If you’re going to tell a Batman story, you’ve got a lot of leeway when it comes to certain details.
You can mix and match your villains and their history. You can include Robin or you can choose to keep Bruce Wayne’s ward out of the picture. When it comes to Batman’s love interests, you’ve got a lot of options.
One of the few things you can’t screw up, however, is the bat suit. Just ask Joel Schumacher. The director of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, who decided it might be a good idea to add nipples and codpieces to Batman’s costume. It didn’t go down too well at the time and it certainly hasn’t aged well, standing out as a metaphor for the excessive, kinky take on the Caped Crusader.
The “realism” of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy did much to undo the bad taste those nipples left behind (there’s a sentence we never expected to write). Ben Affleck’s Batman in the new DC movies has taken things back to a gritter 1980s-style look that moves us even further away.
Gotham, meanwhile, was supposed to be a TV show about Batman that wasn’t about Batman. However, it’s stuck around so long that it can only hold off the inevitable for so long. The show’s Bruce Wayne is getting old enough that he’s starting to think about what the future might hold for him and the most recent episode introduced audiences to their notion of a bat suit prototype.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwUl_zzIqco
It’s not a bat suit. Not yet, at least. So it’s impossible to really make too many comparisons. However, there’s one thing that is noticeably absent from the prototype and that’s nipples.
According to interviews that the Gotham cast did with AVClub during Comic-Con, you can be sure that you’ll never see nipples so long as they all live. Or, at least, their characters.
- “Absolutely not.” – Sean Pertwee (Alfred)
- “No. No. I think that’s a universal agreement.” Jessica Lucas (Tabitha)
- “You know, I think that’s gotta be a no because it’s not anatomically correct.” – Drew Powell (Butch/Solomon Grundy)
- “No. Absolutely not. That was the worst.” – Eric Richards (Barbara)
- “No, dear God, please no nipples on the bat suit. I feel very strongly on this issue.” – Ben McKenzie (Jim Gordon)
While no one wants to see nipples on Batman anytime soon, as the interview puts it, “teets their own.”
[AVClub]
