DC has kept Batman's character pretty consistent over the decades, but if one character is
going to lead more than 80 years of stories, you're bound to get a few contradictions.
Sometimes, DC has even outright lied about Batman - through dead-end storylines, abandoned
character quirks, and bizarre last-minute retcons.
When DC Comics and Grant Morrison decided to title a storyline "Batman R.I.P.," they
had to have known they were entering some pretty loaded territory.
And okay, so the story isn't called anything quite so direct as, say, "The Death of Batman"
- but you can't really blame the readers who saw the words "Batman R.I.P." and assumed
that Bruce Wayne's goose was about to be cooked.
They were wrong, of course.
As it turned out, it was up to fans to pay attention to the fine print.
In 2009, Morrison told Comic Book Resources:
"This is an ongoing story, another chapter in the life of Batman."
And so Batman went on to survive the story arc that was literally named after his death.
Funnily enough, Bruce Wayne does seemingly die in a comic published right around that
time - but not in "Batman R.I.P."
That death occurs in another Grant Morrison comic, entitled Final Crisis, in which a valiant
but unsuccessful attack on Darkseid ends with the caped crusader reduced to a smoldering skeleton.
While the image of an anguished Superman cradling the body of his fallen ally was pretty powerful,
nobody really expected Bruce to be dead for long - and so even this eventual pay-off turned
out to be kind of a dud.
Grant Morrison's celebrated Batman run, which began in 2006 and ran until 2013, was engrossing,
cerebral, and genuinely inventive.
Compared to most mainstream superhero comics, however, it's not especially easy to follow.
In an especially audacious move, the comic references a hitherto forgotten story from
1963 called "Robin Dies At Dawn!," in which Batman volunteers to play guinea pig in an
experiment investigating the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation, overseen by the mysterious Doctor Hurt.
According to Morrison's run, while Batman was in that state of heightened mental vulnerability,
Hurt implanted the words "Zur-En-Arrh" as a subconscious trigger word to cause amnesia
and confusion and generally render Batman useless.
Batman was two steps ahead as always, of course, and preemptively created a backup personality
that would arise if just such an attack on his mind was ever successful.
And that's how the unpredictable and garish Batman of Zur-En-Arrh apparently came to be.
The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh had first appeared in a 1958 story that depicts him as an extraterrestrial
hero entirely separate from the Batman of Earth.
It is thus implied by Morrison's comics that the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh who Bruce Wayne
meets off-world is, in fact, an isolation-induced hallucination.
Even more remarkably, this whole Zur-En-Arrh retcon opens the door to the possibility that
many of the wackier sci-fi Batman adventures of the 1950s were simply instances of Bruce
tripping out on a journey across his own personal dreamscape.
Far out.
By now, everyone's kinda tired of hashing out the merits and criticisms of 2016's Batman
v. Superman: Dawn of Justice: But one thing that's especially hard to get over is Bruce
Wayne's bizarre thirst for blood that's on display throughout basically the entire movie.
Batman kills a whole heap of folks in Dawn of Justice, and, honestly, it's a real disservice to the character.
Obviously, nobody's saying that superheroes all need to behave like upstanding role models,
but Batman's no-kill rule is fundamental to who he is, and doing away with it makes Batman
himself feel like a lie.
In the comics, Bruce's rule becomes a major point of contention between him and Jason
Todd, after the latter returns from the grave.
While training with the League of Shadows in 2005's Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne's falling-out
with the group occurs when he's ordered to execute a thief.
In Injustice: Gods Among Us, the Joker detonates a nuclear bomb in Metropolis, and Batman tries
to stop Superman from extracting fatal revenge on him, even under those extreme and arguably
justified circumstances.
Those are three unrelated stories in three different mediums that all agree on one thing:
The no-kill rule isn't an arbitrary choice - it's the definitive aspect of who Batman
is and how he sees the world.
When you think of the 1966 Batman TV series, you probably think of stuff like this.
"Holy sardine!"
Adam West's version of Batman certainly embraces the sillier side of superheroes more than
most other versions of the character - and so, to some degree, he can usually get away
with looking a little dim.
But even in this universe, Batman's foolishness has to have its limits.
The plot of the 1966 Batman spinoff movie involves Batman's arch-enemies joining forces
and orchestrating a scheme to kidnap Bruce Wayne.
In order to execute this plan, Catwoman disguises herself as Russian journalist "Miss Kitka"
and sets about seducing Gotham's favorite son.
During their various trysts, Catwoman never notices Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same
person, and Bruce doesn't connect Miss Kitka to Catwoman until she loses her mask in a
fight later in the movie.
In fairness to Selina Kyle, this version of Batman's cowl covers basically his whole head,
and so it's not entirely inconceivable that an otherwise intelligent person might not
notice the similarities between Bruce and Batman.
But the only thing concealing Catwoman's true identity is a simple domino mask.
Catwoman and Miss Kitka are obviously and unmistakably the same person, and the fact
that Batman can't figure this out demonstrates a startling lack of intuition on his part
- and might make you wonder whether he's really the world's greatest detective after all.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"
There's no real point in harping on the impermanence of death in superhero comics.
Truth is, if a major character dies in a comic book, they're probably going to come back
at some point in the near future.
Just a few decades ago, however, these infinite resurrections weren't yet a widely-understood
attribute of mainstream comic stories.
And because death tended to be more permanent back then, the grim reaper generally left
the most important comic book characters alone.
So when DC readers voted to kill Jason Todd in 1988's "A Death in the Family" arc, those
readers had every reason to assume he would stay gone.
And stay gone he did - for almost 20 years, in fact, until Judd Winick brought the character
back as the new Red Hood.
Still, let's not judge Winick too harshly.
Seeing as how basically every other Batman protege has been killed and brought back in
subsequent years, the second Robin's return was pretty much inevitable - even if it was
a little disappointing.
It's hard to put an exact number on how many Batman stories have been told over the last
80 years - but it's not gonna be a small number, that's for sure.
And as the key aspects of Bruce Wayne's past have been revisited and reimagined by various
writers, certain details have gotten mixed up, turned around, and even swapped out entirely.
After a while, this can get confusing… even for Batman himself.
During writer Tom King's 2016-2019 run on Batman, Batman and Catwoman get serious about
their storied on-again, off-again romance.
Occasionally, they reminisce about how they first met, as couples often do.
The problem is, Selina remembers their first meeting as it happened in 1987's Batman: Year
One, while Bruce recalls their initial encounter as the one from 1940's Batman #1.
It could be that both stories happened in-continuity.
Bruce and Selina haven't nailed down their costumed identities yet when they meet in
Year One, whereas Bruce is fully Batman during their encounter in Batman #1.
But for that to be true, Bruce has to either forget the Year One meeting, or not recognize
Selina during their second meeting on the boat.
It's all a bit tangled, but no matter how you slice it, DC has lied about at least one
aspect of Batman and Catwoman's early days.
1999 was a pretty long time ago, so not everybody will clearly remember Batman Beyond, the sci-fi-infused
animated series that introduced a brand new Batman to the world.
The cartoon follows Terry McGinnis, a high school student living in the Gotham City of the near future.
After the violent demise of his father, McGinnis becomes a protégé of the now-elderly Bruce
Wayne and assumes the mantle of Batman for a whole new era.
Batman Beyond ran for three seasons, with 52 total episodes and a movie, to boot.
But fans didn't find out the whole truth about Terry's parentage until years later - and
on an entirely different show, no less.
In a 2005 episode of Justice League Unlimited entitled "Epilogue," Terry McGinnis learns
he's actually the result of a complicated plot set into motion by Amanda Waller.
The one-time head of CADMUS had concluded that the world requires a Batman, and that
she therefore needed to engineer a replacement for the aging Bruce Wayne.Cue a complex scheme
involving genetic overwriting of Terry's dad's DNA with Bruce Wayne's, via a fake flu shot.
"But when you're making a Batman, genetics is only half the story.
The rest is tragedy."
So, as it turns out, Terry McGinnis' father's death did not technically inspire him to become
Batman - it was actually the death of his stepfather that did that.
And while Bruce Wayne certainly became a father figure in McGinnis' life, neither of them,
nor the fans, expected it to turn out quite so literal.
Starting from the second arc of his Batman run, entitled "I Am Suicide," Tom King began
playing with fire - especially when he deployed Bane as the arc's master manipulator, arranging
various events and characters to engineer Batman's undoing.
Once the reader arrives at the finale arc, "City of Bane," they get to see plenty of
the Flashpoint reality's version of Thomas Wayne, who, simply put, is a huge jerk.
"City of Bane" also follows Bruce and Selina as they attempt to repair their imploding romantic relationship.
But one thing you won't find much of in "City of Bane'' is Bane.
In fact, Bane functions as little more than a secondary villain in the story, despite
his name being right there in the title.
So what gives?
Well, as King later told Entertainment Weekly:
"Bane is the name of the supervillain, but 'bane' also means 'you're the bane of my existence.'
Bane is also the feeling, the motivation of Thomas Wayne.
That was supposed to be a pun and no one noticed because it turns into the city of Thomas' bane."
And in total fairness to the guy, a story arc called "City of Thomas Wayne, the Angry
Batman from Another Dimension" would've looked kinda clunky on the cover.
During his life, Stan Lee took a tremendous amount of flak for allegedly taking credit
for the work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others.
Whether the likes of Kirby and Ditko were financially compensated sufficiently is one
matter, but in terms of recognition, Stan Lee generally gave his fellow co-creators their due.
Savvy fans today know that they and their colleagues deserve just as much credit for
Marvel's success during the 1960s as Lee himself.
In other words, Stan Lee was never a grifter on anywhere near the same level as Bob Kane.
As has been pretty much public knowledge for a while, Bob Kane came up with the name "The
Bat-Man" in the late 1930s... and, well, that was about the extent of his contribution.
Essentially, all the other elements that make Batman Batman actually came from writer Bill
Finger, who DC didn't acknowledge as a Batman co-creator until 2015, decades after he died in obscurity.
Kane flagrantly claimed credit for the character regardless, along with no small amount of
money for his trouble.
So there you have it - ironically enough, we partially owe the existence of one of popular
culture's greatest fantasy heroes to an inveterate scam artist.
Go figure.
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