Batman as he is usually portrayed in comics is a super-genius and has near superhuman strength and an inhuman ability to take punishment. In jumping off buildings he is showing carting around 200+lb men under one arm as he swings through the air or jumping off 30 foot ledges and landing on his feet etc. etc.
In all of comics history which portrayal of Batman was the most human in terms of his having physical or other limitations?
Oddly, the Silver Age Batman of the late 1950s fills this best. Although the original, late 30s Batman, described as a cross between Sherlock Homes & Douglas Fairbanks does pretty well, too.
No ultra tech, no ninjitsu, nothing that money, decent detective skills, an excellent-but-achievable education, & being in top condition couldn’t provide.
Bob Kane & Bill Finger created him.
Didn’t the ridiculous stuff become standard in the 1990’s? I guess there was some kind of show-offy stuff in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Dennis O’Neill’s was a truly human Batman. While the Golden Age Batman was still pretty much a “The Shadow”-like pulp figure, and post-crisis Batman is now this anti-social supergenius who can fight an entire army without a flinch, Silver age Batman was almost like Rip Kirby with a cape. He had insecurities, got laid by beautiful women, and not as a cover for his alter ego, but because he wanted to… he even wore Mission Impossible-like disguises and could be knocked out by a timely blow to the head.
Quite the contrary, I think. The 90s was “Oh shit, that *Spawn *thing is kicking our asses !” time, and from then on every comic line started vying for who could be the darkest and the grittiest, up to and including Captain fucking America.
For Batman, this involved him getting his spine broken by a villain who used super steroids and being temporarily replaced by a mentally disturbed dude brainwashed into being a Super Christian Assassin (possibly where Charlie Sheen got it ? :)), who also added razor-sharp claws and adaptive armour to the costume as well as weaponizing the cape. Jean-Paul Valley, the dude in question, didn’t struggle as much with the whole “why not straight up murder the bad guys ?” moral quandary, either.
I am making none of this up.
So that was… what’s the English word… ah yes, too retarded to live, so Bruce Wayne eventually came back. But since he still had to be Gritty and Realistic because the 90s were like that , he was getting his ass kicked a lot more than usual, would bleed all over the place, and the focus turned more on his efforts & success at terrorizing the shit out of people than using silly gadgets and such.
In fact, one of the most acclaimed storylines of the series (The Long Halloween) which was sort of a reboot was published in '96-97, and I’d say Batman’s at his most human in that. Hell, he takes the whole year to catch a lone nut who goes around shooting people. Not a super-powered alien, not an ancient god, not anthropomorphized Murder, just a dude with a .22.
. . . kept a teenage boy in a cave . . .
From about the end of WWII onward, probably for 20 or 30 years, Batman was completely normal. It may have started earlier since the Batman daily and Sunday newspaper comic strip really developed the character and those started in 1943. If you haven’t seen the books that collect them, you should hunt them down. They’re great stories. Because they were going into homes, they were very light on violence and insanity and big on clever plotting, atmosphere, and detective work.
The comics picked up on this trend. From around 1945 through the start of the Silver Age, Batman wasn’t a mysterious creature of the night. He was a public hero, working with the police and celebrated everywhere. He was more of a boy scout than Superman, the big blue boy scout. They changed his stick from fearsome totem of darkness to the World’s Greatest Detective. There were several stories per 52-page issue and each one was written as a detective story. Some of them were very clever, far better storytelling than most other comics of the era. Almost all the cool toys were introduced in this era, starting with The Batmobile of 1950, the first supercar. Then they gave him the Batplane, the Batcopter, special suits for specialized needs, and all the stuff in the utility belt. This started well before the attacks on comic books; DC editors saw the trend and positioned themselves opposite to EC.
That changed in the late 50s, when Mort Weisenger dumbed the books down and started introducing the science fiction themes, along with the Batman family - Batwoman, Ace the Batdog, Scroungy the Flesh-Eating Bateria. (One of those isn’t real.) Batman was still normal in abilities, though. I’m pretty sure he stayed that way through the New Look Batman of the 60s, but I had stopped reading him by then.
The supranormal Batman is comparatively recent and contrary to the vast bulk of his canon.
Bill Finger created him. Bob Kane stole the credit.