Batman Sitting Down in Harley Quinn Is More Than a Quick Gag

The new season of DC Universe’s Harley Quinn featured a scene that has very peculiar, but still hilarious, origin. In the fifth episode of season 2, a broken and desperate Batman finds himself at wit’s end in trying to help Gotham, and goes to his friend Jim Gordon about how to best proceed. It might not seem like much to some viewers, but seeing Batman sitting down in the scene is actually a good in-joke about the Dark Knight Detective. As pointed out by Bleeding Cool, despite the many instances to the contrary throughout the years, there was at one point a directive at DC Comics as ridiculous as any other you’ve heard: Batman does not sit down.

Comic scribe Paul Jenkins previously made a mention of the editorial demand on the website, writing in a comment: “I would like to relay an editorial comment that I received near the end of my time writing the Dark Knight New 52 series. In one scene, I had written that Batman is sitting on a rooftop during an intense conversation, close to a person who has been injured. The editorial comment: ‘We’re not sure you are ‘getting’ the character because it’s common knowledge that Batman never sits down.’ This, mind you, after I had made it clear I was not going to rewrite material for the umpteenth time after it had already been approved.”

Jenkins pointed out the many very famous Batman stories where the Caped Crusader took a sit, including Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Strikes Again, and added: “And, of course, Batman never sits down when he is in the Bat Cave looking at all those monitors. I think, perhaps, that if editorial comments are focused around, say, a character’s penchant for standing up as opposed to, say, the interactions between characters or the flow and structure of the story then the people behind such comments are missing the point. The requisite qualification for being a good editor does not have to be a degree in English (though that might help) but neither should it be a ridiculous adherence to past continuity, especially not a haphazard and inaccurate one.”

As Jenkins said, this claim that Batman doesn’t sit down was incredibly inaccurate as countless images of the character doing just that can be found from the 80 year history of the hero. To make it seem even more ridiculous, especially in the context of not “getting” Batman, recall the multiple instances in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight where Batman sits down, there’s a lot!