Batman’s New Comics is Basically The Fourth Nolan Movie
Warning: spoilers for The Batman's Grave #12 lie ahead.
Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy of films offered an audacious, technologically superior look at DC Comics' Batman. With Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the Nolan Batman films gave an alternate look at Gotham's Dark Knight with militarized tech and protective armor, going above and beyond the spandex and leather costumes of the past. While this look was at odds with many of Batman's comics at the time, a new Batman series, The Batman's Grave, plays out like a spiritual successor to Christopher Nolan's trilogy.
The Batman's Grave, by writer Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, and Alex Sinclair, stars a heavily armored Caped Crusader that would be familiar to fans of Nolan's films. The series provides a look into Batman's detective skills and methodology, as it follows his investigation of a murder. Unable to envision the perspective of a killer, in typical Batman fashion, he instead puts himself in the shoes of the victim and uncovers a plot that threatens his self-concept as both Batman and the philanthropist, Bruce Wayne.
The series is full of action sequences straight out of a Nolan Batman film, prompting a question of what it means for Batman to be such a heavily armored figure in the midst of a Gotham wrought by grandiose threats. The Batmobile has the look and power of a tank, while the Batsuit is bulletproof. There are extended action scenes with little to not dialogue, and at one point, a Gotham street caves and then collapses beneath the Batmobile, recalling the scale of Bane's destruction of Gotham's football stadium in The Dark Knight Rises. Between these spectacles that would be right at home in Nolan's films, there is undoubtedly a focus in the series on how Batman can sustain a significant amount of damage.
This is, in some ways, a departure from earlier Batman stories. The bulk of The Batman's Grave's second half is composed of fights where Batman mostly comes out unscathed, a far cry from the damage dealt to him in books like Batman: Year One and The Court of Owls Saga. Rather, this Batman is able to take a bullet without having to be agile enough to dodge it first. The effect of having a Batman whose tech allows him to withstand greater damage builds on the mythology of the Nolan films, where Batman unknowingly feeds his fatalistic death wish through new technology.
A central aspect to Batman's character in any story is that he is simply just a man in a suit with no superpowers. The common denominator between Bruce Wayne, comics readers, and audience members at the movie theater is that Batman is just as vulnerable as they are to mortality. In this sense, Batman isn't so much a superhero, but an extremely motivated person.
This fact is perhaps lost, or possibly amplified, by the tech used by Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy and in The Batman's Grave. Obviously, something that separates Bruce Wayne from most readers and viewers is his inherited wealth and specific childhood trauma. His wealth allows him to afford military-grade equipment he uses to protect his body, the most relatable part about his character, allowing him to briefly ascend to superhero levels. Thus, what The Batman's Grave and the Dark Knight films have in common is a version of Batman and Bruce Wayne who achieves superhero status through his proximity and access to materials completely outside the realm of civilian life.
And yet, the Nolan-esque action sequences of The Batman's Grave all point to a troubling reality for Bruce Wayne that only Alfred Pennyworth is aware of: Bruce's sidestepping of his own mortality. After his Batmobile is destroyed by a remote bomb in The Batman's Grave #7 (written by Warren Ellis, art by Bryan Hitch, colors by Alex Sinclair, and letters by Richard Starkings), Bruce unveils a tank-like new Batmobile similar to the one from the Nolan films. Upon seeing it, Alfred calls it "a bloody ocean liner with wheels" before urging Bruce not to go back out into the mix before getting some rest.
It should be fitting, then, that Bruce meets his end while driving this militaristic vehicle. While driving home after defeating the series's villain, Scorn, the Batmobile is t-boned by a garbage truck driven by one of Scorn's followers, in another move that references a scene in Nolan's The Dark Knight. Batman is left gravely wounded, and manages to drive back to Wayne Manor, where he collapses in front of his own gravestone next to his parents'.
Whether or not Bruce actually dies at the end of The Batman's Grave, the ending of the series went where the trilogy films never did, wrapping up Batman's technological prowess, and by extension, superheroism, in a sense of fatalism. All of the special tech in the world cannot save Bruce Wayne from the fact that he is still a vulnerable human being. The series's themes rest in Bruce's reckoning with his own mortality, which even his wealth cannot save him from.
Ultimately, The Batman's Grave is a Batman story for the post-Nolan era, one that tackles many of his contradictions as a character across media. For all of the mythologizing that the films do for his character, Batman is still inescapably human in the finale of The Batman's Grave. The fragility of human mortality has always been a facet of Batman stories, and likely will continue to be, and the series managed to represent this while also blending some of the most memorable parts of Christopher Nolan's franchise. In doing so, The Batman's Grave emerges as an example of the conundrum that Batman faces as a character in comics today. In trying to avoid his own demise through securing himself in protective gear, Batman actually brings himself closer to the dangers he sought to escape from.