Batman's secret identity is the most closely guarded secret in the DC Universe.
No one must ever know well, except Alfred, of course.
And all the Robins.
And Batgirl.
And Superman, and the Justice League, and probably Commissioner Gordon.
No villains, though except for Ra's al-Gul, and Talia, and Catwoman, Hush, Dr. Hurt well,
you get the idea.
Beyond them, however, no one must ever know, which is why Bruce Wayne has gone to some
pretty strange extremes in order to keep people from figuring out how he spends his nights.
Here are some truly bizarre ways that Batman has kept his identity a secret.
The Bodyguard
Gotham City is a pretty dangerous town, and if you're one of its high-profile billionaires,
you're bound to wind up as a target sooner or later.
That’s why the Wayne Industries board of directors decided to hire a bodyguard for
their CEO.
Sasha Bordeaux made her first appearance in Detective Comics #751, taking the job of working
as a bodyguard for the last person in the world who actually needed one.
At first, Bruce played up his disguise as a flaky socialite in an attempt to make Sasha
so frustrated that she'd quit, but once she discovered his secret identity, everything
changed.
Since she was still dedicated to protecting him, she insisted on joining him on his missions
as Batman, and he decided to train her as a sidekick with a mask and costume of her
own.
Despite the fact that she performed pretty admirably in the role, her tenure ended disastrously
when Bruce Wayne was framed for murder and she was arrested as an accessory.
She was seemingly killed in prison, and then wound up as a cybernetic super-spy working
for an intelligence agency called Checkmate.
You know you've got a weird résumé when "Batman's bodyguard" isn't the strangest thing
on it.
Batman Incorporated
The thing about Batman's secret identity is that it's not actually that hard to figure
out, since everyone already knows that he drives around Gotham City in a rocket-powered
super-car.
Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to connect it to the local billionaire whose
parents were murdered in front of him as a child.
In 2010, however, Bruce Wayne used all of those obvious connections to his advantage.
Rather than revealing himself as Batman, he instead announced that he’d been the one
financing the Caped Crusader, using his vast personal fortune to provide Gotham's resident
vigilante with all the grappling hooks, Batarangs, and Batmobiles he needs.
And technically, that’s true, even if it leaves out one pretty important detail.
Evil Twin
After Batman appeared to die in the pages of Final Crisis, Dick Grayson took over the
role, but that left the question of what to do about Batman and Bruce Wayne dying at the
same time.
Fortunately, they had Dr. Tommy Elliot, better known as the supervillain Hush.
See, Elliot was so obsessed with his childhood friend Bruce Wayne that he ended up performing
plastic surgery on his own face in order to turn himself into Wayne's exact double.
With Batman Gone, he was running around pretending to be Bruce Wayne, depleting the Wayne fortune
as fast as he could.
To solve the problem, Batman's allies decided to let him keep up the ruse, recruiting a
massive roster of other superheroes posed as employees and assistants to keep him in
line long enough for the real Batman to return from a trip through the time stream.
King Batman the First
Okay, this is when things start to get weird.
Back in the '50s, Batman and Robin found themselves transported through a random time warp to
the planet Plaxius, where Batman was unmasked when he accidentally became king.
Initially, Batman figured that there was no harm in revealing his identity to an alien
world, but the criminal he and Robin had been chasing when they got hit with the time warp
was also there, and more than willing to spill the beans when he got back to Earth.
While this entire problem could be avoided by just leaving the criminal back on Plaxius
to face interdimensional space justice, that's a little too far from due process, even for
Batman.
Instead, Batman and Robin decided that the best way to protect their identities was to
jump right back into another random time warp, which fortunately wiped everyone's memory
of the entire story.
Funny how that works
Bat-Ventriloquism
Batman has done a lot of weird things to protect his secret, but the climax of “The Conquest
of Batman's Identity” might be the wildest of all.
It starts when detective novelist J.J.
Jason tries to find a bit of inspiration by solving the most challenging mystery he can
think of: figuring out who's behind Batman’s mask.
He studies footprints, analyzes a piece of Batman’s cape, and even gathers up a soil
sample from the Batcave to conclusively proves that Batman is Bruce Wayne.
When he confronts Bruce about it, though, the result isn't what he expects.
It's not what anyone expects.
Like several other stories like this, Batman relies on a stand-in wearing his costume to
throw people off the track.
Superman's done it a few times, for instance, and Robin has a special costume with built-in
stilts just for such an occasion.
Even Alfred did it once, although for obvious reasons, that usually only works from a distance.
This time, though, his stand-in Batman is blind and deaf, and "speaks" to Jason via
Batman using ventriloquism.
The fake Batman also completely unnamed, and is never, ever mentioned again.
Literally Nothing
At the the climax of 2002’s Hush it's revealed that Tommy Elliot wasn’t working alone.
Instead, the real foe behind a complicated plot that involved almost every major Batman
villain was the Riddler, who had finally figured out Batman's secret identity.
Considering that the Riddler is one of Batman's more enduring foes, this seems like a pretty
big deal.
In that same issue, however, Batman convinces him not to tell anyone, arguing that riddles
are worthless if everyone knows the answer.
Of course, that conveniently ignores the fact that it's also pretty worthless to solve a
riddle when nobody else knows you've done it, but eventually, it all worked out.
Before too long, the Riddler completely forgot Batman’s identity, thanks to a sharp blow
to the head and a bout of amnesia.
Which might be Batman's true super power - the unstoppable power of coincidence.