Surprising superheroics at 3am

One of the local TV stations has this weird habit of playing DC animation movies from the past decade at three o'clock in the morning. They must have been picked up in a bulk deal or something, because the movies are the very definition of filler - they're surrounded by infomercials and don't even have any advertisements, just promos for the channel's other shows.

It almost makes sense that they're only on in the post-midnight hours, because they certainly ain't for kids. They lean heavily on DC's reliance on genuinely shocking brutality, the bright primary colours of their costumes staining red with the gushing blood of severed limbs.

Some of these films really go for it - the Fatal Five don't just break into a scientific station to get what they want, they casually murder dozens of people with absolute indifference - but as a longtime comic nerd, I'm fascinated that these things even exist.

I mean, I'm not fascinated enough to actually buy the DVDs these movies were produced for, but I'll watch them when they are part of the broadcast, with deep and arcane DC lore flickering on the TV in the early hours.

I've seen a lot of the ones based on established comics - if only to see how they fuck up The Killing Joke, the Dark Knight Returns or All Star Superman - but I'm astounded by the sheer number these things there are out there, with movies about the JSA, or my old mate John Constantine, or Richard bloody Dragon. There's been dozens of them in the past decade.

The animation is generally inoffensive, completely lacking in the kind of textured art the original work has, but they're pleasant and functional enough. They're also always less than 90 minutes long, which is just the right length for a superhero movie, and have some deep cuts - I think there was a Kent bloody Shakespeare reference in the last one I watched.

But I think the thing I like most about them is that they take place in strange continuities -  sometimes they feel like the heirs to the wonderful Justice League cartoons of the early 2000s, other times they're whole new timelines, and sometimes it's perpetually the 70s, but none of that really matters ,and nobody gets too hung up on it.

Because if you are the type of person watching superhero cartoons that play at 3am in the morning, you don't want anything too complicated, or tto taxing. A few super-punches, some goofy cameos and some plots that are faster than The Flash is all you really need.