Christopher Nolan’s "The Dark Knight" trilogy : The Comic Connections

With The Dark Knight Rises having stormed theatres around the world and the epic trilogy coming to a close, there is a lot of discussion on various sites and pages about how much this trilogy is loyal to its comic book counterparts.
Well the good news is that it is to a large extent.

This article tries to prove how well the researched the trilogy was by showing all the cues, characters, story points and details that Christopher Nolan and his fellow writers adapted from various iconic comic stories/arcs to create a whole new Batman for a new age!

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(It will either prove that, or that I'm an utter and total nutter who see's things everywhere that are just not there!)

I've tried to break these elements down and give you the titles of the stories/graphic novels/collections where they seem to have originated, of course only the movie-makers can know what's true and what's not.
But here, I ask YOU - think you know your caped crusader? Check this out and see what you knew and all the stuff you might've missed, the inspirations for some great movie moments.

Batman Begins

1. A young Bruce Wayne falls down a hole at Wayne Manor. Bats swarm towards him and then outside. Dr. Thomas Wayne rescues him. (Batman: The Man Who Falls)

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2. Bruce being haunted by image of bats. (Batman: Year One, Batman: The Man Who Falls)

3. Bruce leaves Gotham City and obtains skills in martial arts, criminal psychology and forensic Science. (Batman: Year One, Batman: The Man Who Falls)

4. Bruce trains at a monastery that is hidden in a mountainous area and after his training is over is told by his master that he has exceptional intelligence and physique, but he has a fatal flaw that will be responsible for his fall. (Batman: The Man Who Falls)

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5. Henri Ducard is the man who trains Bruce. He shows him "the uses of brutality, deception and cunning." But then Bruce abandons his training, disgusted after Ducard kills a criminal he was tracking. (Batman: The Man Who Falls)

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6. Bruce gives his jacket to a homeless guy, who also is the first person to see him as Batman. (Batman: Year One)

7. Bruce needs a symbol and realises the need for special tools and gadgets in his coming war on crime. (Batman: Year One, Batman: The Man)

8. He creates his costumed identity based on bats because he fears them. (Batman: Year One, Batman: The Man Who Falls)

9. He contacts Lt. James Gordon during his first appearance and the two form an uneasy relationship. (Batman: Year One)

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10. While other see Batman as a menace, Gordon trusts him. (Batman: Year One, Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

11. Crime bosses Falcone and Carmine have prominent roles in the film. (Batman: Year One, Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

12. Corruption in Gotham City and the GCPD with Gordon fighting it almost alone. (Batman: Year One, Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

13. Gordon is a lieutenant and not a commissioner when they first meet. (Batman: Year One, Long Halloween)

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14. Batman gets quite injured a few times even in his post-costumed mode. (Batman: Year One)

15. Detective Flass is a corrupt cop both Batman and Gordon deal with. (Batman: Year One)

16. Scarecrow being an antagonist in a sub-plot. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory, KnightFall)

17. Batman has a tank-like Batmobile. (The Dark Knight Returns)

18. Batman captures Roman and ties him to something (a bed in the comics, a searchlight in Batman Begins) as a message to Gotham's underworld. (Batman: Year One)

19. Batman saves Gordon’s family. (Batman: Year One)

20. Batman uses a high-frequency device to attract bats from the cave for his escape while being cornered by GCPD at Arkham Asylum. (Long Halloween)

21. Newly promoted Jim Gordon uses the Bat-Signal to summon Batman. When he arrives, Gordon announces the coming of a new threat: The Joker. (Batman: Year One)

The Dark Knight

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1. Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent meet on the roof of the Gotham City Police Department. (Long Halloween)

2. The three make a pact to end the mobs' crime reign without breaking the rules but bending wherever needed. (Long Halloween)

3. Gordon's saying, “he does that” to Dent when Batman disappears without letting Dent complete what he was saying. (Long Halloween)

4. A witness draws a gun on Dent (it was acid that got thrown on his face in the comics) and later Dent becomes Two-Face. (Long Halloween)

5. Batman believes Dent is Gotham's true hope, but also depressed when he falls from his grace. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

6. In the comic Dent and Batman discover mountains of cash and destroy it, while in the film it is the Joker who destroys a pile of the mob's cash. (Long Halloween)

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7. Dent and his wife are threatened with being blown-up together by the Joker, Dent survives and she survives in the comic – in the movie it was his girlfriend, Rachel, and she dies. (Long Halloween)

8. Joker manipulates Dent and others to create chaos in Gotham. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

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9. Because of Joker, Batman stops his war on the mob and goes to stop him. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

10. Although Sal Maroni is not "directly" responsible for Harvey's facial scars, he was the one who unleashed the Joker. (Dark Victory)

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11. Two-Face makes it the sole purpose of his life to take down anyone who is responsible for his condition and lets fate decide if they’ll live or die. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

12. Batman disguising himself as a helmeted bodyguard to ambush Holiday is taken a inspiration in The Dark Knight with the decoy bodyguard being Gordon, the 'transfer' being Harvey instead of Maroni and the target being the Joker instead of Holiday. (Dark Victory)

13. Batman, while pursuing Two-Face, is faced with a sort of mock trial. (The Dark Knight Returns)

Joker is responsible for Dent’s demise. (Dark Victory)

This one, I just love it! (Click to Enlarge!)

The Dark Knight Rises - *Mild Spoilers ahead!*

1. Batman is now public enemy #1. (Batman: Year One, Dark Victory)

2. Batman holds himself responsible for letting Harvey fall to darkness. (Dark Victory)

3. Batman becomes even more of a loner. (Dark Victory, The Dark Knight Returns)

4. Catwoman may have a personal vendetta towards the mob and may even be related to one of the heads. (Long Halloween, Dark Victory)

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5. Bruce Wayne has voluntarily retired from crime fighting and has been more than ten years since the last sighting of the Batman. (The Dark Knight Returns)

6. The emergence of an old enemy/new threat prompts a now older, bearded Wayne to don the Batman costume once again. He also needs technological enhancements to compensate for physical damage/old wounds and having aged. (The Dark Knight Returns)

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7. Selina Kyle is not known as "Catwoman yet, but is shown to be referred to as "The Cat" in the newspaper headlines and her first encounter with Batman/Bruce Wayne has her in disguise, trying to commit a robbery and him seeing through her charade - but she escapes. (Batman #1)

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8. Batman's big return to the streets is met with frightened-awe by a rookie cop (who shoots at him to no avail) as well as sheer joy by a his veteran partner, who tells the youngester that he's "in for a show."(The Dark Knight Returns)

9. Bane deduces the secret identity of Batman. (Batman: KnightFall)

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10. Selina Kyle's life seems to be pretty chaotic and she lives with a friend named Jen who is a lot like Catwomans friend Holly from the comics. (Batman: Year One)

11. Catwoman is looking for a computer program/virus called "Clean-slate" that will clear her entire history away and give her a chance to start fresh. In the comic version she succeeds. (Catwoman #1)

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12. Bruce is talking to someone and they pull a Batman-style disappearing act on him like he does to pretty much everyone else - Catwoman/Selina Kyle in this instance - leaving him to say "So that's what that feels like". (Kingdom Come has the identical dialogue by Bruce but it's Superman who vanishes and not Selina)

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13. A secret underground army led by a charismatic leader exists under Gotham and their actions lead to war against the upper-class, Gordon being hospitalised and Batman nearly broken - both physically and emotionally. (Batman: The Cult)

14. Alfred resigns when Batman/Bruce insists on further endangering himself by continuing/returning to fighting crime. (Batman: Knightquest)

15. John Daggett's name is clearly inspired by Roland Daggett, a corrupt but 'respectable' businessman with secretly shady dealings who makes a pact/deal with a super-villain for control and eventually suffers because of it. (Batman: TAS) The same character arc actually applies to Max Shreck from the old Batman Returns movie, played by the inimitable Christopher Walken. Okay, it's not a comic connection, but it's inspired by old Batman stories so I'm counting it. (Batman Returns)

16. Bane beats Batman mercilessly before "breaking" him, saying, "When Gotham falls, then you have my permission to die" - quote from The Dark Knight Rises trailer. (Batman: KnightFall) This is not unlike the Mutant Gang leader that Bruce faces in the TDKR comics who severely injures him their first fight and whom Bruce returns to beat. (The Dark Knight Returns)

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17. Bane beats Batman directly under his own armory - in the comic it is literally in the Batcave itself though.  (Batman: KnightFall, yeah, this ones a bit of stretch but still fits!)

18. The international, master criminal Bane frees all of the maximum-security inmates of Blackgate/Arkham, his plan being to wreak havoc while his plans work in the background and also to weaken Gotham City and the Batman by forcing him to deal with all the deadly criminals and psychopaths simultaneously. (Batman: KnightFall)

19. Gotham is disconnected physically and otherwise from the rest of the world/country and becomes a kind of anarchist no-man's land where mobs rule and chaos is rampant. (Batman: No Man's Land)

20. Blake draws the chalk Bat symbol as a means of bringing hope to the people to show that Batman is still out there and later Bruce has Gordon light the giant Bat-symbol on the bridge for the same reason - in the comics Batman does it himself with spray paint. (Batman: No Man's Land)

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21. Bane has connections with the League of Shadows and their plan involved the destruction of Gotham under the guise of wresting it from the city's rich and elite. Bane's plan is inspired by a desire to fulfill the plans of Ra's Al Ghul and involves an overloading nuclear-level power plant/supply that will destroy Gotham. (Batman: Legacy, Batman: Bane)

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22. Batman and Selina Kyle start out as adversaries, but he persists in trying to show her that she's not evil and that she has a good side - she evolves from crook to villain to anti-hero and helping Batman. (best show in Catwoman: The Dark End of the Street)

23. Bruce Wayne is seduced by Miranda Tate (a.k.a Talia) who is the agent of an evil league/group/whatever, for nefarious purposes and betrays him near the end of the story. In the comic this part was played by Jezebel Jet. (Batman: R.I.P)

24. Talia has supplanted her father as the head of the League of Shadows. (Death and the Maidens, Batman Inc. volume 2 - ongoing)

25. Bane and Talia have a history but her father does not approve of them a despite having initially accepted Bane into the League of Shadows and believes that Bane is too brutish. (Batman : Bane of the Demon)

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26. Batman is chasing down a van that carries a threat to the city of Gotham and must use lethal force to stop it, ending with the villains driving it being killed - a rare moment where Batman is forced to go against his oath of taking human life. In the comics it's a van carrying mutated/genetically-enhanced monsters created by Dr. Hugo Strange - who incidentally was rumoured to be the main villain in this movie for quite a while. This particular comic is a brilliant piece of the Dark Knights golden age adventures! (Batman #1, 1940 - "The Giants of Hugo Strange")

27. John Blake's real name is revealed to be Robin (Batman: Year 100), he's an orphan like Bruce and he grew up for some years in a Catholic orphanage. He also was a police officer for some time (in Bludhaven in the comics). It is also shown that Bruce saw something in him that made him think he could do the things Bruce did and basically gave him the keys to the Cave. (read pretty much any story about Dick Grayson, the characters are very similar) In addition, the character seems to have traits that make him an amalgam of Robins - his hot-headedness make him much like Jason Todd (Robin #2) and he figured out Bruce was Batman all on his own like Time Drake (#3) who's last name is also very similar.

28. The story ends with Bruce Wayne/Batman faking his own death and disappearing, leaving everything to Alfred and with conditions that most of his estate be used for charities. (Batman: Red Rain) After his retirement from the mantle of The Batman, he is living with/married to Selina Kyle. (There are several stories with a similar concept for these two, including several alternate Earth stories)

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Additional super-bonus trivia!

1. The character of Detective Crispus Allen is used in the awesome "Crossfire" segment of the animated anthology Batman: Gotham Knight, which bridged Batman's career between Batman Begins and TDK. Allen in the comics is a detective and parter of Renee Montoya and eventually gets called upon to become the new Spectre, the spirit of vengeance.

2. The dance sequence between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle at the charity gala, filled with undertones and hints of bad things to come, etc - it really made my nostalgia kick back to the one from Batman Returns (love that movie!) between Michael Keaton and the lovely Ms. Michelle Pfeiffer.

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3. The costume for Anne Hathaway's character seems to draw very heavily from the sleek cat-suit of Julie Newmar from the 60's Batman TV series and the sleeker look from that era in general - particularly the eye-mask and the head-piece ears instead of a full cowl over her head. (Minus the whip though!)

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Just because she was awesome! (Click to Enlarge!)

(Sources : Superherohype, Wikipedia, various comic book forums and personal accumulated knowledge over many years of geekery.)

We all here at Comic Addicts hope you guys thoroughly enjoyed this movie as much as we did.

And remember, for all your Batman related and comic needs in general, this is the place to be!

You should also check out our recent series of ongoing articles about the history shared by Batman and Bane in the DC Comics world:
Batman Vs Bane

Countdown to The Dark Knight Rises -Batman: Venom

Countdown to The Dark Knight Rises -Prelude to Knightfall