How Tiny Toons Introduced Me to the Justice League

Let’s talk about September 1992. I had fairly recently turned ten, I had become the proud owner of a Super Nintendo, and I didn’t know what DC Comics was.

Everyone had seen the Michael Keaton Batman, of course, and the sequel had been one of the previous summer’s biggest hits, but I don’t think I had any real understanding of how Batman and his affiliates fit into any sort of larger universe. As far as I knew, Batman, as a series was a thing on its own, no more likely guest-star Superman or Wonder Woman than Spider-Man or The Incredible Hulk. The animated Batman series had only started airing on September 5, 1992, and that depiction of Batman was very Gotham City-focused. I had never seen Super Friends and had never opened a comic book.

Like The Simpsons and later Animaniacs, however, Tiny Toons taught me a lot of pop culture, even if I’d only understand the references years down the line. And on September 15, 1992, Tiny Toons aired a segment titled “The Just-Us League of Supertoons,” and it gave me my first look at an expanded DC universe.

Written by Paul Dini, who’d was also a writer for Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs, this episode centers around Batduck, the Batman parody the show had introduced back in 1990 — notably well before the premiere of Batman: The Animated Series, making it the first time I’d seen an animated version of Batman. And the episode has Batduck and his Robin stand-in, Decoy, joining up with an exclusive team of superheroes who are all Tiny Toons versions of actual DC characters.

There are Superbun and Wonder Babs.

The Flash parody is assigned to the Tiny Toons equivalent of the Roadrunner.



Aquaman is Aquamutt, and I think the episode is making a joke about Aquaman’s uselessness by having him played by Byron Basset, a Tiny Toons character without a clear Looney Tunes analogue and who never did much aside from sleep in a weird, dog-puddle formation.

Shirley the Loon, the most pop culturally complex character on the show, shows up here playing Hawkloon, a play on Hawkgirl and a hint at the future of the DC Universe, where Hawkgirl would become a more important character than Hawkman, the character to which she ostensibly serves as a sidekick. When Batman: The Animated Series evolved into Justice League in 2001, Hawkgirl was the team’s second female member, after Wonder Woman, and now the CW spinoff of The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, will feature Hawkgirl as a main character once again. I’m certain this Tiny Toons episode was the first time I’d eve heard of Hawk-anything, however.

It’s probably also the first glimpse I got of Black Canary, who in this parody is played by an actual canary and named Pink Canary. She doesn’t really do anything, aside from wear the teeniest set of fishnet stockings in the history of cartoons, but at least she doesn’t make a domestic violence joke.

Green Arrow becomes Teen Arrow, though there’s not any reason in particular that he’s being played by the Tiny Toons version of Wile E. Coyote.

And finally there’s Fifi playing Scentanna, a version of Zatanna, the Justice League’s No. 1 spellcaster. Just a few months later, Batman: The Animated Series would introduce Zatanna as a one-off character. Voiced by Julie Brown, Zatanna is the only non-Batman series character to show up in the original run of the series. It’s not surprising: Paul Dini is a Zatanna superfan and it may be no coincidence that he married a real-life stage magician.



Watching the episode today, it’s hard not to focus on the fact that they sexed Fifi up. I mean, look at this pose.

This is how fetishes get started. Sexiness aside, if this counts as a Zatanna appearance — and I’d say it kind of does — then this is her first-ever appearance on TV or in a movie.

You can view the entire segment below, should you be interested.

To me, it’s interesting to think about Dini getting these DC Comics characters show up in parody form years before they showed up in earnest on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, a show that sent me down many and many a research hole learning the characters’ long, weird histories. I’ll bet that Dini might have thought this parody might be his only chance to get these lesser-known DC characters to show up on screen. I’ll bet not even he thought that Tiny Toons would end up being a stepping stone towards building the DC Comics universe and getting more people invested in it.

Through this episode and in a lot of other ways, Tiny Toons helped make Batman: The Animated Series happen. And it in turn helped shape Batman at large, helped make Batman what he is today. Think about it: If Tiny Toons hadn’t happened, Paul Dini might not have had the opportunity to move onto the animated Batman, where Dini introduced the character Harley Quinn, who transitioned to the comics and who is now debuting in the live-action, big-screen Suicide Squad.

Weird, right?

Miscellaneous notes:

• Julie Brown would eventually also voice Minerva Mink on Animaniacs, another female cartoon character who was, for better or worse, sexed up more than most.
• What is the deal with sexualizing skunks? There aren’t that many anthropomorphic skunks out there, and most of the famous ones are overly amorous.
• The Just-Us League of Supertoons has better gender parity than most superhero teams on TV shows or in movies.
• Since this episode aired, all of the characters have shown up in some live-action DC adaptation — except for Wonder Woman. Batman v. Superman, which boasts the first live-action appearance of Wonder Woman since the Lynda Carter days, opens in theaters on March 25, 2016. The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow debuts sometimes in early 2016. Therefore, there’s a chance Hawkgirl will star in her own show before Wonder Woman appears in a supporting role in someone else’s movie. For what it’s worth, Ciara Renée already cameoed as Kendra Saunders in the season finale of The Flash. It was just a non-speaking role, but she already technically beat Wonder Woman to the punch.
• Speaking of Harley Quinn, the news that Courtney Love was briefly considered for playing the role in a sequel to Batman & Robin allowed me to point out to a whole new group of readers that the character was inspired by a scene in Days of Our Lives. I will never tire of pointing this out to people.

The Two Peyton Lists

If you’re like me and still smarting from the loss of Don Draper and company, then the name Peyton List probably calls to mind the actress who played Jane Siegel Sterling on Mad Men. Jane was the weird fusion of Joan and Betty who was briefly Don’s secretary before becoming Roger’s wife. However, if you’re too young for Mad Men or one of those adults who gets off on Disney sitcoms — and you are sick, you sicko — then the name Peyton list calls to mind an entirely different actress, who stars on the Disney Channel sitcom Jessie, which for all I know is about, like, four diverse kids who open a hotel so their band can perform songs or some garbage.

peyton list (left) and peyton list 

Regardless of which one is your primary reference for the name, you should probably know that there are two, just so you don’t read that Peyton List is starring in some new movie and then end up leaving the theater in huff when you find out that it was actually the other one, the one you find emphatically inferior.

To me, a Hollywood-adjacent Los Angeles person, this is very confusing. I was under the impression that the Screen Actors Guilt has strict rules about letting two working actors share the same name, hence why I learned as child to distinguish between Vanessa Williams and the arguably more famous but nonetheless initial-saddled Vanessa L. Williams, hence why Michael Keaton (née Michael Douglas) had to adopt a screen name. And the nearest I can find to anyone noticing this oddity online is this Access Hollywood article, the gist of which is “OMG, younger Peyton. Someone else has your name. Isn’t that ridonk?” and which dismisses the existence of two actresses with the same name with one sentence: “The acting union SAG-AFTRA makes every effort to discourage actors from using the same name but somehow this one slid through.”

The two Peyton Lists also create an awkward situation on Wikipedia, where they’re identified as “Peyton List (actress, born 1986)” and “Peyton List (actress, born 1998),” meaning that they both have their birth year crammed right into their URL and that the Mad Men actress, at only 28 years old, gets to be “old Peyton” literally for the rest of her career. And I don’t doubt for a second that either could end up at an audition only to have the casting director say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. We thought we were getting the other one.”

Not that I’m all that concerned for either, necessarily. No, this is just one of those pop culture mysteries in which something was allowed to happen that conflicts with my understanding of how Hollywood words, like how Law & Order: Los Angeles just didn’t work.

Miscellaneous notes:

• In case you’re wondering what became of Old Peyton List, she’s currently playing a villain on The Flash and camping it up Julie Newmar-style opposite Wentworth Miller, who’s playing Captain Cold. I love her in this role and am hoping she sticks around.
• You might think a CW superhero show is a step down for a Mad Men alumna. You might be right, but Old Peyton has decent genre cred: She was previously on The Tomorrow People and Flash Forward as well as having played Lucy Lane on Smallville.
• Best of all, however, is the fact that on The Flash, she’s playing Captain Cold’s sister, who in the comics is a villain in her own right who wields a pair of magic ice skates that create their own ice, allowing her to skate anywhere. The magic ice skates will probably not appear on the show, but she has inherit the comic book supervillain name: Golden Glider.
• Finally, there’s a weird Mad Men coincidence: Captain Cold’s real name is Leonard Snart, presumably because the word snart had no meaning when the character was created back in 1957. His sister’s name is Lisa, so that means Old Peyton plays a character named Lisa Snart, which I can barely speak out loud without laughing. Simultaneously, Mad Men January Jones, was appearing on The Last Man on Earth, playing a character named Melissa Shart, presumably because Will Forte knew exactly what that word means. Yep: Lisa Snart and Melissa Shart. Sometimes, the universe just gives you a gift.

Lesley Gore on Batman — or, It’s My Bat-Party and I’ll Be a Lesbian If I Want To

In the same way that The Simpsons made me vaguely aware of Eudora Welty years before I’d read her books, I first learned about Lesley Gore through The Simpsons. In that one episode where Marge goes on the lam Thelma & Louise-style, her friend Ruth accidentally plays Gore’s “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” when she means to put in the cassette of “Welcome to the Jungle.” The song stuck with me — as a kid, because I thought it was funny, and as I got older, I realized it’s relentlessly cheerful to the point that it’s probably compensating for some crippling emotional pain.

The despair. It overwhelms.

Anyway, when the golden age of music downloading struck during my freshman year of college, I downloaded this Lesley Gore song to satisfy some weird Simpsons completionist urge. It was only then that I realized that Gore was also the singer of that midcentury drama queen anthem, “It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want to).” But for my money, Gore’s best song is “California Nights,” a wistful little number doing various chaste things at the beach. Here, watch the video for it.

You may be wondering why Lesley Gore was dressed in a pink kitty cat costume. I know I was. It turns out this is actually a clip from the old Adam West Batman series, which Gore guested on for two episodes in order to debut “California Nights.” She played Pussycat, a Catwoman sidekick who turned to a life of crime when she felt her dreams of being a rock-and-roll singer would not come to pass. This was all news to me, and I thought I’d seen every episode of the old Batman series.

It doesn’t take long for Catwoman to explain her plan: Pussycat is to use her feline wiles to seduce Robin. I know, I know. Naming a seductress Pussycat is a little on the nose — on the genitals? — even for Batman, but the truly interesting bit here is how Batman mythos converge with Lesley Gore’s own life. You see, Gore revealed in 2005 that she had been in a relationship with a woman for decades. (And if she didn’t sing some variation of “It’s My Party and I’ll Come Out If I Want to,” then she really missed a great opportunity.) To me, Lesley Gore’s sexuality seems notable for two reasons.

For one, it allows for a much darker reading of “Sunshine, Rainbows and Lollipops” — “Downpours, Colorblindess and Medicated Cough Drops,” if you will. The lyrics explain that existence has become sunshine, lollipops and rainbows because the speaker is in love. Love, however, doesn’t necessarily result in happiness when you’re a closeted teen pop idol in 1963. I’d imagine that at some point Gore noticed the irony of standing onstage and literally singing the praises of love. (At some point, she probably also noticed the irony of Pussycat.)

Secondly, her brief stint as Pussycat, who only ever appeared on the TV show, foreshadows a sidekick Catwoman would eventually get in the comics twenty-four years later: Holly Robinson. She never wore anything as sidekick-y as Pussycat’s get-up, but Holly was Selina Kyle’s right-hand woman for years, and she actually became Catwoman herself when Selina retired in 2006. Holly eventually came out as a lesbian as well. That’s not to say that Holly’s sexuality has anything to do with Lesley Gore’s, but it just makes for a nice little parallel for these two sidekicks to Catwoman. DC Comics introduced Batwoman back in 1956 to help quell real-life rumors that Batman and Robin gay, so that’s why it was all the more symbolic that DC reintroduced Batwoman in 2006 as a lesbian character. In an inadvertent way, Holly as an openly lesbian Catwoman makes good on something that’s just under the surface at in a different Bat-time and a different Bat-place with a closeted woman playing Pussycat.

Circle achieved in full. Way to be, superhero lesbians.

Extra bits:

• “Marge on the Lam” is also what taught me about Garrison Keillor, though I wouldn’t get the joke until years later, when I heard my first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. “Oh, that’s what that one guy was.” This happens to me often, even today.
• “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” debuted in the 1965 “beach party” movie Ski Party, which did, in fact, have beach scenes in spite of the snowy setting. The film starred Yvonne Craig, who in 1967 joined the cast of Batman as Batgirl. Additional circularity!
• “It’s My Party” was Lesley Gore’s most famous song and also just one of those standards that everyone can at least hum the chorus to. But a lot of people don’t know that Gore later sang a “sequel” song, “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” in which the victimized narrator gets her revenge by kissing another boy and enraging the guy who left her in the first song, leaving Judy alone. Suck it, Judy. Why don’t more songs have sequels?
• Gore also has a song titled “That’s the Way Boys Are,” and I kind of want there to be a response song along the lines of “Oh, How Would You Even Know, Lesley?”
• While Holly Robinson was never Catgirl, Kitrina Falcone was, and her Catgirl outfit looks more or less like you’d imagine Pussycat’s, minus the camp.
• Wikipedia’s page on homosexuality in the Batman franchise is more detailed than you might expect.
• And, finally, you can watch the Batman episode, “That Darn Catwoman,” below.

Wonder Woman in Media: The Star-Spangled Underoos of Ignominy

The long and the short of it: Though Wonder Woman’s life beyond the comic book page dates back a bit further than some fans would guess, these little-known movie and TV appearances all tend to suck. And that’s just how it is.

via atomic sam

Weeks after everyone else saw The Lego Movie and told me that I’d like it to the point that my head would shoot off like a rocket, Tex Avery wild take-style, I finally saw it. Everyone, you were right: It was, in fact, a movie that stirred my spirit and made me wish it had come out back when I was a kid. It also made me want to buy Legos, so I suppose it was doubly effective. However, a few different people have been lauding The Lego Movie for finally bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen. If that’s the case, it would still be a yay-boo — yay that she finally made it, sanctioned by DC and not sucking in any particular way, but boo that she gets about as much screen time as Lando Calrissian and William Shakespeare. She deserves better.

But there’s a decent argument that this is not the case, and that Wonder Woman’s first appearance in a major, nationally released theatrical effort came just a year prior: Movie 43.

via jeffrey k. lyles

Have we forgotten Movie 43 already? Good for us if so. I speak of that comedic anthology film released in 2013 that boasted some major stars doing some horrifically awful things, as Pajiba’s run-down of the film’s thirty most mind-scarring moments will remind you. (One of the most baffling, says me: “Halle Berry makes guacamole with her bare right breast.”) There’s a superhero speed dating sketch in which Leslie Bibb plays Wonder Woman.

Here, watch Wonder Woman, in her cinematic debut, call a Batman a pussy:

I mean, the costume looks terrible, and Leslie Bibb is technically credited as playing Fake Wonder Woman, in the same way that Jason Sudeikis and Justin Long are credited as Fake Batman and Fake Robin, that’s probably a result of the Movie 43 people not wanting to pay DC for official use of use of its characters (and them apparently having pulled this trick off more successfully than Dumb Starbucks did). But that’s Diana on screen, essentially. I looked around and failed to find the full segment, so I can’t tell you much about it. I’m fairly certain it sucked, though, just based on this clip. Pajiba’s summary at least offers us this tidbit: “Leslie Bibb plays Wonder Woman, who is upset because Batman didn't call her after they had sex, and she had to have an abortion alone.”

This is what he have to work with when talking about Wonder Woman on the big screen. At least the few seconds Wonder Woman got in The Lego Movie offered her a single joke about her invisible jet. And she was voiced by Cobie Smulders, which made good on Joss Whedon’s dream of having Smulders play Wonder Woman in a cinematic outing that has long since been cancelled.

Wondering if the early history of Wonder Woman could really be as bad as all that, I decided to look up her history on TV. Most people would probably guess that she first appeared on Super Friends, which began airing in 1973. They’d be wrong: Her first TV appearance is maybe not Movie 43-level embarrassing, but it’s sure as hell surprising. It’s The Brady Kids, a 1972 Filmation-produced spinoff to The Brady Bunch that had Greg, Marcia, Jan, Pete, Bobby and Cindy going on magical adventures in the company of twin pandas named Ping and Pong. “It’s All Greek to Me,” the thirteenth episode of the show’s first season, features Diana Prince as the librarian who fails to help Jan find books on mathematics. As Wonder Woman, she helps the kids on this adventure in the same way that the Harlem Globetrotters or Mama Cass helped out the Scooby-Doo gang.

You can watch the episode below, and even if you don’t give a damn about Wonder Woman’s first-ever TV appearance, the clip is worth watching just to hear the weird, “red universe” take on the Brady Bunch theme song:

The episode plays out as a battle between brains (represented by poor, bookish Jan) and physicality (represented by Marcia, the bombshell Brady). Wonder Woman is both, and also there are magical pandas that the Brady kids are keeping in an impossible-seeming treehouse that we never saw on the live-action show. And yes, the inexplicable canned laughter is creepy.

But even then, it’s worth noting that Wonder Woman’s sidekick Donna Troy appeared even before Wonder Woman did: all the way back in 1967, in a Teen Titans short that aired as part of the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. I’d say that seems like a slap in the face, but since it’s Wonder Woman we’re talking about, I’ll say it seems like an old Buick tossed in her face in the midst of a street fighter with super-strong alien invaders.

Watch Donna beat Wonder Woman to the literal punch:

Even if I were to ask where Wonder Woman first appeared on live-action TV, the answer would surprise. No, it’s not the 1975 Lynda Carter series. Technically, her first attempt at the small screen was a 1967 sitcom titled Who’s Afriad of Diana Prince? The pilot — which stars Ellie Wood Walker as a disheveled, bespectacled Diana Prince, and Linda Harrison as Diana’s alterego, Wonder Woman — was produced midway through the run of the Adam West Batman series. Ultimately, Diana Prince wasn’t picked up as a series, but you should probably be okay with this. The pilot posted in full on YouTube, where the top user comment is noteworthy: “I show this to Wonder Woman fans, and take a sick pleasure in watching that little light in their eyes die.” It’s that bad. A recurrent theme is the shame felt by Wonder Woman’s mother — played by Maudie Prickett, she may or may not be Hippolyta — at having an unmarried daughter.

Here, watch and feel the wave of horrible:

And then a year before the Lynda Carter series took off, there was a TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby as a blonde who was more James Bond (Jane Bond?) than Greek goddess.

Really, it makes the Christopher Nolan Batman films look like a warm embrace of the tropes of the superhero genre.

Eventually, the animated Justice League series gave us the worthiest-yet take on Wonder Woman. That show existed in the same universe as the animated Batman series that began airing in 1992. That same year, DC and Mattel began pushing for a new toy line, Wonder Woman and the Star Riders, which had her teaming up with Ice from Justice League and Dolphin, the DC character that answers the question “What if Aquaman were a hot chick wearing short-shorts?” Essentially, this line reimagined Wonder Woman as a sparkly sparkle-magic sparkle-princess with sparkles, and had the accompanying animated series also seen the light of day, it seems like it would have been a She-Ra clone. It’s just a mind-bender to imagine this being in the realm of possibility in 1992 — at the same time that the dark, stylized, mature and decidedly un-’80s Batman series was already airing on TV.

via wikipedia

via action girl

The toy line never saw the light of day, and the accompanying intro comic (which you can read here) was ultimately stuffed into cereal boxes as a free prize. According to Wikipedia, certain character designs were used for the series Tenko and the Guardians, which premiered in 1995, which lasted thirteen episodes and of which I have absolutely no memory. This is perhaps a fitting death for one of the shittiest-ever incarnations of Wonder Woman, but the real shame here is DC allowing this to happen, apparently because they couldn’t think of a better way to sell Wonder Woman to the world.

And it’s on that note that I realize it’s not so surprising that Wonder Woman has struggled so much in trying to transition off the comic book page — onto the big screen, onto the small screen, onto anywhere on her own, really, even if she has been standing on her own in comics since 1941. Because people apparently still just can’t figure out what to do with her.

Wonder Woman, previously:

• Why the Wonder Woman movie just won’t work
• The weirdness that is Etta Candy, Wonder Woman’s onetime sidekick
• Wonder Woman vs. El Gaucho

Batman: Knight of Varying Color

Don’t let Christopher Nolan mislead you: There’s room for everyone in Gotham, where you like to think of Batman as that menacing gargoyle, perched atop a roof and silhouetted by a flash of lightning, or as Adam West, blue-suited and smirking and surrounding by pop art onomatopoeia. As proof of this, please examine these two takes on Batmania — completely unlike each other but both valid takes on the subject matter.

Batman: The Hypercolor Knight

This one comes from Teen Titans Go!, Cartoon Network’s spin-off to the original Teen Titans series that skews kiddier but doesn’t quite veer into the nursery, Muppet Babies-style. Last week, Robin returned to the Batcave, and Dan Hipp’s art direction showed how awesome it can look with some color to it.

click for a larger, more spectacular version

There’s not a single, uncharged black in the entire room, aside from Robin. That may be telling.

Batman: The Monochrome Knight

And then there’s this: “Silent Knight, Unholy Knight,” the second installment of the Batman: Black & White series. It re-imagines Batman as a silent film, complete with title cards.

Just don’t put nipples on the Batsuit.

That’s Miss Public Enemy No. 1 to You, Batman!

Interests of mine:

• the C-level supervillains of the DC universe
• the C-level supervillainesses of the DC universe
• the C-level supervillainesses of DC’s Batman universe

That’s why it surprised me that I’d never heard of Dragon Fly, Silken Spider and Tiger Moth until now. It’s “Make way for the Moondancers!” all over again, just with better dialogue this time.

via tom peyer

I’m choosing to refer to them collectively as The Bug Dames. And really — “Silken Spider”?

Context, via the Batman Wiki’s entry on Tiger Moth:

The display of the paintings at the Gotham City Museum attracted a parade of men, including Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. The duo was present when Poison Ivy crashed the scene, protesting that she was public enemy #1, her long career as a criminal overlooked because her crimes “were too perfect.”

Eventually, Ivy sent letters to the alleged world public enemies along with a plethora of other felons from the “most wanted” list, each message suggesting that their rivals were the superior criminal. The note invited them to a neutral site in the country to hash things out. The F.B.I. is still trying to figure out how Ivy got their addresses.

Incensed, Dragon Fly, Silken Spider, and Tiger Moth each vowed to arrive at the rendezvous early and kill their rivals. Parachuting into a crowd of dozens of feuding criminals, Batman and Robin prepared to take out all the criminals. Taking flight, Tiger Moth and company stopped long enough to fight over a gold crown that Ivy claimed she would present to “the real no. 1 wanted woman criminal of the world.”

So in other words, a victory for feminism all-around. The Bug Dames did not skitter away after their debut, I was surprised to learn, and have occasionally crawled out from under their rock to cause trouble again. Dragon Fly’s antennae were inverted into sideburns and Silken Spider is now black, so thank goodness the didn’t name her the Black Widow. See, here they are making Nightwing’s life worse than usual:

via dc wiki

Oh, please let their hideout be an overturned rock.

Superheroes, previously:

• The many, many animal-based superpowers of Vixen
• Poison Ivy, Black Orchid and one suggestively named Venus Fly Trap
• Batman characters or soap opera villains?
• That time Wonder Woman was a bitch to her overweight friend
• Jean Loring / Kris Jenner
• Hidden boners on Batman: The Animated Series

Eight Batman Women Whose Names Make Them Sound Like Soap Opera Villains

The trouble with Bruce Wayne, aside from everything awful about his lfie, is that when he’s not tangling with Gotham City’s criminally insane, he’s associating with its twatty aristocracy. And it turns out that same shorthands that comic book writers use to convey affluence are often the same ones used by soap opera writers. Thus, Bruce’s crew sound like a bunch of soap opera heavies.

Truly, Bruce Wayne can’t ever get a break.

Sasha Bordeaux

In Gotham City: Bruce’s bodyguard, who naturally gets framed for the murder of Bruce’s girlfriend at the time. Later, she becomes a cyborg. Of course.

But She Sounds Like: The long-lost Russian-French twin to Irish-Bavarian society queen, Siobhan Hefeweizen.

Vesper Fairchild

In Gotham City: She’s the very love interest whose murder sends Sasha and Bruce to jail. Pre-corpsehood, she’s a Lisa Loeb-looking media muffin.

But She Sounds Like: A blatant attempt to mash the allure of James Bond’s most treacherous love into the ageless beauty of Morgan Fairchild.

Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe

In Gotham City: She’s Misfit, who initially steps onto the Gotham City super hero scene by dressing up at Batgirl.

But She Sounds Like: A headmistress at a girl’s boarding school whose raging lesbianism is an open secret.

Dr. Chase Meridian

In Gotham City: She’s the love interest in Batman Forever. A psychologist, Dr. Meridian should be too damn busy dealing with Gotham City’s festering mental illness to get wrapped up in superhero shenanigans. Alas…

But She Sounds Like: As I’ve noted before, the result of a writer who doesn’t know the term “on the nose” and who thought it would be cute if this character represented Bruce’s struggle to integrate the two extremes of his personality into a happy medium.

Silver St. Cloud

In Gotham City: A white-haired love interest for Bruce Wayne who debuted in 1977 and literally could not look more like a character who debuted in 1977. She returned to the series and in 2009 met the kind of bad end that most women in Bruce’s life meet.

But She Sounds Like: An inexplicably long-lived heroine played by the washed-up actress character, Alabaster Verdegris, on the soap opera-within-the-soap opera.

Veronica Vreeland

In Gotham City: She’s Bruce’s Lana Lang, more or less, in the animated Batman show, and the events she attends draw more supervillains than a Cabot Cove dinner get-together draws murderers.

But She Sounds Like: She has an especially good “superhero” double initial name — Vr. Vr., basically “Vroom Vroom” — but she sounds more like the popular girl who makes life hell for the new girl in town.

Jessica Midnight

In Gotham City: She’s Sasha Bordeaux’s colleague in the spy agency Checkmate. She seem all that happy about that. She, um, has short hair.

But She Sounds Like: The walking photo negative of the more wholesome Sandra Sue Albright. Naturally, Sandra Sue eventually finds out this bad girl is her own an alternate personality, brought about in the most dramatic possible way, and she greets the news with her trademark sunny disposition.

Bianca Steeplechase

In Gotham City: She’s an alternate version of the Joker whose Joan Crawford looks combine with a maniacal clown aesthetic to create a truly disturbing effect.

But She Sounds Like: Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what she sounds like.

DC characters, previously:

• Superman and the Initials “L.L.” 
• The Hidden Boners of Batman: The Animated Series
• Everything That’s Wrong With Wonder Woman’s Fat Friend, Etta Candy 
• How Elcipso Is Like Kris Jenner
• Who Put the Smile on the Cheshire Cat?

Who Put the Smile on the Cheshire Cat?

More than Lewis Carroll could have ever dreamed, Alice in Wonderland has crept up the rabbit hole and into pop culture consciousness. Thank Disney and thank that particular sort of blacklight-happy head culture, but it’s a book people tend to drop references to a lot more often than other works published in the last 150 years, to the point that falling down a rabbit hole now functions as a readily understood shorthand for accidentally happening upon some strange world and losing yourself in it. (And that’s handy, now that we have the internet.)

But just as it’s rarely noted today that the book’s actual title was actually Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a few of Carroll’s references today get lost as a result of Alice growing more popular than anything of-the-period that Carroll was riffing on. Take the Mad Hatter, for example. It’s somewhat well-known today that this particular tea party attendee acts so strangely because hat-makers in Carroll’s day used mercury to cure felt and therefore lost their minds. The whole character is a literalization of the then-popular expression mad as a hatter. As I said, a lot of people have heard this explanation, but a great many more people would have heard of the Mad Hatter than those who have actually come to understand why Carroll invented him.

And even fewer people know the logic behind the Cheshire Cat.

If there’s one thing to know about the Cheshire Cat, it’s that it smiles. It smiles even when the cat itself is not present, in fact. If you’re like me, you have unsettling memories of the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland, which at one point sent the passengers through a dark tunnel and towards the Cheshire Cat’s grinning face, which vanished all but the grin, which then just wobbled back and forth in the darkness, detached from a body.

But why does it smile?

In the same way that the Mad Hatter arose from the phrase mad as a hatter, the Cheshire Cat comes from the phrase grinning like a Cheshire cat. And while a few theories exist about why anyone in Carroll’s region of England would have used it, the simplest and most widely accepted is this: Cheshire, England, had a lot of dairies, so plentiful, flowing milk would have made any local cats extremely happy. Barring a few theories to the contrary, that’s why the Cheshire Cat can’t stop smiling.

As far as making one more pop cultural connection, it’s worth noting that DC Comics has since 1983 had the villain Cheshire. And while she’s retained the same look more or less since her inception — long black hair and a green ninja dress, making her look more or less like a complementary color Elektra — she’s depicted more and more often with a grinning cat mask. Here’s how she appears on Young Justice.

It’s a nice way of making her costume reflect her literary origins, especially when consider how she’s a ninja that, like the Cheshire Cat, disappears whenever she wants to.