#psych-pass

Batman #90 - Catwoman Explains the Deal Behind the New Batman Villain, the Designer

The Designer’s deal is one we’ve seen several times in various forms in crime fiction lately, a criminal mastermind who provides funding, resources, and assistance to criminals in order to make them achieve more elaborate schemes.

The Sherlock version of Moriarty was that, for example, in the beginning at least, with him being a “consulting criminal“ who in the inverse of Sherlock himself helps criminals commit “perfect“ crimes instead of solving them.

The cyberpunk dystopian anime Psycho-Pass has the character of Shogo Makishima, who reacts against the way the regme attempts to eliminate negative emotions or stress in order to maintain public order (to the extent that they not only imprison “dangerous” artists, but also potentially execute the traumatised victims of crimes lest their trauma have a negative effect on others) by providing the resources to the monsterous people as part of an elaborate scheme to bring down the government.

Interestingly, the Designer within the above issue actually ends up being something of an interesting approach to the concept of escalation in regards to supervillainy. The problem is that while Catwoman, the Penguin, and the Riddler’s motivations are/were primarily profit-motivated and have more or less remained attached to a tangible goal (Selina’s used to be stealing money, Oswald’s was stealing power and respectablity, Eddie’s was money and proving himself to be smarter than everyone else)...

The problem is that the Designer appears to be the kind of mastermind who also runs on a profit-motivation, so when he provides the Joker (who even in his earlier stories in the 1940s were  mainly were about terrorising people and then murdering them after stealing their stuff) with the ability to pull off what the Joker would consider to be the ultimate crime... Yeah, even supervillain extraordinaire the Designer doesn’t want a part of that mess.

To use only pulpy fiction for examples. The Designer is Moriarty, as protrayed in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, a guy with the guise if respectablity within his own community who runs all crime in London as efficiently and subtly as possible as a mean to amass power and money. If he wants someone dead, he’ll either hire assassins or arrange his victims to have “accidents“.

The Joker, meanwhile, is the French crime fiction character of Fantômas, a villain who CAN steal things in elaborate ways if he wanted too, but is more focused on, say, committing a random series of horrible murders, then framing the lead detective investigating the crimes for said murders, and then laughing at him as the detective’s being dragged off to be guillotined by the cop’s own friends and colleagues.

Die September Veröffentlichungen von Kazé verschieben sich

Eben teilt Kazé in seinem Newsletter mit das sich einige Anime Veröffentlichungen auf DVD und Blu-ray im September verschieben werden um 14 Tage. Dies passiert aus produktionstechnischen Gründen und alle Titel sollen nun am 9. Oktober 215 erscheinen.  Folgende Animes sind betroffen:   Black Butler – Book of Circus – Vol. 2 (DVD) Psycho-Pass 2 – Vol. 1 mit Sammelschuber (DVD) Sekai Seifuku – World…