The Batman is filled with references and Easter Eggs to various comic book stories, and one of them happens to be Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo’s iconic run with the character.
The duo took over the title in 2011, and it’s considered one of the best runs in the hero’s recent history. It’s so highly regarded, in fact, that director Matt Reeves worked multiple elements from the comic into the new movie.
As per Bleeding Cool, Snyder took to his Substack to share his thoughts on The Batman.
“I thought that Zoë Kravitz was great as Catwoman. I will be totally honest, I’m not the biggest fan of Catwoman-Batman relationships. When it’s done well, I’m always there for it, but I just feel like it falls into the same pattern over and over again: they can’t be together in the present, they get close, and then they fall apart.
So, it’s more just that it’s so telegraphed, but I thought they did a fantastic job with it and I thought she was great. Of course, I was super in the bag for the film the second the contact lens popped up 10 minutes. And I was like, ‘That’s in my first issue of Batman with Greg Capullo, oh my God!'”
Snyder was appreciative of the tech used in The Batman. In his first arc Batman: The Court of Owls, Bruce uses contact lens devices with a remote access processor linked to the Batcave computer that reveals names and information via a facial recognition algorithm.
In Reeves’ film, Batman enlists Selina Kyle to infiltrate Penguin’s secret club in the Iceberg Lounge, where she uses computerized contact lenses to identify Gotham’s corrupt elite rubbing shoulders with the criminal underground.
Snyder was also appreciative of the ending, but that was more for the filmmaking merits of Reeves and his team, as opposed to his own indirect contributions.
“The other thing was the last line. That’s the thing about the Catwoman story, I’ll say this and then I’ll stop. I genuinely believe my version of Batman-not yours, necessarily-my version of Batman is happy. The argument that ‘he is not happy, why doesn’t he deserve to be happy?’ He is happy. He’s happy married to Gotham. He is happy going out every night and doing the thing that he thinks prevents what happened to him from happening to another child.
And that makes him happy, being a symbol of the best of us that way… I didn’t like the end of The Dark Knight Rises where he got married and left. I felt like he wouldn’t be able to do that without coming back, but that’s me. That’s just my take. So, all the power to you if you have a different one.”
Catwoman didn’t have a big presence in Snyder’s run since the hero mostly fought crime solo. He relied on his allies like Commissioner Gordon and his trusted butler Alfred Pennyworth, but the story was more of a character study on the Dark Knight than a Bat-family book.”
Reeves’ The Batman not only drew inspiration from Snyder’s run, but a plethora of other iconic stories. Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and Batman: Ego by Darwin Cooke were some of the ones that influenced the successful movie.
There’s also been speculation that a sequel could feature the Court of Owls because of the hints scattered throughout the movie, and the cast has shown interest in the idea.
