DC Already Proved Batman Deserves a Happy Ending

screenrant.com:

DC Comics has given Bruce Wayne multiple tragic endings to his career as Batman. However, one alternate fairy tale-like conclusion to the Dark Knight deserves to be canon. Due to the timeless nature of Batman, it’s hard to imagine how his story might come to an end.

Although there have been many critically acclaimed renditions of his journey’s conclusion, with The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and Batman Beyond, it’s difficult to contemplate the mainstream iteration’s retirement. While Frank Miller wrote Bruce in The Dark Knight Returns to be even more restless and obsessive in his old age, Mark Waid's Kingdom Come imagined a physically broken Batman. The mentor version of Bruce in Batman Beyond might be the closest that comics have come to giving him a peaceful end, but it started out with Batman nearly breaking his own rule by raising a gun to a criminal. He ended his tenure as the Dark Knight by crossing a line. Even though he didn’t pull the trigger, he still failed in his own eyes.

Related: Batman's First Comic Proves Why He's Relevant 80 Years Later

In one version of events, Bruce decides to hang up the cape and cowl in a story titled “Twenty-Seven“ featured in Detective Comics #27 (2011), written by Scott Snyder with art by Sean Murphy. By this point in his career, his hard work has paid off, and Gotham City was a safer place than when he first adopted the Batman persona. When Batman was initially created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, he was depicted as a vigilante grounded in reality. Before he took on the status of a legend in the DC Universe, Bruce was fairly low stakes in his crimefighting, utilizing his detective skills and solving murders. In the spirit of the Golden Age, it never seemed like Bruce would