There have been several Batsuits that have appeared in DC movies. However, the latest Batman movie has brought in one of the most powerful Batman suits in all of comics, and it’s not one that Bruce Wayne would wear. The new movie is Batman Knightfall Part 1, and it tells the classic story of Bane showing up in Gotham City for the first time. In the comics, Bane breaks out several villains from Arkham Asylum, and Batman exhausts himself trying to catch them all. When the end comes, Bane shows up and confronts Batman before breaking Bruce Wayne’s back. After this, a new Batman replaces Bruce, with Azrael taking his place and almost destroying the Caped Crusader’s reputation.
When Azrael takes over the role of Batman, he uses a new high-tech suit that allows him to deliver a deadly attack to all the villains he faces. That suit has now debuted in Batman: Knightfall Part 1.
Azrael’s Batsuit, when he became Batman, is more armor than suit, and it is something that has a lethal attack that Batman never approved of. Jean-Paul Valley added several key features to the Batsuit when he created it. The armored Batsuit was designed and built by Valley himself, driven by his subconscious conditioning (“The System”) from the Order of St. Dumas, and first appeared in Batman #500 (1993). Valley sat down and began designing the new suit after growing frustrated with the performance of the regular Batman suit. When he almost got beaten soundly by Bane, he knew he needed more tech, and he did something about it.
One of the first changes was to the actual cape. While superheroes wearing capes are often a joke for many fans online, Jean-Paul decided that Batman’s cape was a hindrance to his ability to move when in the air, so he created a larger, more imposing cape that allowed him to glide better in the air. Thanks to his cape, Azrael’s Batsuit allowed him to “fly” better than Batman ever could.
Azrael wanted to remove much of Batman’s reliance on the utility belt as well. As a result, he replaced Bruce Wayne’s grappling hooks with retractable grapnels that sat within his gloves. They allowed him to navigate the city through the air, similar to Marvel’s Spider-Man, and he could alternate between his gliding cape and then launch a new grapnel to continue to travel for as long as there was something to grasp onto.
However, the biggest changes were in his offensive weapons, which let Azrael do damage that Batman never considered thanks to Bruce’s no-kill rule. One of these was the Bat-Shuriken, which he could load 2000 of them into magazine clips and fire them at a speed that would shred anything he fired at into pieces. He added a flamethrower. The Batsuit was always bulletproof, but with Azrael’s suit, it was more like bulletproof armor, with bullets bouncing off him. In the end, the suit looked almost nothing like Batman other than the iconic logo.
The biggest problem is that the Azrael Batsuit didn’t look like Batman or feel like Batman, and fans almost universally refused to accept it as Batman. When Bruce Wayne returned and reclaimed his role from Valley, it was a return to form. The big thing is that Azrael’s Batsuit was more like an armored suit than Batman’s, and the character was never supposed to be DC’s version of Iron Man. Batman is a character who strikes fear in his enemies, not someone who is a shiny armored hero blasting them with multiple tech weapons. In the end, Azrael’s Batman looked more like a gaudy villain than a hero.
This was clearly a product of the 1990s, which was when comic books went way over the line when it came to adding tech and all the bells and whistles to characters. In some cases, it worked, like when Marvel introduced Cable. However, with Image Comics going way over the line at the time with giant, muscular tech heroes with much bigger guns, it just became overkill after a while. Soon, it seemed everything was either designed like an edgelord or was just expected to be a hyper-stylized action hero, and the age of the genuine comic book heroes was going out of style. Batman fans wouldn’t accept it.
That said, there is also a cult fandom that has built around Azrael’s time as Batman. Much of the fandom comes from people who fell in love with the comics in the 1990s because his Batsuit has a strong 90s aesthetic to it that will always mean a lot to that generation of comic book fans. There is also the idea that Azrael subverted Batman’s morality code, which created something very different at the time. It also has a strong cultural identity because it has also popped up in the Batman: Arkham video games, offering its hardcore fans a chance to relive the 1990s phenomenon once again.
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