Robert Pattinson’s Batmobile is now canon and will appear in the latest issue of DC’s Batman: Beyond The White Knight.
It’s safe to say that Matt Reeves’s The Batman has recaptured the mystique of the Dark Knight to perfection. His take on Gotham’s Caped Crusader takes inspiration from some of the most fascinating Batman portrayals from DC’s publication history, crafting a version of the vigilante that feels both familiar and refreshingly new.
As we all know, DC Comics is known for including some of the lore of their movies into their mainline comic book storylines. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is how they completely revamped Harley Quinn’s character following Suicide Squad – and the same could soon be happening to the Dark Knight.
While it might not be the main canon storyline, Batman: Beyond the White Knight has done some interesting things with the Batman mythos. A continuation of the critically acclaimed White Knight alternate DC universe, this entry in the series offers a reimagining of the beloved Batman Beyond animated series.
Set sometime in the future, Beyond the White Knight sees Terry McGinnis becoming the new Batman, using his signature high-tech Batsuit. The star of the show here, however, is what happens in one of the comic’s panels, more specifically, a piece of Batman history that has now become canon in the comic books.
In the first White Knight series, Bruce Wayne is unmasked and sent to prison, but not before the Gotham Terrorism Oppression unit seizes all of his Batman gear. The GTO now owns a museum’s worth of Bat paraphernalia, and they boast about it in the latest issue of Batman: Beyond the White Knight.
What’s interesting to see here is that the GTO owns Batman’s entire garage of Batmobiles. In these pages, we see that the artists managed to illustrate essentially every movie version of Batman’s signature vehicle ever conceived, including one particular black muscle car.
Even though the Batmobile is usually seen as an unparalleled high-tech vehicle, Robert Pattinson’s young Batman drives a car that looks like something out of Mad Max. It fits perfectly with the rest of The Batman’s gritty and grimy new look: there’s not much in the way of fancy gadgets to be found in this Batmobile, only pure, unadulterated horsepower.
Seeing the muscle car version of the Batmobile finally making it into some form of mainline Batman continuity has fans of the Matt Reeves adaptation rightfully excited – that said, this is not the first time that a Batman similar to Robert Pattinson’s has made into a comic. For that, we’d have to take a peek at the main source of inspiration for this new, and much grittier, Dark Knight.
The first volume of Batman: Earth One was published on the fourth of July of 2012. This version of the Caped Crusader was unlike anything we had ever seen from Batman before: if Year One depicted a Batman in his early days of vigilantism, Earth One introduced one that was completely new to the trade.
Matt Reeves salvaged some bits and pieces of Earth One to construct his ideal version of the Dark Knight. Things like Bruce Wayne being trained by Alfred (instead of the League of Shadows) attempted to reinvent Batman in a modern light. This streamlined version of the character would be the basis for Reeves’s adaptation. Robert Pattinson’s Batmobile, however, is an entirely new design that hasn’t been seen anywhere else in the comics.
Perhaps in the future, we’ll see a comic book continuation of the events of 2022’s The Batman, in the same vein as DC’s Batman ‘89. After all, you can never read enough of Batman’s escapades, and DC knows that quite well.
