Now, though, internet detectives have begun to focus on another aspect of the costume design: The weird materials that seem to make up the Bat-Symbol on its chest. Eschewing any bright yellows or other symbols of a more cheerfully styled vigilante, the symbol appears to be made up of not just be metal, but metal with some very particular designs laid out on it. This is all blatant speculation, obviously, but if you look at them long enough, they even start to look a bit like the parts of a gun—the thing that Batman hates the most!
Kudos to Twitter user @UpToTask, who not only pointed out the new symbol’s resemblance to some kind of pistol—easier to see in the color-corrected image above—but who also noted a canonical reason for why it might look that way. Specifically, they drew a parallel to Kevin Smith’s story in Detective Comics #1000, published last year, in which Bruce Wayne tracks down the gun that was used to murder Thomas and Martha Wayne, melts it down—or, to use Smith’s phrasing “I’m going to burn the metal that killed my parents”—and then uses it as the bulletproof metal that makes up the symbol. If that is a gun on R-Bats’ chest—again, we’re all just speculating here—it looks like he didn’t go for the full meltdown process. But the potential symbolism is still there, namely, “I hate guns so much that I don’t even let them die; instead, I capture them and make them work for me.” That’s a total power play, Bats. We’ll presumably get a better look at it (and possible confirmation for the theory) when The Batman arrives in theaters next year, on June 25.
