I don’t like it. I feel it throws off the balance between Batman and the Joker. They should be opposite and equal in status not in a relationship where one caused the other to exist. If anything, I’d like to see a Joker origin story where we find out his parents were killed in a street crime and it put him on the path to crime and insanity.
I also like the idea that Batman’s parents weren’t killed by some supervillain like the Joker or Lex Luthor or Dr Doom. They were killed by a minor thug like Joe Chill. It keeps Batman’s origin grounded.
I agree, same problem I have with Netflix Punisher. By making Castles family deaths be part of a grand conspiracy as opposed to a random street crime you pretty much take all the motivation out of the character. By making it completely random you justify why Batman/Punisher have made their never-ending war on crime their entire life’s purpose, as there’s no actually end goal on it. By making the Joker/a Conspiracy the people behind it after Batman/Punisher kills them they really don’t have any real reason to continue to fight crime.
The line from various stories is that Batman doesn’t fight a war on crime out of personal revenge, but to spare other kids from going through what he did.
THIS is why I hate revisiting the origins of characters so often. It gets so muddy as to make everything meaningless. I refused to ever watch an episode of Gotham, as it looked to be a recipe for fucking over everything we thought we knew about Batman’s formative years seven ways from Sunday. I read/collected for a few years, even worked at a shop, but the constant reboots rubbed me wrong and sort of served to temper my interest.
It’s been way to long since I saw the Burton Batman, but I remember that Batman somehow dropped Joker into the acid vat? I remember a line about “you made me!” Or is that a different continuity?
He doesn’t drop him deliberately: a police bullet ricochets and hits him in the face, pitching him over a railing. Batman tries to grab him, but can’t keep his grip and he plunges into a vat of chemicals. The chemicals give him his coloration; the bullet wound his distinctive smile.
Wasn’t it his own bullet, fired at Batman, deflected by Bat’s (apparently metallic) gauntlets and ricocheted back in Napier’s face?
Looking at the clip, Napier fires at Batman, Batman rather casually does a Wonder-Woman stunt and defects the bullet with his wrist, and it looks like the bullet shatters the glass over an indicator, releasing a burst of steam or acid or something into Napier’s face, wounding him and leading him to tumble over the railing.
The Lew Moxon angle isn’t the original continuity. It’s either the first or second retcon, depending on how strictly you define the term.
The original story, published in '39, it’s a nameless mugger who guns down the Waynes. In '48, they ran a story where Batman is investigating a mid-level crime boss named Joe Chill, and finds out that he was the guy who killed his parents. He confronts him and reveals his identity. Chill freaks out and runs off to his gang’s hideout, where he tells his men he’s responsible for creating the Batman. Outraged, his gang guns him down, before realizing that they didn’t give Joe a chance to say who Batman is. Chill acting on behalf of crime boss Lew Moxon was retconned into the origin in '58.
There’s been a bunch of different versions of the story since then. For while, after Crisis on Infinite Earth, it was canon that early in his career, Batman was forced to work a case with Chill’s help. That was retconned out (thank God; it was a terrible story) after Zero Hour, where it’s revealed that Chill wasn’t the murderer after all. Batman doesn’t know who killed his parents, using the reasoning that not knowing who killed his parents makes “crime as a general concept” Batman’s nemesis, instead of a specific person. He was retconned back to being the murderer in 2006, which added the detail that the police picked him up the same night, which matched the recently released Batman Begins movie. A couple years later, there was another story where Batman encounters an older, crime boss Chill that ends with Chill falling to his death. I think that’s the last time they’ve done anything with the character in the main continuity.
Burton’s film is, I think, the only version where the Joker killed his parents. It’s an idea that, thankfully, never caught on. Although they did do a story in an alternate timeline where Joe Chill kills Bruce, and his mom becomes the Joker. His dad, obviously, becomes Batman.
I forgot that part. I remembered it as Harvey Bullock firing the shot, but that wouldn’t work, because he’d been revealed as corrupt at that point, right?
I’m not a fan of Burton’s Batman, so it’s been a while.
Bullock wasn’t in the movie. There was a fat corrupt cop named Eckhardt (William Hootkins, who was also “Porkins” from Star Wars, believe it or not), who Napier shot just before noticing and taking the fateful shot at Batman.
On examination, the scene is kind of odd - it looks like Batman stood there calmly, a few yards to Napier’s left, while Napier shot a police lieutenant.
The one thing that has stuck from Burton’s film is the name “Jack Napier.” The Joker’s used it as an alias a few times, and in the current Elseworlds series, White Knight, it’s his real name.
One thing I never see in discussions of Batman is that Jerry Siegel’s father died during a holdup of his store when Siegel was 17. Officially, he died of a heart attack, although gunshots were heard during the robbery.
The trauma is often used as an explanation whey Siegel invented a fighter to right wrongs (though it took him a long time and went through several iterations). But the story must have been known to the guys who worked at DC, even if Siegel spent most of his time in Cleveland. Bob Kane and Bill Finger took Batman from lots of current popular culture (and so did Siegel and Shuster for Superman), but that specific bit of origin seems to me to work even better for Batman than it does for Superman.
Somewhere around here, I have all three issues of the 1980 mini-series The Untold Legend of the Batman. It’s basically the comic equivalent of a “clip-show”, where the characters stand around and reminisce, with the events of the historical comic stories like the ones you cite are redrawn by the modern artists (John Byrne and Jim Arparo). Chill and Moxon (and the “Red-Hood” chemical-bath Joker origin) appear in flashback, as does the time a young Bruce Wayne wore a proto-Robin costume to fight crime before adopting the more serious (and presumably still inspired by the “it must be an omen” moment of a confused chiroptera smacking into a Wayne Manor window) Batman persona. I appreciate the effort to try to integrate numerous stories by numerous authors over numerous decades into a cohesive narrative, and I guess (in 1980, at least), it helps establish what is “canon” Batman (Earth-1 Batman, anyway) and what is not. Of course, later authors can’t resist fucking things up again.
There’s a similar “clip-comic” in World’s Finest#271 (September 1981) in which Superman and Batman reminisce about all the times they met before becoming lifelong friends, including several encounters when they were kids and a pre-cowl super-athlete-in-training Bruce Wayne visited Smallville for whatever reason and worked a case with Superboy. Again, attempting to integrate numerous stories written over many years. There are more recent comics (largely from the Superman/Batman series of the 2000s) that go way too far on this, I found, making Clark and Bruce figures of intertwined destiny, like a story of Jor-El looking for planets that might be suitable havens for his infant son and making long range telepathic contact with, of all people, Dr. Thomas Wayne. They talk briefly about their hopes for their sons and such. Frankly, that and stories like it started to turn me off the whole “destiny” thing, where two characters who work together as adults get a prequel story of some kind indicating some kind of cosmic/spiritual link between them. The new Star Trek movies dipped a toe in these waters regarding newKirk and newSpock (pushed largely by oldSpock) and it was yet another irritation in an already irritating reboot.