‘The Batman’ is Now Streaming: Read These Best-Selling Graphic Novels That Inspired The Filmmakers Next

The part that gets missed in the previous Batman films is that…the guy is basically crazy because he watched his parents get murdered as a child. To me, that is apparent in between the lines in the comics with Batman’s internal and external dialog being succinct and obsessed with his “enemies” and living a life doling out vengeance at the expense of any normal existence as Bruce Wayne. This, I thought, was well done in The Batman as a year two story with the “character” of Bruce-Wayne-as-a-playboy having not yet been devised, and any time we do see Bruce he’s basically just maskless Batman.

In Batman: Ego & Other Tails, the Dark Knight experiences a temporary psychotic break where Bruce, and the internal darkness that fuels Batman separate after he feels guilt-stricken for causing a death. Bruce and the personified darkness wrestle in a visualized story of the character’s unresolved trauma.

Reeves called out Wayne’s “confronting the beast”  in Ego as influence, “There’s a lot in what it’s trying to do in the story about him confronting the shadow side of himself and the degree to which you have self-knowledge.”