DC’s Dark Detective Reveals The Saddest Truth About Batman

Warning: contains spoilers for Future State: Dark Detective #2!

Everyone jokes about how Bruce Wayne’s superpower is his money, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Being a billionaire allows Bruce to afford all of those nifty gadgets, battle armors, and vehicles that help the Batman solve unsolvable crimes. One technology in particular, the Bat-Wave, aka the Batcomputer, is especially useful. This computer system not only downloads information from numerous databases but can even pull crime files from Gotham’s police department and upload them right onto his massive screen that lies in the sanctity and security of the Batcave.

But what if his technologies played another role? Has Bruce Wayne’s tech been inadvertently covering up a darker side to Batman that has not only enabled unhealthy behavior but allowed sinister thoughts to fester and consume his mind? A rather chilling scene proves this might be the case in Future State: Dark Detective#2 written by Joshua Williamson and Mariko Tamaki with artists Giannis Milonogiannis and Dan Mora.

In this world, the Dark Detective is the “ghost” of Batman. Many believe him dead, and that was close to becoming a reality. The Magistrate somehow discovered Bruce Wayne and Batman were one and the same. As a result, Bruce almost paid with his life and needed to disappear. So now he lurks deeper in the shadows than his Batcave ever allowed; he goes by the name Jeff Marks and lives with Noah Riley. More directly, he lives in Noah’s basement, which now serves as his new Batcave. And this Batcave doesn’t have a Batcomputer, so Bruce makes do by creating an evidence board, a prop that many aptly refer to as a “crazy wall” since they’re normally used in stories about conspiracy theorists and detectives who have become so irreparably ensconced in a specific case or idea that they appear to have lost all perspective.

Filmmakers usually include crazy walls in movies as an effective means to convey a character’s descent into madness, since these boards allow the person’s obsession to physically manifest in a visually appealing way through the utilization of strings connecting a collage of media. The more differently colored strings woven in more intricate patterns there are, the more the character appears to have closed out everything but the case. The implication of a person carefully cutting out news clippings, unspooling string, and pinning connections in place hammers home the degree to which they’re consumed by their area of focus – a detail that hits even harder when applied to the former Batman, who always seemed effortless cool when this was all happening on a giant screen.

Bruce uses his crazy wall to connect Peacekeeper-01, the leader of the Magistrate, with various companies such as Plexitech, Draftech, Neo Corp and Wayne Enterprises. It can be assumed that Bruce is just following the same methodology he would have utilized with all of his technology in the Batcave. In other words, Batman has always obsessed over each case in this way – endlessly reviewing the relatively basic facts of the case to find new connections – with the Batcomputer hiding the degree of obsession he brought to his role as the Dark Knight. Many stories have grappled with the idea of Bruce Wayne’s dedication bordering on the obsessive, but it’s only with this visual that fans are truly confronted with the idea that, stripped of the context of being the Batman, Bruce exhibits plenty of behaviors that show his chosen profession may actually be deeply harmful to his mental health.

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