Is there another comic book character who has been portrayed in as many different (and conflicting) manners as the Caped Crusader? I mean, just off the top of my head, we have:
The hokey, campy (even for the time) Adam West version.
The gritty anti-hero of the Dark Knight graphic novels.
The fish-out-of-water Batman who meets Scooby-Doo and gang in a memorable crossover cartooon.
The chrome-and-neon smarmy George Clooney version from Batman and Robin.
All so different as to be almost mutually exclusive. It’s hard to believe they were all officially sanctioned uses of the Batman franchise. Is there any other CB character who’s gotten this kind of treatment? Superman, who is a similarly old (in the real world) character, has changed over the years, but it seems to be more of a liner evolution in his case, as he’s gotten more and more powerful. IANAE on Superman, though.
Any thoughts? And for those of you who are fans, which is the “real” Batman?
Oh, heck, there are m ore versions than that. There were gritty Batmans in the early 1970s, well before Miller. There was the original high-domed Batman from the first strip, and the Batman that fought alien and supernatural creatures of the late fifties, and the detective-oriented Batman of the mid-fifties, the “New Look” Batman of 1964 with its slimmed-down Batmobile.
There was a recent issue where some new team I’m unfanimilar with met up with Batman on alternate worlds. They kept slipping from reality to reality, and so kept meeting different version of Batman, including both the Frank Miller incarnation and the Adam West version. Entertainingly weird.
The animated-series Batman… not only something of a Batman all on his own, but there was a very amusing episode that showed off several of his other ‘incarnations’ narrated by three or four middle-school kids. I remember there was an Adam West one, but I most clearly remember the little animated Frank Miller Batman. They took the scene where he beat the snot out of the big huge steroided gang member out of Dark Knight Returns, drawing and animating it in Miller’s style. I hadn’t read Miller when I first saw it, so I didn’t really get what was going on, but I thought it was hella cool.
Much as I loved the first Batman movie when it came out, the animated-series Batman has always been the ‘real’ Batman to me. Mostly because I like him best out of all of 'em.
One issue of Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones’ Fanboy had a sequence in which Batman’s art style and characterization shifted through various versions, from the Golden Age up through Batman: The Animated Series.
