The 6 Best Batman Comics That Influenced The Dark Knight Trilogy

The Dark Knight Trilogy was so successful, partly because of how well it borrowed from reference material These are the 6 best comics it used.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy was another pivotal piece of Batman’s mythos on the big screen after Tim Burton’s breakout hits from the late ’80s to early ’90s, and part of its praises deserves to go to its use of reference material. With over 80 years of lore built up for the superhero, there’s plenty of quality comic books to draw inspiration from.

With the pantheon of books by star writers and artists, there will always be the usual suspects in terms of what’s going to be used to build a foundation. Frank Miller’s work is among them–as expected–as well as Jeph Loeb’s, but the nods to comics go into the Batman arcs from the 2000s as well.

6 Year One (Batman Begins)

When it comes to Batman’s comic book origins, Year One is arguably the best, making it the clear-cut winner in terms of the blueprint for trilogy-opener Batman Begins. This movie needed to carry the character out of the mess that Batman Forever and Batman & Robin put him in, and the turn to darker, grittier, crime-noir approaches that Begins executed so well is in part by having Year One serve as the spine of the narrative.

It has Bruce’s origins as a child and an adult training abroad fleshed out in between present-day scenes, and it also uses the comic’s parallel story of a fresher Jim Gordon to inspire the brilliant iteration by Gary Oldman–both in writing and physical appearances. Their growing alliance throughout the movie is another key aspect borrowed, which crucially set the stage for how the rest of the trilogy would play out.

5 The Killing Joke (The Dark Knight)

If Nolan was to take Batman back into noir/crime-thriller roots, The Killing Joke–perhaps Joker’s best comic appearance–would be equally as important when incorporating a new live-action Joker. The Dark Knight is definitely the movie in this trilogy that feels the most like a Michael Mann/Martin Scorsese crime-drama, but some of the motivations of the Clown Prince of Crime from The Killing Joke served as the premise for the movie’s conflict. Throughout The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s acclaimed rendition of Joker is inciting anarchy and chaos around the city in a fragile time all to prove a point.

He wants to prove that if just enough uncertainty is introduced into the citizens of Gotham’s lives, they’ll happily shed the veil of moral standards they claim to be holding up and become just like him. In the comic, the Joker horrifically paralyzes Barbara Gordon and subjects Jim to intense physical and psychological torture to prove something similar, before Batman ultimately exposes him as a coward desperate for attention.

4 The Long Halloween (The Dark Knight)

Amidst all of Batman’s greatest hits in comics, The Long Halloween is still frequently cited as the best story of the Dark Knight ever written. Understandably so, as the moodily stylized art by Tim Sale and Loeb’s emphasis on the “World’s Greatest Detective” aspects of the character made it easily memorable. While The Dark Knight, unfortunately, doesn’t feature much sleuthing, the crime-drama essence is maintained and adapts key character dynamics from the comic.

The Long Halloween had Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent all working together as Gotham’s crime-fighting trinity, while also leading into the latter’s tragic fall into the Two-Face persona. The Dark Knight did well to pay homage to the comic’s direction while putting its own spin on these turn of events, expertly blending the Joker in as the catalyst for Harvey’s downfall.

3 Knightfall (The Dark Knight Rises)

The Dark Knight Rises was an exciting amalgamation of different comic books when it came to the movie’s story, but Knightfall in particular was undoubtedly the primary source. The comic presented one of Batman’s greatest comebacks, with Bane as the main antagonist pushing Batman to the brink of his physical and psychological capabilities. The comic sees Bane orchestrate a breakout of Arkham’s rogues, forcing Batman to work tirelessly with next to no rest until they’re brought back in.

Once he’s at his weakest, Bane breaks into the cave and breaks Batman’s back–one of the most iconic comic panels of all time. Like the previous entries in this trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises does well in remixing a well-known story with some other influences and original ideas, but the recreation of the “Broken Bat” scene in Batman and Bane’s first fight was a welcome near-1:1 adaptation.

2 The Dark Knight Returns (The Dark Knight Rises)

The other acclaimed work of Miller’s during his time with Batman was in the alternate, political-dystopian timeline story The Dark Knight Returns. What The Dark Knight Rises borrowed from this comic was more of a broad story premise rather than the details from its plot, but worked naturally given where Batman leaves off in exile at the end of the last movie.

The Returns comic starts with a more cynical, jaded Caped Crusader that’s been retired from vigilantism for a decade but is pushed back into it given the relapsing state of decay in Gotham City and the government’s disinterest in providing any meaningful help–and trying to put a stop to Batman’s resurgence. Similarly, after Batman made himself an unjust scapegoat for the sake of preserving Harvey’s positive impact on the city in TDK, Bruce spends eight years decaying in Wayne Manor before the rise of Bane gives him a reason–for better and worse–to don the cape and cowl again.

1 No Man’s Land (The Dark Knight Rises)

Rises’ premise mixed the shocking setback Bane inflicted on Batman with the comeback story of Returns but threw in the dystopian setting of the 2000s comic book arc No Man’s Land for good measure. In No Man’s Land, Gotham’s citizens are reeling from the effects of a devastating earthquake. The federal government, after an initial evacuation of the city, cuts off all access to Gotham in or out, effectively quarantining it and branding it a “no man’s land.”

Bane was worked into this premise by making the supervillain out for vengeance by destroying Bruce/Batman and Gotham’s citizens both physically and spiritually, feeding them false hope only to decimate them all the same. It’s the most inventive twist narratively that The Dark Knight Rises did, it made for a great superhero “war” movie and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

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