Many comic book legends have tried to figure out how much harm Bruce Wayne’s psyche can withstand throughout the years. Jim Starlin transformed Batman into a dumb, drug-addled occultist working for the heretic Deacon Blackfire, whose “crusade against crime” employed Bruce as its primary (and devastating) weapon. Doug Moench delves into the “bat” part of Bruce Wayne’s crime-fighting image, illustrating the horrors that a genuinely vampiric Batman could bring to the world.
The Dark Multiverse, on the other hand, has the most terrifying stories (and variants) of Bruce Wayne’s paranoia-ridden, hyper-pragmatic outlook on human society. By subjecting DC to its greatest nightmares, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo revolutionized the company. The duo has made Batman embrace the fear gauntlet, introducing us to versions of Batman we pray we never meet.
Every version of Bruce Wayne originating from the dark side is downright spine-chilling, and perhaps none more so than Batman the Broken. From the Destructive War God known as The Merciless to the sickening machinations of the Batman Who Laughs, every version of Bruce Wayne originating from the dark side is downright spine-chilling; and perhaps none more so than Batman the Broken.
This is a version of Batman that has been damaged beyond repair, as shown in the Tales of the Dark Multiverse one-shot that reimagines one of the Caped Crusader’s most legendary storylines.
What happens, though, when you put him back together? Will he revert to his previous state? Or will you transform into something quite different? This video will attempt to answer such questions. Tales from the Dark Multiverse is back with a new episode, Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Batman Knightfall is investigated.
Batman’s Bleakest Hour: What Happened in the Original Knightfall?
The cover of Batman issue #497 is one of the most iconic in comic book history. Why? Because it shows the Dark Knight at his lowest point, at his weakest; it shows Bruce Wayne getting his spine shattered by the might of Bane. Knightfall is one of the best Batman storylines in the Caped Crusader’s 80+ year history for a reason: it shows him at his most vulnerable point in life and makes us realize that even the greatest wills can be shattered.
And just to dive deeper into the lore, it isn’t exactly just one story arc. Batman: Knightfall is a trilogy of stories that claw at the very foundation of the World’s Greatest Detective, and fish out something that is perhaps just as evil as his adversaries.
The first part of this story is the most memorable. The masked mercenary Bane puts his grand plan into motion: he lets every criminal held captive at Arkham Asylum loose on Gotham City in a carefully orchestrated move to draw out the Bat. See, Bane doesn’t know Bruce Wayne but he can pretty much read him like an open book: Gotham’s Dark Knight would do everything in his power to throw these nuisances back into the crazy house they escaped from, and he wouldn’t take any help while doing it either.
And he turns out to be right; Batman spends days on end tracking supervillains like The Joker and rounding them up without involving Robin because he believes it would be “too dangerous for him”. This turns out to be his biggest mistake because Bane deduces his secret identity and pays the exhausted Caped Crusader a little visit in his cave. Try as he might, Bruce simply can’t stand up to the Venom-juicing freak of nature that is Bane, and he’s put out of commission by a spine-crunching back-breaker and left for dead.
Even in this condition, all Wayne can think about is protecting Gotham City, so he asks the newbie vigilante Jean-Paul Valley aka Azrael to pick up the mantle of Batman in his absence; a role Valley is more than happy to fulfill. But it quickly becomes clear that this would be an even bigger mistake than not anticipating Bane’s plans because Jean-Paul manages to turn Batman from an intimidating vigilante to a necessary evil, and that is something Bruce Wayne would never approve of.
The 2nd half of the Knightfall trilogy explores Azrael’s descent into madness and the subsequent threat that he poses to the entire superhero community. See, Jean-Paul believes that after what Bane did to the city, that violence is the only way to ensure safety. So he creates a horrifying armored suit, heavily equipped with lethal weapons, and sets out to deliver a more fatal brand of justice that sees him lose favor with Commissioner Gordon, the city of Gotham, Robin, and finally Batman himself.
And sure enough, as it becomes clearer that Valley is not the person to carry on the legacy of the World’s Greatest Detective, Bruce Wayne returns to action, after training with Lady Shiva for months on end. The pair have 2 cerebral showdowns in the Bat Cave: the first time Bruce comes to Jean-Paul as himself, asking him to relinquish the cowl for the crimes he’d committed.
Valley rejects him and tells him he’ll be a better Batman than Bruce ever was. The second time, he returns as Batman, and this is when he finally succeeds in getting the former Azrael to listen to reason. After making Jean-Paul chase him through the narrow passages of the Bat Cave, Bruce effectively makes him submit out of frustration, and Valley gives up the cowl, acknowledging Wayne as the only person who could ever be Batman.
This is an important moment in both men’s lives: Bruce Wayne has to reconcile himself with the knowledge that his sloppiness got Gotham destroyed and then his own name sullied when he picked the wrong guy.
Jean-Paul Valley has to contend with the fact that the voices in his head might not be leading him down the right path, and that he needed to make a real change, real soon. But what if things had played out differently? What if Jean-Paul Valley never gave up on his mission? What if Bruce Wayne lost that night? What if Batman went down a darker path, all in the name of enlightenment?
A Purging Fire: All Hail Saint Batman
Tales From The Dark Multiverse: Batman Knightfall opens with the Fuginaut Tempus peering across the veil of the Multiverse looking for as many champions of goodness as he can. He has anticipated the coming of Perpetua and is afraid of what the Batman Who Laughs is capable of doing. And so he looks to a familiar world where the events of Knightfall are still unfolding. Only in this world, does Jean-Paul Valley’s perversion of the Batman mantle becomes complete.
In their final, climactic battle in the Bat Cave, Azrael stabs Bruce Wayne through the chest and leaves him mortally wounded, re-affirming his belief that only he can bear the burden of leading Gotham City to its salvation as Batman. 30 years later, we see to our horrifying realization, that the heretic was right: in his 3 decades as the iron-fisted, prophetic ruler of Gotham, Jean-Paul Valley was successful in uniting the city under one cause, binding up its bloody wounds with St. Dumas’ edicts.
He has taken the time to scour Gotham clean of its corruption, replacing its democratic civil bodies with a theocratic regime. Laws were replaced by tenets, and police were swapped out for a militia of religious fanatics devoted to protecting the city as much as they were to their messianic leader: the unholy crimson menace who called himself Saint Batman!
A Saint’s Crusade for Acknowledgement: Jean-Paul’s Twisted Gotham City
Though the former Azrael had given himself the highest spiritual distinction that a human being could possibly aspire to, his worthiness for that mantle is highly suspect. Saint Batman didn’t turn Gotham into a paradise by preaching love & peace for all; he did it through personal intervention and brutal suppression. After killing the masked vigilante known as Bane, Jean-Paul decided that in order to implement his grand vision for the world’s greatest city, he would need to become much stronger than he currently was.
And so he started abusing Venom much like Bane, but he went further than the man from Santa Prisca ever had in his pursuit of power, and that got him hooked to Venom even worse than that time Bruce Wayne got addicted to it in Dennis O’Neil’s 1993 classic. Hopped up on drugs and religious fervor, Valley spent his time as Saint Batman crushing out opposition & heresy without remorse; his code revolved around taking “full measures”, as was demonstrated by the public beheading of The Penguin for smuggling insurgents into the city.
And for the most part, it works: Gotham has effectively become the last bastion of civilization on this version of Earth in the Dark Multiverse. A plague engineered by the Floronic Man is cutting its path through America, 2 years after The Parasite orchestrated a cataclysmic event in Metropolis. Given these circumstances, everyone in the States is begging the tyrannical despot to open the borders to his safe haven so others could stand a chance of surviving the coming apocalypse.
But Saint Batman doesn’t care; he’s got bigger things to take care of. The end of the 3rd Sunday, during the last month of summer, was a special day for him, after all. Though he had taken everything from Bruce Wayne and given it over to his own quest for justice, the one thing he left untouched was Wayne Tower. Because, as it turns out, this was where Jean-Paul Valley had kept his predecessor alive; though his living conditions could only be defined as torturous. All Jean-Paul wanted Bruce to do was acknowledge him as the one true Batman.
But it looked like even after losing his limbs and having his remaining body suspended in agonizing stasis, Wayne’s will never falter. He tells Jean-Paul what he has told him for 30 years; that Gotham City deserved someone who would fight for her in her darkest hours, not a drug-addicted-lunatic who would subjugate her to his whims. And going by that metric, Valley was still a colossal failure. Saint Batman’s buttons are pushed further when he’s informed that insurgents have broken into the city square, so he dons his blood-red visor and grabs his flaming sword, preparing himself for his greatest battle to date.
A Loss of Faith & A Chance at Hope
Azrael arrives at the field of battle flanked by his Cardinal & Torchbearer, fuelled as much by Venom as he is by faith. He begins taking down the heathens but is contacted by the spirit of St. Dumas in his subconscious. His Lord constantly disparages him as he fights, mocking his weakness and bringing up the faltering of his faith. He even goes as far as to agree with Bruce Wayne when he said that Azrael is “losing his mind”.
But Jean-Paul doesn’t listen to people who don’t believe in him; he believes in himself, and as long as he can carry on, Gotham City was his to protect. Saint Batman fixes a major infrastructural collapse that was threatening to sink Gotham all by himself but is nearly killed by the effort. His soldiers inform him that they’re holding the line and should be able to draw it out long enough for their messiah to recover and lead them into victory, but the Saint does not care; all he can see is his mission and the fact that he needs to bulldoze his way through the scum to accomplish it.
He commands them to take him to the Dumas Home for a super-sized Venom boost but finds himself betrayed by his closest confidant & lover; Madeleine. See, while Azrael was focused on driving the insurgents out of his paradise, it was revealed that the entire thing was a feint; and that the real plan was to sneak 2 individuals into Wayne Tower so they could rescue Bruce Wayne & restore hope.
These individuals would turn out to be Lady Shiva, the woman who helped Bruce regain his strength & fighting prowess after Bane broke his back; and the Tourne, the Son of Bane himself. The League of Assassins operatives take down Saint Batman’s fanatical troopers and free Bruce from his torturous predicament, but he seems to have given up on himself.
He tells Lady Shiva that she should give up trying to save Gotham City; but she reminded him that under Batman, it used to glimmer as a beacon of hope to the world. Shiva draws an analogy between Bruce’s broken spine & Gotham City’s current predicament, telling him that he is the key to “fixing the world”, and she is the key to fixing him. The only question remains; will he accept?
The End & The Beginning: The Downfall of Saint Batman and the Rise of Batman the Broken
Evidently, Bruce accepted, because he was a part of the team that confronted Jean-Paul at the Dumas Home. After spending 30 years as lovers and powerbrokers in Gotham City, you’d think that Saint Batman would have shown mercy to Madeleine for her treachery. Instead, he murders her in cold blood and prepares to engage both Shiva & Tourne in battle. When he sees Bruce back in one piece and donning a Bat-suit again, he loses it and commands his minions to kill them all, much like Mad King Aerys off of Game of Thrones.
Shiva & the Son of Bane engage the False Saint, while Batman takes off to fight his goons in a separate location. The fight between the 3 martial arts stalwarts is brutal, with Lady Shiva really showing why she is known as one of the deadliest people in the world. She corners Jean-Paul and beats him into a bloody pulp, but her emotions get the best of her and she leaves herself open to attack, thereby endangering Tourne as well.
Basically running on fumes at this point, Valley horrifyingly rips off the arm of the Son of Bane and gulps down his Venom-infused blood to replenish himself. But it would all be in vain. Upon the roof of the former Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne is discovering his brand-new body and its myriad of abilities- like the fact that he can disintegrate his physical self into billions of bat-shaped nano-bots that give him the power of flight. Or the fact that his tech-infused body structure can easily “download” the “data” of any person he comes into contact with, allowing them to live on in his subconscious.
So really, if he inflicts lethal damage upon someone, is he truly killing them? He ponders upon this evolution of his code and concludes that it isn’t murder when they “live on through him” as he decapitates one of Saint Batman’s henchmen. For thirty years, Jean-Paul forced him to watch as he perverted Bruce’s life’s work; his very name. But now, with the power he wielded and the current state of the world, he had to concede that Gotham’s False Saint was right in saying one thing. He did keep this city standing.
The truth is Azrael started her down a new path, one that would see her emerge as the center of all civilization. And the biggest truth is that Bruce’s biggest mistake was the same one Azrael was making now; relying on anyone but himself. But thankfully- or perhaps terrifyingly- he’ll never have to again. Gotham was finally his, and he was hers, and he would not let anyone separate the two of them ever again.
He brutally neutralizes Saint Batman before murdering Lady Shiva & Tourne in cold blood, poking their bodies chock-full of holes like they were blocks of Swiss Cheese. Bruce Wayne had lost the mantle of Batman once already, and look where it got him and his beloved city. This Earth was born of his fear of being unable- even unworthy- of donning that cowl ever again. But while Bruce was able to regain his position in the positive multiverse, his fears poisoned this version of Earth in the Dark Multiverse and turned him into the most disturbing version of Batman to date.
The last panel of Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Batman Knightfall shows a demonic-looking Bruce Wayne, perched atop the Gotham Bridge as a mob of fanatics cheered him on from below. At his feet resides the demolished body of Jean-Paul Valley, unmasked, armored, and chained to a makeshift Bat symbol. And as the night sky paints Gotham’s skyline red, every ray of hope is extinguished with the rise of Batman the Broken.
Conclusion: Tempus Fuginaut’s Helplessness and the Fate of the Multiverse
The last words in this comic book come from the same person who spoke its first words. Tempus Fuginaut belongs to a race of beings whose duty is to observe the events unfolding in the Multiverse; much like the Watchers from the Marvel Universe. He opened this issue with the promise of a crisis and the pursuit of hope. But by the end, he realizes that there is no hope in the world he’s observing right now; because its proverbial Elpis has surrendered to depravity.
At one point in this comic book, Lady Shiva tells Bruce Wayne that he is equivalent to Hope in the DC Universe, and in many ways, she is right. Batman-inspired Gotham City to do better than it ever had in its long, shady history. That is a fact. His actions, no matter how convoluted they were, always worked towards achieving the greater good even at his personal expense. Batman the Broken is a representation of the death of Bruce’s literal and figurative humanity.
It is meant to show you exactly what will happen if he decides to take off all other bets and put his chips solely in his own pocket. Though we’ve always lauded Batman’s practical approach to fighting crime, it has always been tempered with the premise of him not turning into a brutal authoritarian. His no-killing rule is evidence of that. But when he decides to abandon every ounce of morality and adapt his code towards taking “full measures”, his dreams become the stuff of nightmares for the rest of the universe.
Batman the Broken is the scariest version of Batman to ever exist, not because of the torture & abuse he endured, but because of the fact that he gave in to his torturer’s worldview and called it “liberation”. If oppressing millions of lives under a violent, dictatorial theocracy is his idea of doing the right thing, then we don’t even want to guess what a bad day would look like for him. Bruce Wayne from the Dark Multiverse’s version of Knightfall is a grim reminder of the idea that we shouldn’t let our failures define us; because when they do, they give birth to monsters.