I have to say that your interpretation of the character is wildly different from mine (“brutal without remorse”? Really?)
But I think that illustrates one of the reasons for Batman’s longevity and continued popularity as a character. Like King Arthur or Robin Hood, the central core story is strong enough to bear repeated re-telling and reinterpretation to suit different audiences, while still remaining recognisable and coherent.
I’d agree with that. Batman can be all things to all men - he’s been campy, serious, dark, funny, martial-arty, techy, and so on. He is very re-interpretable.
I had in mind a scene where he chastised Green Lantern for torturing information out of a criminal:
GL: You do worse before the rest of us have breakfast.
BM: That’s true. Do you want to be like me?*
Batman doesn’t kill, but he’s said many times (in recent years, anyway) that many people wish they were dead after he’s through with them. Some writers have thrown in asides that, after a beating from Batman, lots of people are disabled to some degree. I recall one thug who needed a colostomy.
I’d count that as brutal without remorse. YMMV.
*Paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.
But that’s only one interpretation of the character.
Batman was the first though, and that helped make him distinctive. It also helped make Robin a cultural icon.
Also, most heroes – even the prominent ones – didn’t have any kid sidekicks, even back then. For the sake of completeness though, and limiting ourselves to mystery men from the 1940s to 1960s, we can add Mr. Scarlett, the Sandman, Aquaman, the Spirit, the Clock, the original Human Torch, and Captain Marvel to that list.
Say, you wouldn’t consider a genii (or other mischievious imp) to fill a similar role for any other character?
Nah, the Thunderbolt’s not Johnny’s sidekick. Johnny tells him what to do, but the T-Bolt actually does all the work, and Johnny’s more likely to fill the ‘get into trouble, and need the hero to get him out of it’ sidekick role.
Oh, he’s certainly (occasionally) been written that way – though not, I think, in his own titles. Like I said: the character allows for many interpretations, and that’s …certainly one of them. I suppose I’m just still surprised that anyone looks at that as the quintessential Batman.
Was that from Justice League: Cry for Justice? It sounds like it.
What the…?
Stupidest concept ever.
Yes, but none of these characters are brooding vengeance-minded vigilantes, as I said. Batman as a character isn’t really all that original, Steranko’s History of Comics describes a number of pulp-fiction analogues, as well as makes that Robin helped the character immensely by being a stand-in for the kids who were buying the comics, letting them fantasize about fighting crime alongside a father figure. Additionally, Robin’s costume was notable distinct from Batman’s, while Bucky and Toro and Speedy and Kid Flash were just the hero in miniature.
Well, plus Batman has somebody to get all expositional with, useful in mystery stories.
I think its the trousers.
He’s us, but better. Everyone wants to imagine that, if you were sufficiently motivated, you could become the world’s biggest bad-ass just through sheer force of will. That you could become more than yourself if you just get off your ass and do it. We can’t learn to fly, or shoot beams out of our eyes, or have metal bones. But we can be supremely skilled, smart and dedicated. We just aren’t.
Also, he has one of the greatest, arguably THE greatest nemesis in all of comic-dom in the Joker.
That may be the Dark Knight (Frank Miller) version, but he’s also the less serious Batman of the Golden or even Silver Age of Comics. Then you have the campy version on TV. So I guess the answer to Batman’s longevity as a cultural icon, like anything else that endures, is its adaptability to its era. Then the question is really why is Batman so adaptable? I think it’s because he’s a mere mortal without super powers (like the rest of us) and he has a compelling origin story that works for any incarnation. And, as I said before, he’s Bats! Gotta like a man running around in a bat costume (to me, the best costume of any cartoon hero) kicking baddie ass.
It’s because he knows more about kicking criminals in the nuts than any other hero.
Sidekicks seemed to be fairly common in the period that spawned Batman (comic book debut 1939). The Lone Ranger (radio debut 1933) had Tonto from pretty early on, and the Green Hornet (radio debut 1935) had Kato.
Now Tonto clearly wasn’t a teen, and Kato probably wasn’t portrayed as one, so that does differentiate Robin from those examples. But I have a hard time believing that made a big difference in the Dynamic Duo’s appeal.
I don’t know, Rufus. Seems to me that adding Robin was a big difference for the readers of The Shadow, the Spider, and all the other two-fisted darkness-hugging adventure heroes. Batman’s audience probably had more overlap with the noir detectives than with the Lone Ranger.
Since he was Britt’s valet and the Hornet’s driver, and had been working for him for years, before the story started, there’s really no ‘probably’ about it.
No, it was from the Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner) story where one of GL’s sidekicks gets gay-bashed.
In the *Bruce Wayne: Fugitive *series, Batman has an exchange with a mercenary leader who taunts him. The mercenary’s intel says conclusively that Batman doesn’t kill. Batman confirms this; he will only disable the mercenary’s crew. The Dark Knight goes into explicit detail as to how he will do this: he will injure the kidney of one thug (who has given the other to a relative), give a joint wound (prone to infection) to another thug who is allergic to antibiotics, and so on down the line. It’s a pretty chilling vignette.
Elsewhere in the series, Batman confides to the policeman who handled his parents’ murder case that it was reasonably easy to get a confession from the first major killer he brought in: he just dangled him in front of an oncoming train.
In another example whose provenance I can’t recall, Batman was exposed to Scarecrow’s gas and experienced the worst fear he had. Of course, this was his parents’ death–the thing that had driven him into his life as a vigilante. Reliving that scene made him so insanely angry that he nearly beat Scarecrow to death; I forget who stopped him or how they did it, but it was a frightening thing to behold.
This is the Batman I grew up with. Since the late 1970s, he’s been about the most brutal hero in the DC universe who refuses to kill. If you go back to the Golden Age, you see a lot of the same stuff. You may not see it as much in the Silver Age, and not at all on the campy TV series, but those are alternate imaginings of the character; almost every series I’ve read since then recapitulates Batman’s origin story periodically, reminding the reader of the sorrow and rage that drive him. I’d say the dark drives that he started with are a big part of why he’s endured. Superhuman motivation is his only power, and in Batman’s case it’s not pretty.
If anything, Golden Age Batsy is more psycho than modern grim n’ gritty Batsy. You have to be more psychotic, IMPO, to go around beating people up with a smile on your face (all the while trading quips with your sidekick) than to do so angrily.
Even from the 70’s on, Batman only had periods of brutality. Usually, he just scares people into telling him what he wants to know. It’s only recently that they allude to things like straight-up torture being any everyday occurrence for him. Batman isn’t The Punisher, after all, or Judge Dredd.
I think Robin is a pretty big reason for the character’s continued popularity. Robin is really popular in his own right, so that right there is a boost. He’s the archetypical teen sidekick.