Nothing Wrong I Can’t Fix With My Hands: Kevin Smith On Zack Snyder’s Batman Suit

So recently, Batman Vs. Superman director Zack Snyder tweeted a photo of Ben Affleck in the Batman suit for the upcoming movie. And while some of us who are actual comics fans might have seen some similarities in the suit to some other earlier comics works, there were just as many people who said, “Meh; it’s just another one-color Batman suit, just like in the Christopher Nolan flicks. And the Tim Burton movies. And the ones by what’s-his-face, that nipple-obsessed pederast.”

And certainly, that single photo that most of us have seen points toward that kind of design… but most of us have only seen the one photo posted to the public Internets by Snyder, who is known to like fucking around with visuals, whether or not it’s actually a good idea.

But there is one man not involved with the actual production who has seen a photo of the costume: Kevin Smith, the director of Clerks, host of podcast Fatman on Batman, and the guy who cast Affleck in Chasing Amy, which led Hollywood producers to see him as something other than his character in Dazed And Confused, i.e.: a paddle-obsessed pederast (I’m detecting a common theme here).

Smith has been saying for months that he’s seen the Batman suit, and based on his descriptions, we weren’t expecting another one-color Batman costume. Well, Smith has made a few more comments about the costume he saw on his Hollywood Babble-On podcast (transcribed by ComicBook.com), and in doing so, confirmed some things that many long-time comic fans already suspected from the first black and white photo.

So what did Smith say about Snyder’s photo?

They put it on a fake rooftop, and they lit it up. But it was in color, and you could see every piece of detail. So I’ve seen some people online go, ‘Why is this f***ing suit any different than the Chris Nolan Batsuit, it’s all one f***ing color.’ It’s like, ‘Dude, that’s a monochrome photo. You know what that means, one chrome.

That’s not a representation of what the suit looks like… So what the suit looks like, and I was always kind of keeping it quiet until they revealed it, but they’ve revealed it. And you can kind of see, and anybody that…you’ve seen some people take the picture and color it online. If you want to see what this f***ing suit looks like, you just go to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, go to the third book, Hunt the Dark Knight… it’s the exact f***ing outfit he’s wearing. That’s why I hugged that guy all those months ago.

Now, the splash panel I posted from The Dark Knight Returns back when Snyder’s photo hit Twitter was from the second book, The Dark Knight Triumphant. And as anyone who has read that series knows, Batman goes through a few costumes, from the 1970s familiar blue and grey with the yellow logo suit in the first book, to a suit of armor for beating the shit out of Superman in the fourth book, The Dark Knight Falls.

So what’s the Hunt The Dark Knight costume Smith is talking about?

Yeah, that looks pretty close to the Affleck picture, and like something I’ve wanted to see in a movie since I was 17 years old.

And it also serves as a reminder that all those leg and thigh pouches that we sneer at Rob Liefeld for? Yeah, maybe they weren’t completely his fault.

(via ComicBook.com)