Warning: contains spoilers for Future State: The Next Batman #1!

Any fan of Watchmen knows that with stories like Doomsday Clock, DC are consciously making the effort to merge Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's masterpiece with the mainstream DC Universe, but in Future State: The Next Batman #1, the Dark Knight's new status quo is rendering those efforts pointless, since the conditions that created Watchmen's America are already coming true.

In Future State: The Next Batman #1 by John Ridley, Nick Derington and Tamra Bonvillain, a mysterious organization called the Magistrate has somehow leveraged a great deal of power over Gotham and created an initiative that's akin to passing a new version of Watchmen's Keene Act, which banned masked vigilantes. Enforcing this "no mask" mandate is a heavily armed militia called the Peacekeepers, though the name is horribly misleading, as the Peacekeepers keep a deadly peace predicated on summarily executing anyone in a mask. This mentality causes major problems for the new Batman of Gotham as he attempts to save young recruits of a violent gang called Bane-Litos whose members wear masks.

Related: Harley Quinn Claims Joker's Role in DC Future State

In comparison, the Keene Act from the Watchmen didn't make extensive changes to policies and procedures unlike the Magistrate's mandate, especially when it came to the formation of a whole new militia. The Keene Act just highly encouraged citizens to inform the police if they ever saw individuals donned in masks or capes, armed with experimental gadgets or weapons, riding unlicensed vehicles, or, especially, enacting vigilante justice. Additionally, the law allowed some superheroes to continue functioning as such so long as the government sanctioned them. The select few heroes who fell under this jurisdiction included heroes such as Doctor Manhattan and, ironically, the ultra-violent Comedian.

Future State Peacekeepers

Accosting a dangerous criminal early in the issue, Batman refuses to save him from the Peacekeepers, but does rip off his mask, informing the man he's saving his life, and implying that officially or not, Peacekeepers don't offer anyone in a mask due process (or even the chance to survive.) The most insidious part is that in the Gotham of Future State, facial-recognition cameras are a ubiquitous feature of the city, meaning that the violent response to masks forces law-abiding citizens to be constantly traced and monitored.

Hypocritically, the Peacekeepers themselves have high-tech headgear that obscures their faces, and again this is a part of Watchmen canon, mirroring the Defense of Police Act amendment to the Keene Act, passed in 2017, which allows the police to protect their identities by wearing masks, as depicted in the Watchmen television adaptation that continued on from the graphic novel. Though written in 1986, Watchmen's idea of an over-policed future chimes with that of writers in 2021, albeit with even more technological aspects to this sci-fi dystopia to take into account. Here's hoping that as the Future State rollout continues through February, heroes like Batman don't have to go to the same lengths as Ozymandias to set the world back on an even keel.

Next: DC Future State Theory: Scarecrow Has Turned Gotham Against Batman