As the World’s Greatest Detective, with a mastery of dozens of martial arts under his utility belt, there are very few scenarios the Dark Knight can’t think his way out of. But that doesn’t mean he’s never had close calls! After all, Batman is still very much human, and when dealing with super-villains who really want to see him dead every minute of every day, he’s bound to slip up now and again. Sometimes, that’s brought him pretty close to death’s door…almost near enough to knock. How did he manage to survive? Let’s revisit Batman’s five closest calls!
 

Escaping a Flooded Tunnel

In the classic Knightfall saga, Bane destroys Arkham Asylum for the purpose of wearing down an already weary Batman before attacking him at his weakest and destroying him.

For weeks, the Dark Knight chases and apprehends his most dangerous foes, growing weaker as he makes do with little sleep and rest. In the background, the Joker and Scarecrow team up and kidnap Mayor Armond Krol, taunting the GCPD who are trying to rescue him with booby traps that leave several servicemen dead. Eventually, Batman pursues the evil duo to the Gotham River tunnel, which he quickly ascertains is a trap. He defeats the Joker and Scarecrow, but the latter still manages to fire a rocket launcher at the tunnel walls, flooding the tunnel.

Batman knocks the mayor out with anesthetic gas while he swims to find a possible escape route, which uses up the rest of the oxygen in his rebreather mask. Hauling the unconscious mayor on his back, the Dark Knight swims the entire length of the now underwater tunnel until he reaches the service tunnel walkway, which is also quickly filling with water. Fighting against the compressed air pressure, Batman struggles to open the hatch leading to their freedom. His physical strength at zero, sheer will and determination kick in when he considers that it’s not just the Joker, but Bane at the end of the proverbial tunnel. With his conviction that no one will ever take over Gotham while he still breathes igniting a fire under him, Batman manages to wrench the hatch free, saving himself and the kidnapped mayor from certain death.
 

Poisoned by the Joker

Batman: The Man Who Laughs, Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke’s retelling of Batman’s first encounter with the Joker, goes to great lengths to show how nasty and violent Joker’s killer toxin is to those afflicted. Case in point, one of his intended victims is billionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne!

As the Batman, Wayne has spent days working on an antitoxin to counteract the poison that’s been murdering public figures the Joker has threatened on television. However, his research is disrupted when he himself is listed as one of the next intended targets. Against his own wishes, a police detail assigned by James Gordon stays with Bruce at his home while they count down to midnight, when he’s intended to die by the mysterious toxin.

As Bruce ponders to himself what the Joker’s goals could possibly be, 11:30 strikes and he suddenly finds himself afflicted with the poison, which turns his skin a garish pale white and forces his face into a maddened, rictus grin. While the police and medics try to gain control of Bruce, he experiences the same insanity that the Joker has experienced every day since falling into the vat of chemicals that fateful night at Axis Chemicals.

Fighting the loss of sanity with his own mental training helps Bruce concentrate and allow the medics to administer a shot to slow his heartbeat, after which Alfred applies the antitoxin that Batman had been working on. These combined efforts make Bruce the first survivor of the Joker’s poison, as well as give him insight into his mortal foe that aids him in deducing Joker’s plan to poison all of Gotham.
 

Escaping the Entire Gotham City Police Department

In the seminal Batman: Year One, Batman’s war on crime is impeded by the GCPD, who have orders to arrest or kill him on sight. The given reason for the arrest warrant is assault and interfering with police business, but in reality, then-commissioner Gil Loeb is working with Gotham’s mob bosses like Carmine Falcone. After the fledgling Dark Knight made his presence known at a dinner, threatening all of the Gotham City officials and well as the city’s top gangsters, the police declared him public enemy number one.

Night after night, every effort is made to apprehend the masked vigilante, from waiting out in seemingly abandoned cars to staging fake muggings with various officers playing roles. However, everything comes to a head when Batman saves a homeless woman from a car. Immediately, the police arrive and open fire, shooting Batman in the leg as he flees into a scarcely occupied tenement building.

Before long, the entirety of the GCPD descends on the building, bombing it and flooding it with SWAT team forces whose orders are to shoot to kill. Batman hides in the shadows, working to take them out one at a time after his utility belt catches fire and explodes. Thanks to the presence of a noisy cat, he’s discovered and pinned down by a dozen cops with automatic rifles. But as the police close in on Bruce, backup arrives in the form of a flock of bats screeching and flying over the city, lured to Batman’s location by a signal he activated on his boot.

In the confusion, Batman takes out the SWAT leader by punching him through a brick wall and escapes by stealing a police motorcycle while the officers and surrounding citizens of Gotham flee from the cloud of bats, which are covering the city and sending the message that Batman cannot be contained by the same forces that previously held Gotham in its grip.
 

Drugged, Beaten and Buried Alive

In Grant Morrison’s epic Batman R.I.P., forces from Batman’s Silver Age past come back with a vengeance to do him in once and for all.

Over the course of several issues, the Dark Knight is beset with betrayal and psychic attacks that threaten to take over not just his body, but his very sanity. The main culprit is Dr. Simon Hurt, a psychiatrist turned psychopath who leads the Black Glove—an evil organization that has dedicated itself to the destruction of Batman. In an attack in the Batcave, Batman is drugged and left abandoned of all his resources while his girlfriend Jezebel Jet is kidnapped and Robin is cut off from contact. Kicking in a failsafe personality called “The Batman of Zur-Enn-Arrh” (which recently reemerged in the current ongoing Batman series), the Dark Knight tracks the Black Glove down to rescue Jezebel, who reveals that she has been involved with the Black Glove the whole time. Poisoned by the Joker, Batman is tied into a straitjacket and buried alive, left to suffocate and be exhumed by Dr. Hurt.

Regaining his senses, Bruce goes over his lifetime of training and combat experiences to figure out how to escape this deathtrap. He easily frees himself from the straitjacket and locks, while slowing his breathing to control his sense of panic and conserve his air supply. With this reservoir of strength, he braces himself to push open the top of the coffin, struggling against over 600 pounds of loose soil.

“Difficult,” Bruce readily admits, but as he emerges from his would-be grave, “not impossible.”
 

Left to Die in the Cold of Space

In one of the craziest events in recent Bat-History, the battle between the Dark Knight and his last-resort-android-gone-haywire named Failsafe leads him to the Justice League Watchtower out in space. Destroying the space station, Batman tricks Failsafe into the teleporter room, which he booby traps, blowing the Dark Knight outside. Hoping to commandeer a Javelin ship to make it back to Earth, Batman discovers that all the vessels have been destroyed by Failsafe, leaving him stuck in space with little protection and a very low oxygen supply!

Resisting panic, Batman thinks his way through what he needs to do to survive…remote as that possibility is. With his costume vacuum-sealed just enough to protect him from the lack of atmosphere, Bruce snags an oxygen tank from the remains of a destroyed Justice League ship. He then attaches it to a floating piece of techboard and uses the compressed air in the firing mechanism of his grappling gun to propel him towards Earth. Calculating the exact amount of burst he needs to cover the 240,000 miles of distance it will take to reach the planet, Batman patiently fires his grapple-gun dozens of times over the course of several hours, resisting the G-forces that are pulling him towards the planet’s orbit.

Nearly passing out several times, Batman makes it to Earth’s atmosphere and survives its entrance by using his trunks to cover his mouth and the full protective force of his suit to withstand the heat. Pushing his cape’s gliding capabilities to the limit, he survives the fall and makes it to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, where the Man of Steel and Robin greet him in awe of his miraculous and most unlikely escape from certain death to date!
 

Donovan Morgan Grant writes about comics, graphic novels and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Twitter at @donoDMG1.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Donovan Morgan Grant and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.