Somebody explain the evolution of Batman to me

Cafe Society
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I’ve never been much of a comic book reader. The genre just never really grabbed me. I do enjoy the occasional graphic novel- bind up a really good series into one cover, and let me have at it. I consider The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns to be works of classic literature. But superheroes just don’t hold a fascination for me (although the Marvel heroes I do find somewhat interesting, being generally troubled creatures). Superman just bores me.

But then there’s Batman. I don’t read any Batman comics on a regular basis- I do periodically reread The Dark Knight Returns but I haven’t gotten around to the sequels yet. But the character of Batman fascinates me. He doesn’t have any superpowers- just the financial wherewithal to acquire a lot of really great gadgets that assist him in fighting crime. That alone makes him stand out from the rest of the superhero pack. (Oh, and I dearly love watching him beat the snot out of Superman). Plus, the guy’s obviously more than a little nuts- witnessed the murder of his parents, out for revenge- very dark, broody. I remember when I was maybe about six or seven, when my image of Batman had been shaped by the uber-campy TV series, reading a stand-alone called “The Slaughter in Silver” which ended with Batman (sans Robin, IIRC) pegging the villian between the shoulder blades with a silver brick. I thought Batman had killed the guy, but in retrospect, that kind of injury would have probably rendered him a paraplegic. A couple of vertabrae higher would have meant quadraplegic, though. I was shocked by the violence.

So, anyhoo, from what I’ve read and heard, Batman hasn’t always been, well, batty. In the early thirties, I guess he was pretty much a standard issue vigalante in a silly outfit, who carried a gun and had no compunctions about shooting to kill. Then he’s been through Clean-Cut Dogooder phases, really psychotic phases… seems to depend on who’s writing him. But I’ve never really seen or read a fully fleshed-out history of Batman, and I’m really not up for hunting down every Batman comic ever printed to get the full story- although the Dark Knight sequels are on my reading list for the future.

So, can somebody give me a coherent, complete history of the Batman, in all his incarnations, various character developments, and hey, how many Robins have there been, (I know that Dick Grayson went on to start his own supeerhero organization or something, and one guy named Jason got killed).

So, tell me about Batman.

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Prepared -> wins.

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  1. Batman first appeared in Detective Comics back around 1938. In it, he was your usual playboy millionaire/costumed adventurer, for which there’s plenty of precedent in literature.

He carried a gun occasionally, but seldom used it; in one story, a mad scientist is turning people into giant zombie monsters, and Batman machine-guns several to death, remarking, “Much as I hate taking human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary.”

The writer got called on the carpet for that by the editors, and after that, Batman did not kill. Period. Sometimes, bad guys slipped on banana peels and fell out windows, but Batman did not kill them.

  1. His origin was restricted to a one-page synopsis, in which we find that he became a vigilante in order to punish bad people; his parents were murdered by a mugger when he was a child. Accounts vary – early accounts indicate that his father was shot, but his mother died shortly afterwards from shock, while other accounts indicate that the mugger shot them both. All versions leave little Brucie alone in the street with his parents’ corpses. Only in the movie version is it the crook who would later become the Joker who shoots Bruce’s parents.

  2. Not too long after that, word came down from on high to add a kid sidekick, someone for young readers to identify with, and Robin was born; adopted by Wayne after the boy’s parents – circus performers – were killed by mobsters, Robin helped soften Batman’s creepy ambience and sharp edges somewhat. This was the first Robin: Dick Grayson.

  3. Throughout the forties and early fifties, Batman and Robin fought crime as auxiliary members of the Gotham City police force, until around 1953 (I think), in which Dr. Fredric Wertham, a pop psychologist, wrote a book, Seduction Of The Innocent, in which he tied comics to juvenile deliquency and crime; Batman and Robin came under fire for being a “wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”

  4. After this, things changed somewhat; Batman and Robin still hung out, but the butler disappeared, and was replaced by “Aunt Harriet,” to provide a feminine presence in the book. Precisely why this is better than a male butler is unclear. In addition, Batman and Robin began dealing with less crime and more alien invasions, mad scientists and their Pet Plot Devices, and suchlike.

  5. In 1966, the TV show came out, and things really got goofy.

  6. Around 1970, artist Neal Adams did away with the Adam West look, and took the character back to his roots: long, hornlike bat-ears, flowing cape, spooky poses atop roofs and cornices. Robin was packed off to college, so Batman operated solo most of the time. He got more obsessive about catching crooks, and more intimidating when he caught one. Readers loved it.

  7. Early eighties: someone thinks it might be fun to bring Robin back. Feelings are mixed, both among comics creators and fans. Furthermore, the old Robin is now running the Teen Titans, and has adopted a new identity: Nightwing, a sort of Batmannish spooky guise. The new Robin is one Jason Todd, much younger and more annoying than the old Robin, and the fans hate him.

  8. 1986: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, becomes the first graphic novel to hit the national bestseller lists. Hollywood begins talking Batmovie that doesn’t have Adam West in the starring role. Batman is hot. Oh, and in B:DKR, which is set “ten years in the future,” we find that Jason seems to have died in the course of pursuing Batman’s obsession: crimefighting. The fan underground goes nuts. Does Jason Todd DIE?

  9. In one of comics’ more infamous moments, a storyline is set up in which the Joker is about to murder Jason Todd. The last page of the story invites the reader to call a 1-900 number to vote on whether or not Jason Todd will survive the next issue. The fans gleefully kill the little bastard. The mainstream press goes a little nuts. “ROBIN DEAD!” When the truth of the matter comes out, many people are outraged; DC Comics swears it will never do anything of the sort again.

  10. Batman hits theatres in 1989, with Michael Keaton in the title role. Several more Batmovies and a highly successful animated series follow in the years to come. Each movie gets more and more baroque when it comes to Batman and Batmobile costume designs, until the franchise collapses under its own weight when *Batman And Robin * is released.

  11. During the nineties, a third Robin emerges – one Tim Drake, who joins up after figuring out who Batman is. He is forced to retire by his dad, upon finding out that his boy has been running around in tights at night with Batman. Who can blame Dad?

  12. Two very recent developments: After Tim Drake’s retirement as Robin, the fourth Robin is female. Meanwhile, Batman has his hands full with a criminal called Hush… who turns out to be none other than… Jason Todd?

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Les Daniels writes big glossy books on superhero stuff which are surprisingly good, considering that sort of thing is usually full of fluff and hype. You might consider reading his Batman book. I haven’t read it but I have read his Wonder Woman book, which was exactly the sort of character history you’re looking for.

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Nitpick: Wayne never adopted Grayson. Grayson was always his “ward.” There was some drama during the Jason Todd era because Wayne did adopt Todd, leading to at least one confrontation between Nightwing and Batman on the “why did you never adopt me?” question.

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Addendum to the nitpick: Wayne did adopt Grayson as his legal son, after the Jayson Todd period and after Grayson had become Nightwing.

Just a warning about the Dark Knight Returns sequel, Mango. It is awful. Not merely a let-down as are most sequels are, but genuinely awful. If you must read it out of curiousity (as I did), be prepared. There is much better stuff out there, I believe there have been a few threads on the topic.

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Didn’t Hush turn out to be

an old friend of Bruce working with Clayface (who faked being Jason). Jason’s still really dead.

The animated Batman of the 1990’s (who still can be seen on Cartoon Network’s Justice League) deserves more mention. Many fans (well, me) feel that it captured the essence of Batman better than the recent comics. It was highly influential anyway, as its revamped origins of Mr. Freeze, and the character of Harley Quinn crossed over to comics. The Freeze origin even made it to the movies.

We should also mention the “Knightfall” period. During the nineties, Superman died (he got better). This set a trend for superheroes to die or drop out and be replaced, at leats for a little while (see also Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man). Batman ran afoul of a steroid-enhanced baddie named Bane who deduced his identity, broke everyone out of Arkham Asylum, and after Batman was exhausted from putting all the psychos back in, broke his back. Bruce tagged a once-assassin named Jean Paul Valley (Azrael) to fill in while he recovered. Jean Paul proved to be unstable and let a villain die under his watch. Bruce got better and took him down.

Since then, Gotham’s been hit by a plague, and destroyed by an earthquake. The latter led to teh US actually kicking it out of the country and sealing everyone who didn’t evacuate inside. Batman played “Lord of the Flies” with Jim Gordon and the villains for a bit, until Lex Luthor (!) helped re-open and rebuild the city.

The new Robin’s name is Stephanie. She’s Tim’s sometimes girlfriend and operated under the codename “The Spoiler” previously, mostly to take down her father, a minor league crook called “The Cluemaster”. As teen sidekicks go, she’s interesting, since she’s also a mother.

You have read “the Killing Joke”, right? Best Batman story ever. If you enjoyed DKR, I also suggest Miller’s Batman: Year One. Skip the “Dark Knight Strikes Back”. I’ve heard nothing but bad things.

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Don’t forget the time that Batman and Robin rescued the professor and his beautiful daughter, both of whom had been captured by this animated mummy. They defeated the mummy using their quick wits and a pack of Hostess Twinkies.

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The order here is wrong.
Wertham published “Seduction”, Batman and Robin do the “alien invasions/mad scientists” stuff, sales plummet. Julius Schwartz, the hottest property in comics gets called in. He and Infantino (along with Gardner Fox and John Broome) “fix” Batman, starting the whole “New Look” period (so-named 'cause Bats gets the yellow circle on his chest) where the focus is Batman’s detective skills. A brief shining moment, killed because the Batman TV show took off and started interfering with the stories sad to say. THIS is where Aunt Harriet comes in. Nothing to do with Wertham who’s about 14 years in the past at this point.

Not quite–there are two Jason Todds. The Earth-1 version was a kid who’s parents were killed by Killer Croc and no-one in particular hated him. Somewhere after Crisis another Jason Todd–a hoodlum who tried to steal the Batmobile’s hubcaps showed up and he was written in such a way as to intentionally make the fans hate him (note that for a while, both Jasons were runnng around–the hoodlum in the Bat-books, and the Earth-One version in Teen Titans–there’s also a problem with the Nightwing/Batman “You never adopted ME” conversation–the conversation appeared waaaay post-Crisis, but the post-Crisis Jason Todd was never adopted! The whole “adoption” thing with Nocturna was pre-Crisis.)

Again, not quite. The fans do vote gleefully to snuff the hoodlum. However word gets out in the mainstream press that “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL ROBIN!” and non-fans start voting and the scales tip in favor of letting him live. O’Neill panics, since the pages aren’t actually done for the “Robin Lives!” scenario…the thumbnails are, but he’s worked so hard to make Jason unlikeable that he didn’t imagine that anyone would vote to save him. Allegedly, he has DC staffers up the night before the contest closes, calling the line to make sure that Robin dies. (All from memory from an interview with…um Jim Starlin,perhaps in CBG in the early '90s.)

Within a year or two, the DC merchandising and licensing departments have a hissy-fit. Robin is the fourth best known and marketable DC character (after Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) and this putz O’Neil has killed him? They force him to brin in a new Robin.


He wasn’t, dammit. That woulda been good. Instead it’s Batman’s childhood friend who was pissed that Papa Wayne didn’t save his daddy or something equally stoopid

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I stand corrected. This is why they won’t let me have a fork in here, you know; and even when I can hack the hospital computer for outside access, I have to type everything with my nose… :smiley:

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It never got as goofy as Batman and Robin turned into green-skinned giant-headed alien crime-fighters… :wink:

Amen to that. It’s not an overstatement to say that the success of the new animated Batman directly led to WB’s bumper-crop of animated heroes to follow – Superman, Batman Beyond, Justice League, Teen Titans, etc.

But as much as I’m thrilled for their success, the original Batman: The Animated Series still kicks major ass, largely for its stellar writing. Hell, the animated movie Mask of the Phantasm is unarguably superior to all of the live-action Bat-movies. I would give a major body organ to get the entire series in a high-quality DVD boxed set, and I’m shocked that WB still hasn’t thought about releasing such a beast.

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Batman: The Animated Series is being released on DVD, albeit slowly. I think only the first 12 episodes or so are available so far.

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This will be out soon, too. If I remember correctly, the entire series will be collected in three of these sets (the first contains only part of season 1, because season one is huge and the other seasons are pretty small).

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I’m going to disagree slightly with Fenris. Always dangerous, I know.

But the “alien invasions/mad scientists” horrors of the late 50s weren’t really a reaction to Wertham. They were a sign of the times. Hollywood had gone crazy with sci-fi (true sci-fi) and monster movies, the space age was being talked about everywhere even before Sputnik, and print science fiction was having an enormous boom. All DC comics went into the same mode, and poor Stan Lee wrote about ten thousand such stories for Timely or Atlas or whatever Marvel was called at the moment.

It was more of a response to what appeared to be popular than a cleaning up of Batman. In fact, the comic from the late 40s through the early 50s was going through one of its very best periods. Batman was not a crazed creature of the night but a public hero. More importantly, he was the world’s greatest detective and the stories reflected this. There were loads of quite sophisticated whodunits with a lineup of suspects from which Batman named the killed using fairly placed clues. These stories were completely innocuous in the Wertham sense (except for Robin’s bare legs) and a thousand times better written than what followed them.

Of course, the awfulness and lack of sales of the alien period eventually allowed for the rise of Marvel, which I am convinced kept the comics industry from dying, so some good came of it. But nobody could have foreseen this in 1958.

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An I’ve gotta disagree with Exapno, much as it pains me. In the wake of the Wertham mess, comic books “cleaned up” their act, and the Crime stories that formed such a large part of, for instance, EC comics got elbowed aside. The Comics Code Authority forbade all sorts of things, including stuff we would consider relatively tame, like Hollywood-style monsters (it wasn’t until Marvel and DC started challenging the Comics Code authority in the early 70’s that Marvel started doing titles like Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf by Night). An emphasis on lurid crime was to be avoided. Batman could still be a detective, but it had to be toned down. What could he fight against? In the absence of serious criminals and supernatural villains, he ended up fighting fantasy-based characters like Clayface, aliens, super-scientific criminals, and the like. I’m sure the SF boom of the 1950s helped this along, and maybe gave them the ideas, but most of that SF boom actually came late in the 1950s. We recall a few high-profile films from the early 50s, but the peak of “monster movies” happened in '57 or '58.

And it’s not that they needed to look to the films for inspiration. Science Fiction writers had been writing for the comics since the 1940s. They weren’t exactly ignorant of the field – what they needed was direction and a reason to go that way.

As Fenris notes, Batman started getting away from that circa 1964 with the “New Look” Batman, who drove a sleeker, sportier Batmobile (instead of that old clunker), emphasized Detective work, and clung a lot closer to reality, without the aliens and robots and stuff.

And then that damned TV series came along and ruined it all, and the comics copied all the idiocy, including Aunt Harriet.

To tell the truth, though, I don’t recall them getting rid of Alfred – he’s been there all along AFAIK.

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Harley Quinn is an animated Batman invention? And what was Freeze’s original origin?

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Nobody linked the Batman page at Toonopedia?

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Alfred was dead for a while, came back as the villainous Outsider, then was restored to his butler self.

from this list of Silver Age dead people by John Wells, via the Bob Rozakis column.

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One of the first Batman stories I ever read, if not the first, was in Detective circa 1964. The story began with Batman and Robin waking up together. In separate beds, but in the same bedroom. The guy lives in a mansion, but can’t give the kid his own room? Hmm.

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Wow. This is turning into “everything you always wanted to know about Batman but were afraid to ask”

Hell, yeah, I’ve read it. I squirmed when Barbara Gordon got shot in the uterus (guys, picture a male hero having his testes shot off, and that’s kind of the feeling a woman gets seeing this kind of thing) and ended up paralyzed. BTW, did Jim Gordon ever tumble to the fact that his daughter was Batgirl?

But, I really dug the premise of the story- the Joker, who has apparently repressed the memory of how he got to be so looney-tunes, comes up with this theory that all it takes is one really bad day to push a man completely over the edge, and arranges for Jim Gordon to have that one really bad day…

So, next time I have some actual disposable cash, I guess I have to get “Batman: Year One”. Maybe I’ll try to borrow the rest of the Dark Knight books rather than shell out for them.

I’ve seen “The Sword of Azrael” in bookstores, paged through it, but never got around to reading it. Is it actually a good read?

Also, are there any other really great Batman series’ that have been bound up in graphic novel form? I haven’t really been checking out the comics sections of boookstores lately.