WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batman #122, on sale now from DC Comics.
Batman has plenty of tricks and toys up his sleeve, but none were as exciting as those seen in the Arkham games. The video game series that launched with 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum gave players Batarangs and Batmobiles to use as they saw fit. It also brought new gadgets like the freeze blast and the remote electrical charge to the Caped Crusader's utility belt. Now the greatest gadget from the Arkham games has made its way to the comics.
With Ra's al Ghul's death kicking off Shadow War, the World's Greatest Detective was on the case in Batman #122 (by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Tomeu Morey and Clayton Cowles). The Dark Knight has always used cutting-edge tech to solve crimes, but what he used in this issue was more advanced than usual - and straight out of the Arkham games.
Batman used his video games' famous Detective Mode to recreate the fateful events of Ra's al Ghul's murder at the scene of the crime. Players will be familiar with how Detective Mode works and the ways it has evolved as the series has progressed. Initially, it was an alternative sort of vision that highlighted important objects. People highlighted by Detective Mode would appear as skeletons, and details such as heart rate and condition (e.g., excited, terrified) would be marked, something which came in handy when scaring the wits out of Joker's henchmen.
By the time of Arkham Knight, Detective Mode had evolved to the point of total crime scene reconstruction. This mode combined evidence analysis with Augmented Reality to recreate a crime as accurately as possible. Before, this was limited to figuring out the position of gunmen in the likes of Arkham City, but in Knight, it allowed Batman to figure out exactly what happened when the titular Arkham Knight kidnapped Barbara Gordon, amongst other things.
That's exactly how it functions here, in Batman #122. Most likely, the intense media coverage Ra's received as he met his end allowed a lot more detail in this reconstruction than what was seen in the Arkham games. However, the fact that Batman is able to make a three-dimensional AR reconstruction, in general, is amazing and a wonderful addition to coming straight out of the Arkham playbook.
This isn't the first time the games have crossed over into the comics. Perhaps the most notable is the character of the Arkham Knight, who debuted in the comics in Detective Comics #1000 with a whole new identity in the form of Astrid Arkham. Her most recent appearance was as an undead member of Jason Todd's Task Force Z. Other examples of the games crossing over are less obvious, like the Batmobile from the original Arkham Asylum game making the odd appearance in the comics.
In general, though, the inclusion of such an advanced Arkham series gadget shows just how advanced the Dark Knight's tech has become in general. Batman has always had technology that surpasses our own. Though some have remained science fiction, others have become science fact. Batman #109 (by Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris) saw the Dark Knight with his own personal drone - and that was in 1957! Therefore, Detective Mode is more than just a video game mechanic or a tool for solving crimes; it's a continuation of one of the character's greatest legacies and may one day become real technology. Perhaps it could even be used for the very purpose Batman originally intended.