Watchmen Reveals That Batman Is A Spoof Of Nite Owl

HBO’s Watchmen has been grabbing eyeballs with its innovative plot which is turning everything one knows about the original comicbook on its head. Right from the first episode itself, titled “This Extraordinary Being“, which revealed that Hooded Justice was a black man who was also the grandfather of Angela Abar/Sister Night. Next up, on Sunday’s episode titled “An Almost Religious Awe” it was revealed that Dr. Manhattan wasn’t on Mars at all. Instead he had been living in Tulsa all along pretending to be Cal Abar, Angela’s husband. These two reveals shook comic book fans because everyone knew they had it all figured out, only for the show to throw more surprises along the way. But now it has come to light that Batman exists in the Watchmen world and he is Black.

This isn’t the only world/timeline where people are theorizing what happened to him. Batman is also missing from the Arrowverse. Since we are dedicated bat fans so we had to theorize what happened to The Dark Knight there:

Black Batman Was A Spoof

The Watchmen tie-in site Peteypedia has mentioned that Agent Dale Petey shares a memo in which he digs deep into Angela’s childhood and looks at the inspiration behind her masked police persona. The inspiration turns out to be a movie called Sister Night. It is a Blaxploitation film about a “nun with a motherf****ng gun”. The film hold significanace for Angela since it’s a movie she wanted to watch but wasn’t allowed to by her parents and she was told no right before they died. Agent Petey’s memo reveals that Sister Night is itself a spoof of the Minutemen’s Silhouette and part of a genre of films referred to as Black Mask. The memo also notes that there’s a Black Superman spoof of Doctor Manhattan, Tarantula about Mothman and, interestingly a Batman spoofing Nite Owl.

The Deep Inversion In The Batman Reference

Fans who have read The Watchmen comics will know that Nite Owl character is a parody of many other characters. The first Nite Owl, Hollis T. Mason, was a parody of The Phantom while the second Nite Owl, Dan Dreiberg, was a parody of Batman. So if in the tv show universe, Batman is a spoof of Nite Owl then the show flips everything around. It’s the kind of subversion which keeps things interesting for long time fans of the show as well as makes everyone chuckle a little. After all this tvshow is titled the Watchmen and not Batman so it makes sense that they will get the first priority.

Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.

(Source: comicbook.com and meaww.com)