4 Steps To Make Sure 'Batman vs. Superman' Isn't Terrible

Anyway, back in '86, before Watchmen made him famous, Moore wrote Swamp Thing #53. In a nutshell, Swamp Thing's human wife is locked up in Gotham City for bail jumping after a small-town sheriff cuffs her for relations with her plant husband. (Fun fact: Mrs. Swamp Thing has sex with Mr. Swamp Thing by eating a psychotropic orgasmic yam plucked from his torso. Seriously!) Swamp Thing is mighty pissed, so he turns Gotham into a lush jungle -- at least until authorities drop the yam-cest charges.

Enter Batman. He's not impressed that stamens and pistils and tubers and gourds are holding Gotham hostage, so he rolls up in this magnificent rig.

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"Hi, Lucius, it's Bruce. I'm hosting a bris. Giant Man's. Yeah, he's converting. You call it 'The Bat-Mohel'? I'll swing by at 4."

Negotiations go as well as they can, considering one party is an unmedicated billionaire in a Nosferatu lumberjack car and the other is an exasperated pile of insoluble fiber.

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Y'know, Batman, calling for sober deliberation tends not to work when your bully pulpit is made of chainsaws.

Batman soon realizes there's no arguing with a sass-mouthed compost heap.

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This is how you write Batman: understating a flamethrower.

That's right -- this issue sees Batman and Lex Luthor independently working toward the same basic goal. To reiterate, Swamp Thing won't leave Gotham. Batman wants Swamp Thing out of Gotham, and so does Luthor (but he's more interested in $1 million).

So what if we replaced Swamp Thing with Superman and Mrs. Swamp Thing with a new motivation to putz around Gotham, like an ancient, weird-ass Kryptonian superweapon that crash lands in the duck pond at Arkham Asylum? (This being Arkham, the ducks are inmates too.) Remember, Zack Snyder's Superman loves snooping around extraterrestrial ruin porn.

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He also did a lot of this.

Now we have our central conflict: Superman's in Gotham investigating Kryptonian tech, which he doesn't want to fall into the wrong hands and -- because Cracked's straight-up paying me to write fan fiction today -- turns out to be Brainiac, goddammit. Batman wants Superman out of Gotham because entire city blocks crumble to dust when so much as his TMJ flares up.

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"Oh shit, he's eating taffy!"

So now we have our impasse. However will we break it?

Yeah, it's dumb they're using Batman vs. Superman as a stealth pitch for a Wonder Woman flick, but if you must shoehorn her in, here's how to do it:

- At the beginning of the film, a prophecy and/or walleyed crone and/or crime-smelling Antikythera mechanism warns Wonder Woman that Batman and Superman's dickhead shenanigans will trigger an apocalypse.

- Uneager to draw attention to Themyscira, the hidden high-tech island of Amazons where Wonder Woman hangs her hat boomerang tiara, she absconds to Gotham on her giant space kangaroo.

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Audiences will anticipate the invisible airplane. It's good to shake up expectations.

- Then, at the film's climax -- just when Batman and Superman are seconds away from their tiebreaker third bout -- she shows up and flat-out wrecks the duo. Surprise! Wonder Woman's the hero, not these knobs!

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"I was raised by warriors. Your parents are barley farmers and a hologram."

The rest is easy: Wonder Woman hogties Batman and Superman with her Lasso of Truth, Bruce and Clark share a trust fall and a gentlemen's embrace, and the trio stop Lex Luthor from sticking his brain dingus into Brainiac's doom socket or whatever.

Ta-da, we have our blockbuster! All this plot needs is some garnish ...