The Dark Knight and The Silent Samurai...or how history repeats with the return of Samurai Jack. A comparison to The Dark Knight Returns and Samurai Jack 2017

First off: I'm going to be honest and let you know that this blog is going to be two things, first it's not pony related or I don't intend to mention MLP much in it unless I have to, secondly it's going to be a little long but I'll try to keep it short. Think of it like a cross between an essay and a thoughtsmall post.

Still with me? Okay good. You've heard the news, maybe see posts by the creator of the show or even seem the adds, Samurai Jack after fifteen years is finally returning with a finale of eleven episodes to make its fifth season. A sort of new season mixed with a reboot. The thing that people are thankful for in regards to the reboot, addition to the original creator Gennedy Tartakofski being involved, I'd the show is airing on Adult Swim instead of Jack's original home Cartoon Network.

Why? Because between the end of Gumball: Regular Show, and Adventure Time. The rise of Teen Titans God being aired over a hundred times a week, and most infamously the reboot of another CN property The power puff girls, solely for the purpose of selling newly licensed toys without any involvement of the creator Craig McCracken or three original voices of the girls just because they wanted younger actresses voicing them. Honestly there are people from the mysterious mrenter to max 6 and his show brain dump. Who have said far more than I have, plus I don't want to get of topic here.

Cartoon Network has really fallen from grace with these decisions, and their reputation is preceding them, the same thing happened to shows they cancelled either because they couldn't or wouldn't sell toys to the mass public, in addition their's the debacle of the Galatic Kids Next Door, a continuation of codename kids next door supported by the creator Mr. Warburton getting turned down in favor of said power puff girls reboot.

Now as we stand on the brink of another dark age for the first network for cartoons, a glimpse of hope, in the form of Every thing wrong with that network defied in the form of an old idea from the past, brought back from sands of time, with support from the creator. On a network sister channel that doesn't have the limits of the main one. Unlike CN Adult Swim doesn't have a toyetic focus, anymore than theyou do standards, baring the limits of acceptable for broadcast.

Which brings me to the secondary part of this article, the past....

The year is 1986 and the face of another medium had changed and will continue to change over the next four years. Comic books, we're only going to focus on DC comics for this, and it started with the previous year's event the publication of Crisis On Infinite Earths. After the series publication, DC reimagined almost every single one of their flagship characters. The one in need of a complete image revival was Batman. It's difficult to imagine today, but before the blockbuster juggernaut of Tim Burton'so movie of the caped crusader in 1989, Batman was not or at least wasn't as much as profitable name ad he would be in the coming years. The comics sales were at their lowest since the end of the Adam West Tv show in the sixties, and speaking of that show that was the image almost the entire general public had when it came to him.

Adam West and Burt Ward with all the campy goofiness the show was notorious for. That was the image of Batman anyone who never read a comic in their life had of him, and it was hurting DC big time. The aforementioned Batman movie was still in development hell since the seventies, almost every animated appearance of him stuck to the campy goofy style, and the general public wasn't taking either him or his comics and by extension the whole range of DC seriously as they where and had taken Marvel comics and other forms of media like film.

All that changed in 1986 with Frank Miller's tale of the Dark Knight in the then modern age. The book was a look at what would happen if time finally caught up with Bruce Wayne and age took its toll on him, the story is still remembered and celebrated to this day because it still relevantly asks how long can you go on doing what drives you? How long can what you do matter especially when you want to make a difference.

Both in the universe of these stories and the meta sense of our world these stories are not just mirroring what happened in their fictional front, takes of old heroes rising above the limits of age and time to prove that neither can or should hinder them and by extension the reader, and saving their world's from a threat that thought it had them beat in the end.

In Jack's case aku and his grip on the world and time, in Bruce's his old rouges galley and the newer younger threats to the city he loves. Samurai Jack 2017 might just be this generation's Dark Knight Returns not just because it's a story about an old man getting back in the saddle after falling from his grace, but also because it might just be the new perspective on how to do revivals of old ideas and give them a new point of view on what the people really want, not Teen Titans Go, Not the power puff girls 2017 and not rejections of shows creators want to see revived and reimagined the way they have so far.