When Justice League director Zack Snyder released an image of Ben Affleck as Batman in his new Tactical Batsuit, the internet exploded with reactions. Most fans were excited by the new outfit, a sleek body armor with slightly shorter ears and goggles that came with the promise of an all-new vehicle that required them to properly pilot. Some, however, were critical, or at least observed a striking similarity to another Zack Snyder DC Comics-based superhero movie costume.
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Nite Owl 2 from Watchmen also had a sleek body armor style, the stubby ears, and goggles; while side-by-side they don’t bear that close of a look, fans of both films still saw the likeness immediately, and made their observation known. However, there’s another character in the pages of DC Comics with an even more striking similarity: Nazi Batman.
In the pages of DC Comics, the multiverse – a series of alternate realities where history’s changes results in different versions of the heroes and villains fans know and love – has been incredibly important to its history. Whether expanding or contracting, providing a worlds-altering Crisis or giving us a peek into an Elseworld where things played out in a shocking manner, the multiverse has been key since the Flashes of two worlds first met.
In one such world, Earth-10, Batman and the rest of the JLA work for a Nazi regime that won WWII (itself a play on the silver age Earth-X that also featured a world where the Germans won WWII). As the JLAxis, created by Grant Morrison, Justin Gray, and Fabrizio Fiorentino in Countdown to Adventure #2, these versions of Batman, Superman, and the others are agents of Adolf Hitler, still Fรผhrer after decades.
Morrison revisited this world in Multiversity #7: Mastermen, with art by Jim Lee and Scott Williams, where he gave another interpretation, wherein Overman (the Nazi-raised Superman) leads the New Reichsmen, with Valkyri Brunnhilde, Underwaterman, Blitzen, The Martian, and Leatherwing, here the Batman whose parents were Nazis, and who still upholds the Reich’s ideals. Here we get close looks at Leatherwing, and the design, with a mostly form-fitting armor and goggles over the cowl, looks strikingly like that on Ben Affleck as the tactical suit.
Now, a good design is a good design; it could be that Zack Snyder or his costumers simply did a search for “alternate Batman costumes” and saw this one and liked it – without noticing the copious swastikas behind it. Maybe they did use influence from Nite-Owl, and it just happened to come out looking like this. Or maybe it’s all just a zeitgeist (whoops, another German word) that resulted in this coincidence. Regardless, Nazi Batman and Tactical Batman share some considerable similarities.
Justice League is filming now for a November 2017 release.
