Knew someone was going to beat me to that.
It’s a shame, really. I can barely read Batman comics anymore because the character is just a humorless, amoral sociopath now. He’s a more effective supervillain than most of the menaces he faces, and it’s depressing.
John Byrne, of all people, got Batman right in Batman/Captain America. I read an interview around the time that comic came out where the interviewer asked him why he went for a smiling, upbeat Batman as opposed to the brooding psychopath he had become. Byrne replied that writers who adopted Frank Miller’s portrayal from DKR were missing the point of that book. That book portrayed a psycho Batman specifically because he had given up being Batman. Being Batman is Bruce Wayne’s therapy. It’s going out at night and beating up criminals that allows him to maintain any semblance of a normal life. As long as he’s doing that, there’s no need for him to act like what he’s become in the DC Universe in the past couple decades or so, which is basically a less-cool Dr. Doom who happens to hang out with the Justice League.
Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered as a child. That leaves marks. He is hung up on Catwoman, who represents the opposite of his proclaimed ideals, there is something going under that cowl. Batman has the dimensions of a real person, he is not the big blue Boy Scout represented by Superman.
It should be noted that ‘serious’, and even ‘dark’ is not the same as ‘asshole’.
He got serious, in the 70s, but that era has a Bruce who has also been referred to as a ‘Hairy-chested Love God’.
I strongly disagree. It’s not that he wants to make the criminals suffer, it’s that he wants to make sure that they don’t create more victims like he was (punishing criminals is just an added bonus). Batman (done right) will always protect the innocent rather than punishing the guilty if it comes down to that choice.
And I would choose protecting the innocent over playing video games but that doesn’t make me any less of a gamer.
Yes it does.
LERN2PLAY
I’m remembering through my younger self somewhat, but the villains and plots from those issues were just really scary. Engelhart made everyone – including Alfred – downright menacing.
I think that’s what’s makes the Nolan Batman films so go - the earnest yet easygoing and teasing rapport Bruce has with Alfred. You get the impression that that’s as close as we get to the real Bruce Wayne; everying else, Batman and the Billionaire, are just acts.
Was Englehart the writer during Marshall Rogers’ stint with Batman? If so, yes, those were some decidedly dark tales. I remember Batman threatening a cab driver by explaining to him how many pounds of pressure it takes to break the average human bone while slowly squeezing his collarbone and shoulder blade closer and closer together.
I remember that same scene (or another writer using the same material)! It was quite chilling for the time and for my age. Nowadays, of course, Batman would just break his collar bone and THEN start asking questions.
Rogers may have drawn it, but Denny O’Neil wrote it right after Englehart left the title. Englehart actually complained about it in an interview.
It’s kind of sad to think that these sort of events define a “real person.”
Batman was created to be a vigilante, but the “saw his parents murdered” wasn’t even established until after he had become a star (it actually showed up after things like the utility belt or the batplane). And, while it was Wayne’s impetus for becoming Batman, he never brooded on it even in the early days – he had moved on by becoming Batman. It never hung over him, and was rarely referred to. Going back to the gritty roots was fine, but the original strips were never as gritty as later strips (the Joker was a killer, but not a psychopath, for instance). Using the excuse of “going back to the roots,” the writers went far beyond that, moving from a pulp hero (which was the original conception of Batman) to Grand Guignol.
His origin was presented in November 1939, just six months after his first appearance. It included the death of his parents. Origin story.
Maybe we have different definitions of psychopath, but in the first Joker story the Joker killed people with a poison that caused them to mimic (in death) his own joker grin. That sounds pretty psychopathic to me.
Yes, so Batman was created without an origin story; it was retconned six months later, and was rarely referred to in the 40s. It explained why he fought crime, but he never brooded over it.*
Not in the way he’s been portrayed later. (Actually, I notice that the Joker was just a revamp of the previous villain Dr. Death – a story in Detective #29 has a very similar plot.)
But the main point was that the Golden Age Batman never was haunted by his origins. Other than the origin story, Batman/Bruce hardly ever mentioned it.
When writers say they are going back to his dark origins, they portray things far differently from the way he was originally portrayed.
*He also fought against vampires and werewolves. ** Twilight **before its time.
I disagree. For the first year or so (1939-40) the stories were pretty dark.
Hell, early on Batman toted a gun, and even had a machine gun mounted on the Batplane.
Then the powers that be dialed it back and made the character more kid-friendly by taking away his guns and adding Robin as a sidekick. Then later, they started adding some broad comic touches to the stories.
But the character as originally envisioned was dark. (I mean, his inspiration is a bat, fer cryin’ out loud!)
It isn’t sad, just the way life is. Real people have real lives, and real problems. That’s how humans can empathize with the character. And people often prefer characters to have worse problems than their own.
You can’t simply dismiss something like watching the murder of your parents. Bruce Wayne always had vast wealth that he could have used to fight crime, but instead he chose to put on a mask. He doesn’t have superpowers, he didn’t have a family to protect. The mask creates an alter ego. Batman has as much duality as Harvey Dent. Of course the comics from the early days were sanitized, and couldn’t expressly depict the seething rage that lies within the character, but they intentionally defined his origin as an event that emotionally scars anyone in those circumstances. They could have had his parents just get robbed, or seen strangers murdered, but chose this scenario to explain that Batman harbored a desire for vengeance. This is the common theme in vigilante stories. It’s not realistic to have a person who is purely good operate outside of the social order.
Really? You had your parents murdered before your very eyes?
Frankly, I don’t much care for these sort of cheap psychological tricks to create characters. Luckily, Batman’s writers didn’t use them.
You can’t dismiss it, but Bob Kane and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson did. Other than the origin story, Batman rarely if ever mentioned the death of his parents. In the same way, Superman in the 1940s never brooded over the destruction of Krypton.
All your analysis is from a modern viewpoint. This is the presentism fallacy. It was not in the text as written in 1940.
Batman was a vigilante for the same reason the Shadow was – to fight crime (and the Shadow – who was far darker than Batman – had no dark backstory). The “parents killed” was an afterthought. In fact, the first year of Batman clearly owes a lot to the pulps and the Shadow.
And, again, he was created without the backstory. It was an afterthought and had nothing to do with why the character did what he did. If he was off shooting people in his early adventures, it wasn’t because of his parents, since that backstory didn’t exist.
I’ve just reread a couple of stories from the era and nowhere do you see Batman making any mention of his parents’ deaths. It occasionally became the basis of a story (say, the story of Joe Chill), but even then it was clear that Batman had moved on.