“Gone, gone, the form of man / Rise the demon, Etrigan!”A branding iron at auction in Gotham City draws fiercely competitive bids from occult expert Jason Blood (Billy Zane) and the impish witch boy Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith). It’s Bruce Wayne who places the winning bid as a “professional courtesy” to Blood, who Tim Drake is flabbergasted to learn is an ageless wizard who shares a body with Merlin’s personal paladin, Etrigan the Demon. Etrigan escapes when Klarion’s familiar, the were-cat Teekl, steals the iron, and Batman and Robin have a real hellraiser on their hands.
I have a hard time remaining objective about this episode because it was one of my earliest forays into the mad world of Jack Kirby, whose boundless imagination never took a holiday. Even after revolutionizing the “Marvel method” with Stan Lee, after formulating the Fourth World Saga practically single-handedly (and conjuring its god of evil, Darkseid), Kirby continued to churn out new and amazingly original creations like Etrigan and Klarion; the legend tells that workhorse Kirby fashioned Etrigan within the span of a lunch hour, and I believe it. There’s something immediate and dreamlike about Etrigan’s origin, summoned by Merlin to guard Camelot while bonded to a knight, wandering immortal as a god.
Put another way, I’m a real sucker for a Kirby creation, and so I’m not especially perturbed that Batman and Robin essentially become guest stars in their own show when Etrigan and Klarion come to Gotham. (See also Superman: The Animated Series, whose best episodes were the ones involving Darkseid and Kirby’s New Gods.) I’ll also argue that these dark magic characters fit quite nicely into the red-skied ethos of the redesigned Gotham. The implication that Batman already knows Etrigan makes perfect sense, extending his sense of the occult from the training we glimpsed in “Zatanna,” and this episode finally finds a good use for Robin, pitting him as the perpetually amazed sidekick entering a daft world already in progress. Indeed, this episode makes perhaps the greatest use of Robin’s diminutive stature, juxtaposing him with both the slender Klarion and the mammoth bulk of Etrigan.
In the case of The Demon, casting director Andrea Romano hit a home run when she cast Billy Zane as both Jason Blood and Etrigan. As ever, Zane brings a perfectly calibrated performance, flirting with the realm of camp when his Demon speaks in rhyme but also knowing exactly how much gravel to use to differentiate the two voices. We believe his exasperation with Klarion, and we can hear the wink in his voice as he alludes to his past in a conversation with Robin. And in the moments when he speaks the incantation to unleash Etrigan, we can almost see the forceful showiness of a Jack Kirby close-up, replete with bolded lettering and that distinctive “Kirby krackle.” It’s the kind of performance that is just fun to hear, not too far removed from Kevin Conroy’s own distinctive dulcets. This is usually the part of the review where I say it’s a shame we didn’t get more Etrigan, but I’m not sure how much more could have been done with the character while still maintaining this as a Batman show.
In fact, I almost wonder – as we approach the end of The New Batman Adventures, were the writers making a soft pitch for the show to become reinvented as a “Brave and the Bold” team-up series? After this episode, we’ve only got six to go, and two of them can be considered less at Batman episodes proper and more as team-up standalones; over on Superman, meanwhile, the showrunners gave backdoor pilots to Green Lantern, Aquaman, and The Flash (among others). Those of us in the know recall that we did get a team-up show – named, incidentally, Batman: The Brave and the Bold – and with next week’s wink-and-a-nod to a kinder, gentler Batman, perhaps this sort of episode was a necessary course-correction away from the friendless, emotionless, unfeeling Batman of whom we’ve seen all too much on TNBA – even if his friends are literal demons.
Writer: Stan Berkowitz
Director: Atsuko Tanaka
Villain: Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith)
Next episode: “Legends of the Dark Knight,” in which there’s no wrong way to read a Batman.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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