Some BatFamily Things the DCEU Should Adapt (And Why They Won't)

The short answer for "why they won't" will boil down to "Batman has this reputation as a grim loner even though the Bat-Family is frickin' huge, and who cares about the guy who doesn't have superpowers? I mean, how can Zack Snyder get his God issues shoehorned in there?"



No Man's Land: Huntress's Arc
No Man's Land is a story arc that ran across the Bat-verse in 1999. Basically Gotham City is devastated by one too many disasters (including an earthquake) and is left to rot by the federal government. By "left to rot by the federal government," I mean the US decides Gotham is no longer part of the country and orders that nobody - and nothing - be allowed in or out. Gangs take over, and it basically becomes Batman meets Mad Max. A tiny, tiny portion of this was adapted in The Dark Knight Rises, but a) it wasn't done very well, and b) it wasn't given the chance to be done very well because i) the rest of the Bat-family hadn't been introduced and ii) it had to share its screentime with a pithy adaptation of Knightfall as well.

While probably most famous for introducing Harley Quinn to the comics and killing off Commissioner Gordon's wife (oh, sorry, spoilers), it also had a very interesting character arc involving the character of Huntress. Huntress - Helena Bertinelli - is "one of the only" openly religious superheroes, and by "one of the only" I mean she's the only one I can name. She's also one of the "darkest" of the bunch in that she doesn't have that "no killing" taboo that comic!Bats has that never seems to make it into the films. (And yes, there's considerable study of her trying to reconcile that aspect of her character with, y'know, the whole "thou shalt not kill" thing.) Oh, and did I mention that she's a mafia princess, and that her most famous story (Cry for Blood) contains a couple of really unsubtle Godfather references?

Her costumes flit back and forth between "rubber nun" and "stripper." And I'm a-okay with that.

(There's also a different version of the character, where instead of being genderflipped Michael Corleone who dresses up in fetish gear and beats criminals up instead of attending baptisms, she's the daughter of Batman and Catwoman. But that's a whole different issue.)

Anyway, in No Man's Land, Batman spends the first few months AWOL (because Bruce Wayne is lobbying Congress to reverse its No Man's Land policy). Someone is running around in a Batgirl costume, but it's not Barbara Gordon - she's been a) crippled and b) playing mission control for a while now.

Eventually Batgirl II is unmasked and it turns out it's Helena. Batman is not happy about this - his relationship with her has never been easy because a) she's borderline evil, at least by his standards, and b) at this point in the 'verse, she's trying to get into Dick Grayson's pants. Dick Grayson being Nightwing, the original Robin, and Batman's favorite "son" figure.

Helena might be the only one of Dick's love interests who's shorter than him.

Basically, Bats forces her to give up the costume (just in time for a new character to take over the role - what a coincidence). Helena goes back to being Huntress. But even though he's (apparently) rejected her as an ally, Huntress keeps on trying to protect the people of Gotham. She joins forces with a cowboy cop named Petit and ends up butting heads with him in order to keep the people under his protection safe. (One of the cowboy cop's men is named Foley - see what I mean about Dark Knight Rises making a really phoned-in attempt at adapting this storyline?) At the end of the story arc, the cowboy cop completely loses his head when the Joker attacks. After dealing with Petit, Joker turns his attention to the women and children under Petit's "protection," and Huntress makes her stand. Some thoughtful person scanned all the panels of the climax of Huntress's arc and put them here.

So to summarize Huntress's arc: Huntress gets kicked out of the Bat-family but tries to help Batman's mission anyway, in her own way. Ultimately she very nearly sacrifices her life to do so, before Batman pulls a deus ex machina and saves her. Okay now replace "Bat-family" with "Eden" and "Batman" with "God," and you have a very straightforward fall from grace/redemption story. There's a reason I mentioned that Huntress is an explicitly religious character up above. Now think about this: if Zack Snyder remains in charge of the DCEU, isn't this a novel way of him doing his "man vs. God" thing that's been his schtick ever since 300?

Now, you might be thinking that Huntress is too obscure a character to make a movie about, and you might be right, but I've got two words for you: Suicide Squad.

In all likelihood, though, neither a Birds of Prey film in general nor this specifically will happen unless Wonder Woman is good. Like, really good. Good luck!

Prodigal
I'm not seeing an easy way for Snyder to work out his God issues on this one, it's not a particularly well-remembered storyline, and it'd need a lot of lead-in. I'm really only putting this one on the list because there were a couple of ideas in the story that could have been better developed.

Okay, so, remember this?

Apparently by the early 90s, idiot fans, drunk on Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, wanted Batman to act more like the Punisher. So DC, in full-on "be careful what you wish for" mode, wrote Knightfall, a storyline that started in 1993 and ended as late as 1995, depending on what you count the "end" as. They introduced Jean Paul Valley, alias Azrael, an unstable superhero, as well as Bane, a ridiculously muscular supervillain. Then they had an increasingly-exhausted Batman have to deal with all his enemies in quick succession... only to have Bane waiting at the end of the gauntlet to break the Bat. Bruce hands the mantle over to Valley and then goes off to recuperate. Valley - affectionately known as AzBats - beats Bane, and then goes off the deep end.

Neat Batsuit, though.

Ultimately Valley sullies the Bat-name badly enough that Bruce feels compelled to come out of "retirement" and hand him his ass. But Bruce still isn't ready to deal with being Batman on a regular basis, so he hands the mantle over to Dick Grayson - Nightwing/Robin I - for a short period of time. And this is the Prodigal storyline, Dick's time as Batman. Now, I read this story about ten years ago, so forgive me if I get some details wrong, but I remember three sub-plots sticking out rather clearly: in the first, Dick has to deal with a villain who wants revenge on AzBats and can't tell the difference. In the second, Dick has to repair "Batman's" relationship with Commissioner Gordon, who can tell the difference and wants to know what the hell happened to the first Batman and if he's ever coming back. And in the third, Dick has a heart-to-heart with Bruce about why the hell AzBats was even necessary in the first place.

This would have to be a looser adaptation - remember, The Dark Knight Rises did the whole "Bane breaks the Bat" thing (poorly) so audiences should probably expect to wait a bit before we see something like that again. (Though in fairness, the James Bond series did a pair of OHMSS remakes in 1999 and 2006, so maybe we can see Bane Breaks The Bat again in 2019?) Still, I particularly like that second vaguely-remembered story idea: looking at the relationship between Gordon and Batman, tasking a character besides Bruce Wayne with maintaining that relationship, and seeing what they do with it. If this entry feels underdeveloped, I felt the same way about the Prodigal storyline, but in fairness the fans were probably anxious to thump the reset button and have Bruce be Batman again, so there.

A Lonely Place of Dying
This would be far and a way the easiest thing for Snyder et al to adapt, because the groundwork was already laid in Dawn of Justice with that Robin shrine in the Batcave.

In 1983, Dick Grayson finally quit being Robin. He'd moved out and gone off to college at the end of the 60s, and although he occasionally did sidekick work for Batman, he was moving more in the orbit of the Teen Titans property. Specifically, he was becoming the leader of that group. The DC editors decided, however, that Robin was a sidekick, and so if Dick was going to be a leader, he was going to have to leave that persona behind. He did.

This is just about the only change in superhero history that has permanently stuck, aside from Captain America being retconned so that he did time as a human popsicle. Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd came back to life. Barbara Gordon made a miraculous recovery. (Has Gwen Stacy ever come back to life? Won't check; can't be bothered.) But Dick Grayson never went back to being Robin in the past 33 years.

Good for Dick. But Batman now had a Robin-shaped hole in his life, which the editors duly filled with Robin II, Jason Todd. (If your short-term memory lasts longer than a single paragraph, you can see where this is going.) Jason was originally a Dick clone, but after Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985-86, his character was retooled, and fans didn't like it. (Crisis wasn't all bad; it killed off the Helena Wayne incarnation of Huntress to make way for the Bertinelli version - see the first entry above.) So, in 1988, DC ran a storyline called A Death in the Family. Jason Todd was murdered by the Joker.

Don't worry, Bats; he'll be back as soon as DC decides turnabout is fair play, and if Marvel can make a Robin clone in Bucky Barnes, then DC can bring their dead kid sidekick back to life too.

Once again, Batman had a Robin-shaped hole in his life. Now remember, this was 1988. (Jason stayed dead until 2006, one year after Bucky Barnes came back in The Winter Soldier.) Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke had all been published, but they hadn't yet taken root as the end-all-be-all grimdark template for superhero comics. So Batman losing it in the aftermath of Jason's death was portrayed as a bad thing.

Enter Tim Drake. Tim has figured out that Dick Grayson used to be Robin. And that means that Dick's guardian Bruce Wayne is Batman, and Bruce's new ward, Jason Todd, was Robin II. Tim is concerned for Batman's mental well-being, and wants Dick to go back to being Robin. In the process of tracking Dick down, Tim runs across Dick's Teen Titans teammates, one of whom looks like this:

This is one of her most modest outfits. Hellooooooooo marketing!

(I mention this not as an excuse to put Starfire pinups on my blog - well, okay, yes that's why that picture's there. But I mention the side-stop with the other Titans because including that scene would be a more organic way of worldbuilding than having Wonder Woman watch Lex Luthor's YouTube videos.)

Dick makes it clear that he's Nightwing, not Robin, and tries to team up with Batman in that persona. It doesn't work, and Tim is forced to steal the Robin costume in order to save them.

Since Jason Todd's already dead in the film-verse, this storyline could be a logical next step. That said, a key point of this story is that Dick is an adult now, when the Bat-films that have included Dick have portrayed him as a 20-something Robin. So film-only audiences could be confused by that. But this storyline would grow the Bat-family, help Batfleck out of his shell, and either set up a Teen Titans movie or just establish that there are "background" superheroes in this 'verse.