Tuesday, April 24, 2001

Bruce Timm talks Justice League - Part One

By Rob Allstetter/The Comics Continuum

OAKLAND, Calif. - It's been a long time coming, but the Justice League is returning to animation this fall.

Bruce Timm, the producer of Batman, Superman and Batman Beyond, is heading up the Warner Bros. Animation crew putting together Justice League for a November start on Cartoon Network. It marks the first time in more than 15 years - since ABC's Super Friends - that the modern Justice League has been presented in animation.

The new show spotlights Batman, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkgirl as a newly formed League. Twenty-six half-hours were ordered by Cartoon Network.

The Continuum caught up with Timm last weekend at WonderCon for his insights into the series. In part one of a two-part interview, Timm discusses the look of the show and many of the show's heroes and how they compare to their previous animated versions.

The Continuum: So you're finally doing the Justice League -- why now?

Timm: I often ask myself that. (laughs) Well, Batman Beyond was drawing to a close and we knew weren't going to be doing any more of those. So, one of our executives at Warner Bros. in development suggested this might be a good time to do the Justice League. So I said, "OK, we'll give it a shot." I called up Michael Lazzo, head of programming at Cartoon Network, whom I had an acquaintance with. In the past he mentioned he wanted us to do something for him. So I called him up and said, "We're thinking about doing a Justice League show." And he said, "Great. How many do you want to do?" It was like, shoot, now we're in business. Now we've got to do it. And that was it.

The Continuum: This is really a show the fans have been demanding.

Timm: For the last five or so years, yeah. Whenever I go to conventions or store appearances, that's the number one question I get from everybody: "When are you guys going to do the Justice League? When are you going to do the Justice League?" Hopefully, they'll be happy.

The Continuum: Is Justice League set in the same continuity as the Batman and Superman shows?

Timm: Technically, it is. We're not totally beholden to our own continuity. If it works within the continuity of the stuff that we've established, fine. And if it doesn't, we don't want to stifle our creativity by being stuck by, "Oh, we can't do that because in episode so-and-so of Superman or whatever, that violates continuity." We're not totally beholden to it.

For instance, we have a new Green Lantern, so we're just kind of pretending that the Kyle Rayner/Green Lantern episode of Superman never happened. That kind of messes up what we're doing now with the John Stewart Green Lantern.

The Continuum: What's the general look of the show? It's still a Bruce Timm show?

Timm: Yeah. It's very much in the same style and genre as Superman and Batman. The major difference is that we're going for a more realistic look in the backgrounds.

The events that take place in the show are so much larger than life than what happens in Batman. Batman, it was a fairly mundane adventure just in the fact that it was a non-superpowered human fighting non-superpowered villains for the most part, so we were able to stylize the backgrounds more to give the show more visual interest.

Whereas with this show, we've got a goddess and a guy from Krypton and a guy from Mars and a space cop - all teamed up together. So there's a lot of visual pow right there already. We felt the fact that these characters are already so larger than life, we should try to make the setting of the Earth look a little more realistic, so it will feel a little more believable, if that makes sense. So we're going for a little bit more of a - it's not really photographic or photo-realistic - but it's a little bit more of a realistic background.

The Continuum: How would you compare Justice League's Batman to the other animated versions?

Timm: It's almost more like the very first Batman animated series look. I don't know why we did this, but we redesigned Batman once again. I was just going to use the redesigned Batman from the revamped WB episodes. My co-producers, Glen Murakami and James Tucker, said, "No, no, we should do a new Batman. We should make everything all new."

So he's got the highlights back on his black, but it's a little bit of a different color. The shape of his head is little bit different. He's a little leaner. He's not quite as thick and boxy as he used to be. No yellow on the bat.

The Continuum: How about Superman?

Timm: Superman is very close to the original design that we did. One of the things that James Tucker specifically wanted to do was he wanted to make Superman a little bit more mature, not quite as youthful and fresh-faced, boy scout-looking. We did a redesign on his face to make him look a little bit more rugged, a little bit more mature, a little more manly.

The Continuum: How about Flash?

Timm: Flash is real close to what he looked like before. We redid the design, but it's very close to what he looked like on the Superman show.

The Continuum: Is he Wally West?

Timm: It's Wally West. But one of the things about the show is that we hardly ever refer to the characters in their alter-egos. They're almost never out of their costumes, so there's not a lot of secret identity stuff. I don't think, not yet, that we've ever referred to him as Wally West.

But it is. He's a very youthful, brash, energetic Flash.

The Continuum: These are hour-long episodes?

Timm: Yes. It's both. What it is is that we're doing all the shows, because of the scope of the series, we wanted to have room for all these characters to have something to do. As I've said before, we've got all these huge, super-powered characters. It's not enough to have them fighting a group of thugs in a warehouse. We're tossing planets around, now.

So you have to have room to tell those kinds of stories. So every story is either a two- or three-part arc. The plan is now, when they first air, they'll be run as complete hour or hour-and-a-half episodes, and then they'll break them up into half-hour episodes for stripping.

The Continuum: Is an hour-long show something you've wanted to do?

Timm: Yeah, oh yeah.

The Continuum: You have a diverse cast. That's part of the reason for John Stewart?

Timm: Yeah, and Hawkgirl, too.

The Continuum: Will Hawkgirl be connected to Hawkman?

Timm: We're not doing anything with Hawkman at the moment. Again, we don't have a lot of time to go into everybody's origin stories. We don't really explain a whole lot with Hawkgirl. She does mention that she's from Thanagar. But there's really not a whole lot of room in the show to have Hawkgirl and Hawkman. It brings up a lot of questions and backstory which we really don't have time to get into. So she's pretty much a singleton at the moment.

(In the second part of the interview on Wednesday, Timm talks about the Justice League's villains and headquarters and more, including a possible Justice Society crossover!)