The first pictures are out from the short DC Showcase: The Spectre that comes with Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. This is the first of several planned short films that will feature less commercially popular characters from the DC universe. We already know that a Jonah Hex short written by Joe Lansdale is on the way, presumably for inclusion on Batman: Under the Red Hood, to help promote the live-action film coming in the summer.
DC Showcase: The Spectre is written by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and voiced by Gary Cole and Alyssa Milano. Joaquim Dos Santos is the director. Bruce Timm is producing the companion line of shorts and spoke to Voices from Krypton about the endeavor. When asked about the concept of the DC Showcase series, Timm said:
They’re a blast. It’s great, because we can play with these oddball characters who wouldn’t commercially support making a full length feature with them. I wish the business model was such that we could do that, but now we get to mess around with these more off-trail characters and have fun. In a weird kind of way, the Spectre is perfect for a series like this, because those original Fleischer/Aparo comics this version is based on, were really simple, straight-forward little standalone stories. You don’t have to expand it and make it bigger than it is: bad guys do a crime, Spectre shows up and kills them in horrible ways. Ten minutes of that works great.
Timm also talked about the challenges in moving to short form stories:
The biggest problem was figuring out how to tell a satisfying story in 10 minutes. It’s literally half the length of a standard half-hour episode, and we didn’t want to make each one non-stop action. We wanted to make sure they had a beginning, middle and an end and a little bit of character development. I wouldn’t say it was worrisome, but we did kind of struggle with it in the beginning, wondering if that would be enough time to do a satisfying story featuring any of these characters. We’ve seen the first two at this point, so far so good.
You can read the rest of the interview at Voices from Krypton.
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is set for home video release on February 23rd.
