To celebrate what would have been Neal Adams’ 85th birthday on June 15, DC revealed a first look at a special oversized hardcover book, Batman by Neal Adams: The Absolute Edition Vol. 1. The collection, with a foreword by Frank Miller, contains the definitive collection of his Batman work from 1967 to 1970. He clearly understood the material, so why did everyone laugh when he suggested Ted Danson as Batman and Matt Smith as The Joker on the Fat Man of Batman podcast with Kevin Smith?
Adams redefined Batman’s visual identity in the late 1960s, gave the world Ra’s al Ghul and Man-Bat, and is widely credited with transforming the Caped Crusader from campy TV relic into the brooding Dark Knight we recognise today. But when asked about who he’d cast as Batman and The Joker by Kevin Smith, nobody took his answer seriously.
“Here’s a choice for Joker…say we’re looking for another Joker…Matt Smith,” Adams said. “He can overcome. He’s not going to seem like a challenge to the previous one. He’s got that look…fan favorite. And he’s got the shape. Everything’s there.”
And if that wasn’t shocking enough, Adams had ideas about Batman too: “Here’s a thought. This is wrong, but it’s still right. If Danson…what-his-name Danson…Ted Danson….if Ted Danson were a young man….what is he 6′ 3 and a half? He’s got all this hair, but when you take the hair down, he’s got this thick neck that goes down.”
That’s not a joke. Adams described a young Danson as the walking embodiment of his Batman: tall, broad-shouldered, athletic without being cartoonish, with a jawline built for a cowl.
But the internet just chuckled at the idea and moved on. The guy from Cheers as Batman? Doctor Who as The Joker? Very funny, Neal.
But, honestly, while it might sound absurd when you say it out loud, it’s now possible to see what he was thinking. Firstly, Smith has gone on to show his range with shows like House of the Dragon. His Daemon Targaryen (who returns this weekend when House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres on HBO on June 21) is essentially The Joker with a medieval dragon on the show, when you think about it. As he’s shown again and again, he’s capable of switching from warmth to violence in a single cut. You have to admit that after seeing the show, he’d be a perfect fit for the role in the DCU (certainly better than the DCEU’s Leto Joker). And at 43, he’s not too old to pull it off either.
The same, however, can not be said about Danson. But Adams wasn’t talking about the aged actor (who was 66 in 2014). He was saying that a younger Danson would have been ideal. And that he believed the actor had the DNA of his Batman: the jaw, the height, and the leanness.
So why did nobody take Neal Adams’ Batman casting seriously? Probably because the question was framed as fun podcast chatter rather than genuine creative vision, and because both names registered as comedy to an audience conditioned to think of Batman casting in terms of physical action heroes and method actors. Adams was thinking like an artist — about faces, silhouettes, and presence. The internet was thinking like a casting agency.
And if you needed any more convincing that Smith has Joker on the brain (which he has said in plenty of interviews before), he revealed on a recent episode of The Happy Sad Confused podcast that he actually improvised the most iconic Joker line in cinema history on the set of Morbius (Jack Nicholson’s “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” from Tim Burton’s Batman), and they cut it. “I was like, come on. Let’s make that from Big Jack,” Smith said. “And they cut that f**ker out. Can you believe it?” The man is haunted by this franchise.
The Batman by Neal Adams: Absolute Edition arriving this September is a reminder of exactly how right Adams has been about Batman for the better part of six decades. Maybe it’s worth extending him the benefit of the doubt on this one too. Neal Adams saw it coming.
