Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett takes a look at the state of comic-based TV animation.

Once again I'll be writing about something only tangentially related to comics, in this case cartoons, mostly because a number of cartoons caught my attention this week.

I've got to confess that even though it's being produced by Bruce Timm, someone who has yet to do anything I haven't enjoyed tremendously, I really wasn't looking forward to Cartoon Network's Green Lantern: The Animated Series.  I don't care much for TV budgeted CGI cartoons when they're comedies featuring cuddly animals but I actively dislike the action/adventure ones featuring human figures.  That's because, with maybe the exception of Reboot, they all share that creepy "Uncanny Valley" thing that makes it particularly difficult for me to suspend my disbelief and relate to them as characters.

I suppose you could blame this unwillingness to embrace CGI on my age (i.e., I grew up with hand-drawn animation and if it was good enough for me it ought to be good enough for all of you, gosh darn it).  But whatever the reason, even though I know it has its fans I avoid Star Wars: Clone Wars like the plague and was planning to give Green Lantern a similarly wide berth.

Another reason I was planning on avoiding it is because I knew it was going to feature characters and storylines from recent Green Lantern comics, which I've found to be on the verge of unreadable for about a decade now.  And the prospect of seeing the Green Lantern Corps' "blood-vomiting rivals" (as the i09 website likes to call them) the Red Lanterns in animated form was just too much for me to bear.

But then I finally saw down and watched the hour-long debut of Green Lantern: The Animated Series and was pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the CGI animation (the figures, both human and alien, are remarkably lifelike) and how the recent additions to the comic book mythology were adapted for what is essentially a kid's cartoon show.  It's not spectacular but a pleasant surprise is a pleasant surprise.

I'm on record as being a big fan of Jack Kirby's Forever People so I was startled and for the most part pleased by their first (if you don't count their cameo appearance in the Justice League episode "Twilight, Part II" and, predictably, I don't) appearance in animation in "Disordered," last week's episode of Young Justice.  Naturally they were altered for the new medium.  Beautiful Dreamer was now just plain Dreamer (I suppose putting prefix "Beautiful" in front of her name does seem kind of conceited), and was given actual clothes to wear instead of the piece of brown butcher's paper she's been wrapped up in for fifty years.  Big Bear became just Bear for, well, obvious reasons, and Vykin, DC's first black superhero, finally got some of what's due him by being made leader of the group (oh, and by losing his "the Black" subtitle).  

The biggest misstep came with Serifan.  I didn’t mind him dressing more like a spaghetti western cowboy but he really shouldn’t have been given a pair of super six-shooters.  It sort of abrogates his entire “deal” of being a zen cowboy, one who used “cosmic cartridges” rather than guns.  Maybe someone decided that the idea of a character ‘playing’ with bullets was inherently more violent than mere gun use (especially since for at least the last couple of decades adventure cartoon guns have exclusively fired energy blasts and the like).

Still it's hard to complain about a cartoon where they cried out "Taaru!" and merged to become The Infinity-Man not once but twice, even if the animators decided he should look more like a giant robot than a golden guy in shorts.  I never thought it possible but now that the Occupy What Do You Got? (to paraphrase Marlon Brando's famous quote  from the movie The Wild One) movement has made the "hippy" stereotype once again relevant maybe it's time for a Forever People revival.

And, finally, this Friday will see the airing of the final episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold.  I've already seen it and can tell you it's a fitting send off for a series that more often than not captured everything that was good and cool about the DC Universe.  And I mean everything, from Detective Chimp to Kamandi to 'Mazing Man.  The final episode, "Mitefall," features a meta-roller coaster where Batman's biggest "fan" Bat-Mite wants to unravel the show to make room for a darker, CGI version of the character.  And the only one who can stop him is (can this really be true?) Ambush Bug!  It's so good, and so strange, it makes me hope that one day we'll see a direct-to-DVD animated adaptation of Evan Dorkin’s "World’s Funnest" which pits Batmite vs. Mr. Mxyzptlk.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.