The part that gets missed in the previous Batman films is that…the guy is basically crazy because he watched his parents get murdered as a child. To me, that is apparent in between the lines in the comics with Batman’s internal and external dialog being succinct and obsessed with his “enemies” and living a life doling out vengeance at the expense of any normal existence as Bruce Wayne. This, I thought, was well done in The Batman as a year two story with the “character” of Bruce-Wayne-as-a-playboy having not yet been devised, and any time we do see Bruce he’s basically just maskless Batman.

In Batman: Ego & Other Tails, the Dark Knight experiences a temporary psychotic break where Bruce, and the internal darkness that fuels Batman separate after he feels guilt-stricken for causing a death. Bruce and the personified darkness wrestle in a visualized story of the character’s unresolved trauma.

Reeves called out Wayne’s “confronting the beast”  in Ego as influence, “There’s a lot in what it’s trying to do in the story about him confronting the shadow side of himself and the degree to which you have self-knowledge.”