This week, the Batman is about to enter the endgame (not that one but kind of) on a conflict that has been decades in the making. After years of serving as the dark knight’s punching bag, getting a few clean hits in himself and playing the deadliest game through dozens of death traps, the Joker is ready to call it a day. Bored with Batman and wanting to finish their conflict in style, The Joker War will see the ace of knaves strike back at the caped crusader with his greatest weapon yet: An ungodly amount of cash, siphoned from the Wayne family fortune after a daring heist.
Spearheaded by writer James Tynion IV, it’s safe to say that Batman will probably win this war. But how will he emerge from the conflict Darker and more obsessed with spending a lonely night brooding on top of a gargoyle about his dead parents, but to the max? Not exactly! When the dust has settled, Batman is looking to rise above the machinations of his deadliest adversary, and to do so he’ll be donning some new threads once again.
With the Joker having stripped Batman of access to all of his wonderful toys, the world’s greatest detective will don a new Batsuit by the time that Batman #100 hits the newsstands. Designed by Joker War artist Jorge Jimenez, this suit is braver and bolder than anything else that Batman has worn over the years:
“So honestly this suit is really thematically important for the issue, and for this entire arc,” Tynion explained to SyFy.
This is the Batman that Batman has been building himself towards, that he thinks is sort of his own happy ending. And this story is very much about Joker seeing the happy ending that Batman wanted to build for himself and destroying all of the pieces that would be necessary to build himself that happy ending.
So that suit is an aspirational suit that we’re going to see ripped away. You’ll see it for the first time in #95, you’ll see it in the future in #96. And then it’s going to come back in a big way towards the end in a way that isn’t going to necessarily be the utopian situation that [Batman] was hoping to put that suit on in. So, that’s a big piece of what we were trying to build.
I like it! I give it a few issues before the usual grey and black threads are donned once again, but seeing a Batman who is more confident and happier with how he can use his gifts and unrelenting drive to make Gotham City a better place to live is a new angle that I want to see explored. It’s not the first time that Batman has swapped costumes, as back in 2018 he got bat to basics with a very cool look from artist Greg Capullo.
Featuring a few nods to his origins, this suit was eventually abandoned when writer Tom King took over, and put the vigilante back into a depressing status quo, one that was capped off by Batman’s return to his traditional costume that had the underwear on the wrong side of the pants.
Last Updated: July 20, 2020
