Box Office Mojo reports that, in the midst of what is probably the most crowded summer yet for movies inspired by comic books, the genre is failing to deliver out and out hits.

“While comic book movies continue to pack a potent punch for genre fare, it’s becoming more difficult to generate a transcendent hit like ‘Batman Begins’ or ‘Iron Man,’ much less a box office sensation like ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘Spider-Man.’”

It’s no secret why: there are too many of them and, for the most part, they’re not very good. I count myself as a comic book partisan, and I’m almost always happy to see one of the characters from my childhood make it to the big screen, but for major studios to release four major adaptations — “Thor,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Green Lantern” and “Captain America” — within a single summer is just unrealistic.

Two years ago, in a post about “The Dark Knight,” I compared the contemporary super-hero actioner to the Hollywood western. Like that once-dominant genre, super-hero films get little respect today but, I argued, they’ll one day become a routine vehicle for serious artistic ambitions. I still think that’s true, but the western-ization of comic book movies is happening on another level: they’re becoming commoditized and stripped of any meaningful uniqueness.

Read the Box Office Mojo write-up here.

A genuinely entertaining information graphic from, of all sources, CarInsurance.org: this exhaustive inventory of the many, many designs of the Batmobile over the years unearths a fun history most of us probably never suspected existed.

There are dozens of iterations here, and maybe what’s most interesting about the vast majority of them is not so much how each design reflects the ideas of its particular time (they do), but rather how little imagination is really at work throughout this long string of reinvention opportunities. The Batmobile is a blue-sky design brief if there ever was one, and yet time and again, these designs are little more than a mildly interesting variant on the notion of a hot rod or muscle car — basically the kind of ride a middle-aged guy buys when he gets divorced.

The exception, and the notable standout, is the “tumbler” design produced for Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins.” This Batmobile is not only a novel departure from what came before, but it was actually inventive enough to inspire a real world tank design from a military contractor. Honest.

See the full, very, very tall graphic over at my friend David’s Mlkshk page.

Bam! Clunk! Whap! A visual catalog of the interstitial fight-scene titles from the old “Batman” television series. Seen collected like this, they’re actually quite beautiful. According to this blog post, the most popular titles were “Kapow!” (used 50 times) and “Boff!” (used 43 times). Now you know.

A MovieTickets.com poll shows that anticipation for this sequel to “Batman Begins” is running very high. I can’t wait.

Satiric adaptation of “Crime & Punishment” by by R. Sikoryak (channelling Dick Sprang Batman) originally published in Drawn and Quarterly. Thanks to Infrangible.

Gorgeous sound effect title cards from thee Adam West “Batman” television show. Awesome.

The comic book artist was little celebrated but his depiction of Batman was a key image of my youth. May he rest in peace.