No one tell Frank Miller, but Occupy Wall Street has donned the mantle of the Bat. During last Thursday's "Day of Action" march across the Brooklyn Bridge by New York City-based protesters, a powerful light projector bathed the monolithic side of the nearby Verizon Building with OWS slogans, in a move directly inspired by the Gotham City Police Department's preferred method of contacting Batman.

In an interview with Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, project coordinator Mark Read had this to say:

It came up at an action coordination meeting. We were talking about what to do on the 17th. We had a sense that the morning on Wall Street would be forceful and confrontational, and we wanted to not do the same kind of thing in the afternoon. Initial talks focused on having a thousand people taking the bridge in the afternoon, and continuing in a militant mode of activism. But we started thinking about creating a more unifying moment. A celebration of the birthday of Occupy Wall Street. Maybe taking the roadway and having lots of arrests might not be best thing. What if we took the pedestrian walkway, and gave out LED candles? We would give out 10,000 LED tea candles, a river of light streaming over the walkway.

And a guy named Hero, who has been central to a lot of facets of the occupation since the beginning, turns to me and says, "We need a bat signal. The 99%."

I said, I think I can do that. I know just enough about how the technology works that I think I can pull that off. And for the past two weeks, I've worked full time on figuring that out.

It's hard to say what my favorite part of this story is. Batman inspiring a real-life fight for social justice? The low-income housing resident who bravely donated her apartment as a base of operations? The choice of positive, uplifting slogans projected in light, against the metaphorical backdrop of a pretty ugly week for the country? The use of the face of a big building as the canvas for the OWS-signal, a la Gotham Cathedral in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns? The fact that the dude who came up with the idea is named "Hero"?

Read the message in full and watch a video of the signal in action (both via Boing Boing) after the jump.

"99% / MIC CHECK! / LOOK AROUND / YOU ARE A PART / OF A GLOBAL UPRISING / WE ARE A CRY / FROM THE HEART / OF THE WORLD / WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE / ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE / HAPPY BIRTHDAY / #OCCUPY MOVEMENT / OCCUPY WALL STREET / list of cities, states and countries / OCCUPY EARTH / WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE."