Batman: Knightfall Getting An Animated Adaptation

Bounding Into Comics is reporting that at New York Comic Con Warner Animation announced a project not tied to the Gunniverse. That should relieve fans concerned that the “Tomorrowverse”, staring from Superman: Man Of Tomorrow onward until the DC Gunniverse started, was over and marked the end of shows not tied to James Gunn’s DC Universe By James Gunn, shows like Creature Commandos. It may not take place in the Tomorrowverse, but the writer of the Superman starter will pen the first movie.

Yes, first. Two movies are planned for this adaptation of “Knightfall”, the story arc where Batman is crippled by Bane and must come up from injury to stop his successor from ruining the symbol of the Bat due to his failure to understand what that symbol means. I have not read most of the comics but I have read a couple and the novelization has been a Chapter By Chapter review (an example of a really long book to review that I actually enjoyed). This is where the author of the linked to article shows concerns. JB Augustine isn’t outright rejecting the adaptation but he does have some trepidation since it’s still modern Warner Brothers and they’ve made a bunch of missteps lately. This includes turning Watchmen (which apparently hasn’t been adapted enough in the past few years with a live-action movie, motion comic, direct-to-video adaptation of the “Tales Of The Black Freighter” in-universe comic, and most recently the about to be mentioned full on animated adaptation) into two movies. Crisis On Infinite Earths was also two movies, but from what little I’ve seen, and I do want to see the whole thing, isn’t actually an adaptation.

Personally I’d rather see three movies for “Knighfall”. Sound silly? Let’s address Augustine’s concerns and maybe point out a few of my own, as well as how I’d want to see this adaptation go.

No one is asking for it, but Warner Bros. Animation is mining its DC back catalog for more inspiration to give us new films based on the Knightfall saga. I say “films,” plural, because it was announced at a New York Comic-Con panel that this endeavor would be a multi-part event similar to how the animated Crisis on Infinite Earths and Watchmen projects were structured.

This is good news if you like the stories that gave us “The Man Who Broke the Bat” in Bane and the insane suit redesign worn by Azrael. We also should consider that the impending films might be decent. They are inspired by the work of some of the best Batman writers of all time: Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Dennis O’Neil, and Peter David.

The first film is also reportedly being written by Jeremy Adams, who penned the animated Superman reboot Man of Tomorrow, which was a strong start for the chapter of the Animated Universe it breathed life into. However, I’m only cautiously optimistic about the whole thing because, as I see it, albeit anecdotally, risk-averse Warner Bros. is strictly going back to the well for what worked for them in the past.

It’s good that he’s not rejecting the idea automatically. There are good names attached to it, though recent history of anything tied to adapting comics or even some of the stranger ideas of the Batman comics, can make it hard to just immediately cheer. I’m not going in blind and automatically assuming this will be good just for existing. Too many burns there. Still, we have a good pedigree to work with and I really enjoyed the novelization. I do want to read the rest of the comics beyond the two or three I’ve already read.

Yes, the arc is popular and still discussed to this day, and Bane remains one of the Dark Knight’s most recognized foes of the modern era, but let’s be real. This is typical Warner doing the predictable thing: relying on popular, recognizable stories, characters, and titles from 30-plus years ago. It sounds logical to them and makes business sense, but the fact that they keep exploiting what they know because it’s all they know is transparent to everyone.

They have been doing it for years and for so long, honestly, that it feels like they have been doing it forever. You don’t need to look any further than Watchmen and all its adaptations and spinoffs, whether they be comics, live-action, animated, or serialized. I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve had enough of Alan Moore, just from all the versions of this one work (which he has disowned, by the way).

I was done with Alan Moore before it became cool. I haven’t even read Watchmen…yet, and I had issues with it before it influenced so many writers into using the base ideas of the comic, essentially making everything Watchmen without understanding Watchmen. Augustine also mentions the Death & Return Of Superman story arc that inspired DC to have the Bat-Writers do their own arc the following year, and how Doomsday used to be a serious threat. Some threats weaken the more you use them. I hope to never see the Weeping Angels again in Doctor Who and the Borg’s downfall in the Star Trek future started with rectonning in a “Borg Queen”, which is not the hivemind hub I was expecting from the “race” of cyborgs who create more of themselves by force and drain all emotion from them. Apparently, the writer thinks that Bane suffers a similar problem.

This brings me back to Bane, i.e., Doomsday’s analog to the Bat Family. We all know what he was created for; it’s so academic at this point that a recent retcon made his purpose deeply ingrained, and completely on the nose. More to the point, everyone has seen him do it on the page and on the big screen in The Dark Knight Rises. Breaking the Bat became such a meme, Seth Green parodied it on Robot Chicken.

It’s obvious what they are chasing when the character was a climactic component of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, otherwise known as the greatest success the studio has seen outside the breaching Moby Dick Aquaman turned out to be. If they can’t top it, they will just re-rack and try again; in other words, rinse and repeat. Those vertebrae won’t break themselves.

The thing is I’ve seen Bane adapted without breaking Bruce’s Bat-Back (say that three times fast–granted, it might be possible) in both the DCAU and Kids WB’s The Batman (not to be confused with the Matt Reeves movie). In Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman/Superman Adventures as well as the tie-in comics this was not what Bane was after. Bane was created as someone who could believably injure Bruce enough to consider giving it all up, but in those shows we get more of his obsession. Every Bat-character is obsessed by something that defines them but also causes them problems. For Bane it’s a desire to rule over Gotham, to be the man at the top. This was inspired by his time growing up in a corrupt Caribbean prison because his horribly treated mother died there. He eventually defeated the cruel warden, but his eyes were on Gotham City and the tales he heard about The Batman.

Batman doesn’t specialize in anything, including preparation.

There is more to what Bane did than breaking Batman’s back. He uses both brains and muscle, managing to defeat Batman by releasing Arkham’s most criminally insane (like that’s a hard task–place should just put a revolving door in there by this point), wearing him down and making it easier for him to uncovers Batman’s lair, and then takes him out without any interest in Bruce Wayne. Most recently he also ruined the Batman/Catwoman marriage just to ensure Batman remains a worthy opponent. And it wasn’t Bruce who ultimately defeated him, it was Jean Paul Valley as the replacement Batman, who took over as the actual threat Bruce had to overcome as the then former Azrael was still influenced by his mental programming from the Order Of St. Dumas, a false religious order denounced by the Catholic Church as a violation of Jesus’ teachings after Dumas got the wrong lesson from the Crusades. It was Valley who turned out to be the actual villain of the arc after Bruce regained the courage to pull himself together and regain his edge as Batman.

That’s one thing I hope we get in part one, seeing Bane as more than the man who broke Bruce’s back, as people who missed the comic story get a chance to see HOW Bane got to that point. That’s what the first movie should be. The second movie should be about Bruce dealing with the results of that action, his crisis of self. I don’t know if the Dr. Kilsolving plot could be worked in, an injured Bruce still using disguises to solve his doctor’s kidnapping and running into a tale of superpowered healers and crazed siblings, though it could also explore how Bruce approaches his various identities and masks, but something should happen that convinces Bruce to come back and become Batman once again before Valley ruins what Batman means to Gotham for good. The third movie would then be that journey back. I really want to spend as much time as possible on his fall and coming back stronger. When they adapted The Death & Return Of Superman the first time they tried to do the whole thing in one film, and it wasn’t very good. They tried again in two part, but I haven’t been able to see it yet. In the comics, this ended with a better understanding of Superman and +3 superheroes to the DC Universe, two of which are still running around even after all the multiversal reboots DC does whenever they screw up too badly.

That was the strength of both stories. Superman’s was created by circumstance and the media pecking order, but the writers made the best of what they had to deal with, and it worked. Instead of deconstructing Superman, they explored what Superman meant to Metropolis and the DC Universe at large, showing why the world need a Superman not just in powers but in who he is and what he stands for. We had a world without a Superman and it wasn’t the best one, as four different dudes scrambled to replace him: one out of misplaced revenge, one out of misplaced devotion, one because he was cloned, and one because he believed what Superman stood for. Neither of them could replace Kal-El, which only Steel would admit to, thus going by “Man Of Steel” at the time. Sadly, like Watchmen, nobody really understood why it worked and just saw “killing a character gets you in the press”.

Note the symbolism of Jean Paul cutting the Bat Symbol. No joke, that’s my critical perspective coming in.

With Batman it was also an exploration rather than a deconstruction. What if we gave readers what they wanted: a Batman who kills and a villain who was Batman’s equal in cleverness and power, moreso in the second case. Bruce doesn’t defeat Bane, Jean Paul did. Thus it was a false Batman, a corrupted version of what Batman was intended to stand for, that “ruled” Gotham City. I hope the ending of a Knightfall adaptation does justice to their final encounter, as Bruce slowly forces Jean Paul to lose his Batman armor, slowly breaks him not with violence but with words and actions. There’s a reason it’s one of my favorite fights and frankly if they do this scene right it will be worth making the whole thing.

I hope they don’t screw it up. However, if they do it right this could be really good. It would also give us something animated that isn’t Harley Quinn or James Gunn’s nonsense. I do agree that their recent history brings that into question given the best adaptation currently out there is the elementary school show about Batman’s talking car. I could be reaching for optimism that we won’t get another The Dark Knight Returns but nobody is adding Batman hooking up with Batgirl like Bruce Timm is obsessed over. There’s good stock in this one, so there’s still hope, and Batman is all about spreading hope.