Batman '66 in last year's Brain Movies: Volume Five, the latest installment in a series of books that republishes his award winning television work, both produced and not. There have been a few of the latter, as was the case with an episode of Star Trek he wrote and was rejected by Gene Roddenberry for being too downbeat. Which we suppose wasn't the case with the Batman episode since it's getting finished off, finally, in the form of a comic book adaptation! Batman 66 is one of the most purely entertaining and fun books on comic stands right now. It continues the tone, stories and characters of the sixties TV series in appropriately bright pop art, doesn't take itself seriously, and is generally brilliant. At SDCC DC revealed that Ellison's script will be turned into a future issue of the series by artist José Luis García-López, and will introduced the character of Two-Face into the universe. How will the horribly scarred and morally bent Harvey Dent fare amongst the more upbeat Adam West and Burt Ward incarnations of the Dynamic Duo? Guess we'll just have to tune into Batman €™66: The Lost Episode, bat-time (November), same bat-channel (the comic shop).