The whole thing is ridiculous, if you think about it for more than two seconds. Batman himself is an incredibly silly looking character. He's just been around so long we never think about it.

Oh, definitely Mxyzptlk for the second tier as well. He did indeed just slip my mind.

That's a really good character hook - a guy who's made himself look just like Bruce Wayne and actually is as much an elitist rich-boy scumbag as many people think Bruce is. I've never actually read a Hush story, but I might look up Dini's some time.

He also wrote a comic where Dracula bombards Britain with vampires from his moon castle.

I think it's almost based more on Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi's Dracula more than Stoker. You rarely see the bits Stoker used but those adaptations didn't in modern stories either. (The moustache and general hairiness, the lizard-like wall-climbing, the varied shapeshifting. Or the fact that he can move around in…

Yeah, but outside those five? There's nobody. Maybe Metallo, Parasite and (ugh) Doomsday as B-listers, but they've no pop-culture recognition. Whereas your average kid on the street could probably rattle off seven big-league Batman villains after a moment's thought. And that's before you get to the B-list and the more…

That's the kind of stuff I like. Riddler as a detective was great - it reinforces his specific character trait (to prove he's smarter than Batman) and puts him in a context where he doesn't have to be a second-rate Joker (who fills the role of psycho-who-plays-mindgames admirably).

I love villains with specific niches. It makes you feel like there really is a super-criminal "ecosystem" in Gotham. Same with the Carpenter as the person who builds the elaborate deathtraps, or the Crime Doctor as the guy you go to for a patch-up. And I love the Penguin as a nightclub-owning Legitimate Businessman…

I wish they'd kept that. It's a great little detail.

Paul Dini, not Jeph Loeb, wrote probably the only decent-ish Hush story. There's no doubt someone better at writing for comics could do a good Onomatopoeia story.

It looks like Transformers vs GI Joe levels of crazy, too. I think zombies are involved.

It's better than a few pre-2000 winners too. (Shakespeare In Love, for a start, though I admit that's only just pre-2000.)

Well, they were, effectively. But Ralph Fiennes isn't meant to be playing literally the same man as Bernard Lee.

I wouldn't go that far, but yeah, I do think it made sense to change the largely luck-based baccarat for a more skill-based game like poker.

If you're doing spoiler tags it's < spoiler > < /spoiler>, without the spaces.

They're not the same "original M". Bernard Lee's is "Miles Messervy", Ralph Fiennes is "Gareth Mallory". So in a sense there's the transition from "male M in Universal Exports building" to Judi Dench to "male M in Universal Exports building", but they're not meant to be the same man.

(Well, I'm not that secretive. Though honestly, I'm going to delete it again now. Nothing personal, it's pretty easy to find, but I'm getting more nervous of leaving it around in public.)

Hey, don't ask me. As I said, Irish, not Irish-American.

Nope. It's literally a backwards (not-quite-)phonetic rendition of my real name.

The fact that half their Irish stereotypes in the Ireland episode are just plain wrong really annoyed me. Corned beef is not a thing here - you can get it, obviously, but it has no cultural value. That's an Irish-American thing, that they got from (as I understand) their Jewish neighbours.