Master Bruce — Roleplayer Guild

Oh, and @Retired? You owe me a second post. 

I want a long-winded analysis about every era of comics and what you like about them in relation to Batman stories. Golden Age, Silver Age, all of it.@Inkarnate

Ask and ye shall receive.

Obviously, The "Bat-Man" created by Bill Finger differed quite a bit from the Batman that would come into the 1940's with a sidekick and a building rogue's gallery. This guy was a no-nonsense, do-it-yourselfer who went out every night and basically fought evil in every conceivable form, whether it be petty thieves, armed crooks, or the occasional vampire. What I like about this interpretation is that he was very much a one man machine, who used all manner of tricks to get by in order to seek out crime like a relentless, obsessive habitual psychopath. He'd use his friendship with Gordon to get the scoop on crimes in progress, mimick Gordon's voice over the phone to get tips from other officers, use disguises, and act like a self-made secret agent before he even thought to put on the costume. He was his own Alfred, his own Robin, and to some degree, the only superhero of his own little universe. There's alot to like about that version of the character if you take it on it's base levels.

Unfortunately, there are quite a number of drawbacks that suffer due to later developments with the character. Because he has no real supporting cast outside of an oblivious Commissioner Gordon and a hapless fiancee who has no idea what's going on, there's no real character to Bruce in the early stories beyond "vengeful creature of justice". Alfred was years away and he only had himself to really talk to. He operates almost more like a machine than a man, which makes him nigh-emotionless to a fault. This of course contributed to his case-by-case lethality against criminals, where in one story he'd want to preserve the criminals he was capturing for the police, and in other's he'd openly and gladly shoot them down in his plane, hang them, break their necks, or even shoot them point blank. He wasn't The Punisher so much as an indecisive blank slate that Finger and co. hadn't quite figured out, so it's no surprise that this version only lasted a few months. By late 1939, he'd already ditched the purple gloves, didn't kill anyone due to editorial concerns, and was starting to smile and quip alot when he beat up the bad guys. Alot of people think that Robin brightened his image and softened the character up, but he was well on his way there already before The Boy Wonder appeared. Which leads into...

This is where Batman evolved from unhinged vigilante who stalked the night and made criminals genuinely afraid of him into something more resembling what we'd come to know as the superhero. This is where Bill Finger's influence really came through, as he really liked to write over-the-top stories with giant set pieces like mammoth pianos that could crush men with The Joker dancing atop the keys and such. Having adopted Robin, Batman's supporting cast expanded a bit with characters like Vicki Vale and he was starting to open himself up to a more concrete characterization - abiet one that was held back by what the 1940's considered a well rounded character (basically, he was a do-gooder and nothing more), but it was a start. As Batman started to fight less pinstripe suit mobsters and more colorful villains like Joker, The Penguin, The Cat (later Catwoman), and Riddler, his world started to really take shape. New York City was named Gotham, there was a Batcave following it's introduction in the 1943 serial film series, and a bumbling private eye named Alfred Beagle became the proper Alfred Pennyworth, loyal butler to Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. What I appreciate about this interpretation is that it truly felt like Bruce belonged alongside characters like Superman and Wonder Woman because they were willing to let go of alot of the more blatant influences of Pulp characters like The Shadow and The Spider, whereas the 1939 Batman was basically a Pulp character himself in a Sunday Comic Strip. There's alot to be had with these stories as they became fantastical, never really stepping ahead into the 1966 Batman series level of camp. Bruce Wayne was more the altruistic adventurer, a swashbuckler that so many of these originally grim heroes become at some point - Daredevil being the most recent example.

The drawback is that without the tone of those early stories, Batman's adventures kind of blended together with the other heroes that would eventually make up the DC Universe. He had an edge by having both no powers and a sidekick, which nobody until Green Arrow came about and ripped him off would really have, but you could easily mistake Batman's characterization as a clone of Superman's from that era. He was just kind of an "aww shucks" type of a hero, who didn't have any of the pathos that would come later or some of the grit that had come earlier, making him the perfect wartime hero. He wasn't a blank slate anymore, but he was definitely not really that noteworthy of a character, either. Had this been the version of Batman that lasted into the 60's, I very much doubt we'd be talking about Batman as much of anything more than a novelty that died off when the rest of comics moved ahead. Marvel by itself would've stamped Batman out of existence with it's more innovative storytelling.

Personally, probably my least favorite era, but also the most culturally important to the longevity of Batman's popularity. The stories became even weirder, and lended themselves to science fiction over superheroics. Batman was suddenly heading off to space to battle varying different species of aliens, getting transformed into ridiculous stuff like The Zebra Batman, or heading into battle with mystically overpowered versions of his enemies. He had a gadget for everything, including the dangerous-but-ludicrous "Batarang X!", and battled characters like The Signal-Man. On the plus side, this led to characters like Dr. Zero (Mr. Freeze) and Poison Ivy eventually getting a place among the larger group of villains, who were pretty much set as a complete entity in their first form. Basically, if you want a taste of what this version was like before Adam West's Batman came along and recontextualized everything as a lampoon, watch the excellent Batman: The Brave And The Bold cartoon. That was Silver Age Batman to a tee, and the stories could be very charming. They just didn't really compare with anything before or since. 

Then, of course, Batmania of the late 60's happened, and the comics became a carbon copy of the television series. With good reason, since the series was immensely popular and saved the comic from outright cancellation, but it was harder to justify reading the books when you could watch the show. On the plus, this allowed the invention of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl to be added to the canon after the rather superfluous inventions of Bat-Woman and Bat-Girl following the Wertham hearings that idiotically implied Batman and Robin (note: a grown man and a boy) were homosexuals. On the negative, however, Batman was starting to look pretty lame next to the characters with actual, you know, development and distinction from the competition over at Marvel. While DC was trying to play catch-up by reinventing The Flash and Green Lantern to match the space age of America, Batman was kinda left in the dust because the comics were a pale imitation of the more popular television show. And once that was cancelled, the comic fell into a bit of a void for a few years, unsure of where it was heading and what identity Bruce Wayne had to take on to become a character people could become invested in.

This is where things started to get interesting. Obviously, people were getting fed up with the sad devotion to a cancelled TV show in comic form, so a need for a drastic new direction was needed. Enter Julius Schwartz and Denny O'Neil, who looked at the original Golden Age Beta phase of Batman and saw potential in expanding that to fit the at-the-time modern age. That Batman was unhinged, but he was also a detective. A brooding creature of the night. A thinking man's crimefighter who resembled Sherlock Holmes as much as he resembled The Shadow. O'Neil took all of that and expanded it into a character who was simultaneously brilliant and driven by an indomitable will that allowed him to tackle newer, dangerous threats like Ra's Al Ghul and The League of Assassins right alongside more contemporary reinventions of characters like The Joker and The Riddler. He still had Robin, and the sidekicks had a place to humanize Bruce as a surrogate father who had to hold onto a moral compass to set a good example, but he was just as ready to go out and fight crime on his own as he was to hop into the Batmobile with either Robin or Batgirl in the passenger seat. This was even further dillentiated when Dick Grayson left for college, moved in with The Teen Titans and became Nightwing. Jason Todd came along, and after a rough period of basically doing Dick-as-Robin clone stories with Jason, the new Robin was reintroduced as a street tough as Batman transitioned from the 70's to the 80's. Exciting times all around, especially as a large number of these stories would make up the inspirations and some direct storylines that would later be adapted into Batman: The Animated Series.

There's not really much to say on the negative side of things, here. The Bronze Age successfully rebooted Batman from a primordial caped crimefighter who tried to imitate his television counterpart to The Dark Knight Detective. The stories didn't exactly become more mature as much as they became more complex, with actual reasonings and characterizations behind everyone that made up the tapestry of Gotham. Batman himself had a driving motivation, finally, beyond just the murdered parents. He was a character that didn't want to see death and took every possible measure to prevent it. The moral framework of the character was set, and it would be what would latch the character onto a boom in popularity that would set the stage for everything to come.

Even though Batman was back to being a relatively serious character, the Adam West jokes didn't necessarily stop. The character was largely still considered camp despite the comic's attempts to recapture the spirit of the detective character that Bill Finger had created, so a major shake-up was needed to get Batman firmly back into the public stratosphere as a character with as much depth as any of his contemporaries. This is where I will argue against anyone who dismisses The Dark Knight Returns, because without Frank Miller deciding to give the character a shot in the arm with what was only intended to be an imaginary future tale in the first place, no one would've stood up and took notice. O'Neil laid the groundwork, Miller blew the roof off. And beyond it's cultural significance, Dark Knight is also just a damn good story that I've always struggled to meet the complaints halfway against. Without that book, you don't have Bruce going back to wearing black, you don't have the brooding Gotham City that exists in a world of perpetual shadows, you don't have Jim Gordon being as significant of a character as he became (later stressed to an even more extreme degree in the excellent Year One, one of my favorites), and you don't have Batman willing to mend the rules of societal laws to operate as a vigilante without upfront police allegiance. So as far as TDKR is concerned, I'm very fond of it. And especially fond of the elements it brought to Batman. Similarly, I feel the same way about what The Killing Joke did to up the stakes in any Joker story, even though I've mixed feelings on friging Barbara (mixed only because she became a better character as Oracle). And then you have Death In The Family, Son Of The Demon, Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's seminal run that helped bring grit back to the streets of Gotham in Miller's wake, and a whole host of other creators that completely changed Batman by the end of the 80's. They are the architects of what he's become today, both good and bad. 

I say "bad" because, unfortunately, stories like The Dark Knight Returns were never meant to be the norm. Miller even went out of his way to write a Batman in Year One that acted more altruistic because he knew he was going to have to write it in the confines of the actual comics, so his Bruce wasn't nearly as grim as portrayed as an older man in a future of his own invention. But the comic book world didn't see it that way, and took away some lessons that I don't think Miller or Alan Moore ever intended. Batman's tendency to be a real closed off dickhole to even his closest allies, yes, came from Miller... but in a story where he and Superman have to fight it out for the sake of escaping Reagan's America. Other writers took that and thought it meant he should act that way in the regular books, so Batman became meaner and alot edgier for no real reason other than people thinking Dark Knight was cool. This didn't start off right away, given the Knightfall saga portrays Bruce as still relatively within the O'Neil characterization, but after he recovered from Bane breaking his back and he took the mantle back from Jean-Paul Valley, Bat-dick came to the forefront and led to some... questionable decisions. Namely, Bruce leaving Gotham after the No Man's Land earthquake and having to find his purpose again, leaving the city to his worst enemies until he got his act together - even outright telling Superman to stay out of the conflict because it was "his" city. 

There were also signs of it in other books, which led to the creation of perhaps my most loathed interpretation of the character of all: Bat-God. The Batman that everyone on the internet joked about throughout the early to mid 2000's, where with enough Prep-Time, Batman could take on Superman, Goku, God, and Galactus all with one hand tied behind his back. This was perpetuated by Grant Morrison in the pages of JLA, and despite my liking of Morrison's stuff (sorry, Bounce), I will not acknowledge the idea that Batman has to be a character who has plans ontop of plans and has prepared for every possible eventuality. He's a character whose primary appeal is that he has no superpowers, so trying to overcompensate for that by making him literally better than every other superhero at anything that doesn't involve lifting heaving things or beating people up in the vaccums of space just makes Bruce seem like an even bigger douchebag. I often think of Dave Willis' "Shortpacked" comic, where Batman appears in space with half a helmet and proclaims that he's Batman, and he can breathe in space. It's ridiculous, and needed to be retired a long time ago. Hell, it's become the subject of further lampooning in the "How It Should Have Ended" videos, where Bruce's literal response to everything is "I can do it... BECAUSE I'M BATMAAAN!"

Ugh. But regardless, there were quite a few gems of stories to be found in stuff like the aforementioned Knightfall and No Man's Land, stories that I actually do quite love on the whole. And I can't really say anything about Batman without acknolwedging The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Jeph Loeb's big crime opus that expanded the early days of Gotham and essentially gave Christopher Nolan a gigantic blueprint for his movies. Miller did alot of the ground work for him, but Loeb's expanding on the ideas of the mob and corruption and how it all gave way to freaks and criminals like Joker and Two-Face are hard to ignore. I still love how that story treated Harvey Dent as the idealistic, down-on-his-luck DA that had been beaten down so many times that he didn't know which way was right anymore - leading to his inevitable downfall once the acid hit. Great, great stuff, and all material that exists almost outside of the pitfalls of the 90's era that gave Bruce some of his less than stellar character flaws.

This is where it gets practically impossible for me to be unbiased, because this is where I became an avid collector of the comics at 13 years old. Batman: Hush was my introductory arc to the world of Gotham, and that story still holds a very special place in my heart for being essentially a grand world tour of the greatest hits in Batman's history at the time. But before Hush, there was another, more important story that helped cement a trend that I appreciate exists, but hasn't really been followed through on: Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive. If you've never read it, go and get the trades right damn now. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker deliver some of the finest Batman stories ever told in this run, and it really goes to undo the whole dickbag Batman trope that emerged out of the 90's by bringing Bruce to his lowest possible point and having him emerge a changed man who saw the worst in himself and decided to be better. This was peak Batman storytelling, where everything came together in a way that felt complete, and in a way that felt like a natural continuation of the tone established by The Animated Series, which was basically the Bible of Batman from then on out. The early 2000's onward was a great time for the character, and he found his footing again, blending the grit of Miller with the cerebral nature of O'Neil and Loeb's Gotham to give Bruce a happy medium. There was even a great follow-up from Brubaker and Rucka in the form of Gotham Central, some of the best stories ever told about Batman characters.

It didn't last. Unfortunately, some hack writers came in at a pretty frequent interval to bring Batman back down to the dickheaded loner that wouldn't accept help from anyone, even the people he was trying to train. And unfortunately, one of the chief architects of that horrible later half was Geoff Johns, who successfully turned Batman into a raging asshole for Infinite Crisis and the Green Lantern story "Rebirth". Johns would later correct the mistake, thankfully, with the excellent Earth One comics, but the damage was done and the period of shitty storylines like War Games begun in earnest. The only silver lining out of this was the successful resurrection of Jason Todd, turned Red Hood, a concept that I'm still dismayed never stayed as it was intended to be: a literal ghost from Batman's past turned into a formidable foe. Red Hood really had the potential to be one of the premier Batman villains, and they shot that to hell almost immediately, making Jason's resurrection seem pointless at best. By the end of it all, Grant Morrison's run had to come in and basically sweep away the mess that the books had become by going weird with it and doing trippy shit like Batman Of Zur-En Arrh just to make people forget that Batman and Detective Comics were both slowly turning into a convoluted crime drama. 

But, Morrison's master stroke eventually made things pretty alright whenever he did the unthinkable and killed Bruce off during Final Crisis. This is, honestly, one of if not my favorite period in the Batman books, because Bruce's "death" spurned on a complete line-wide change where every important character was given an upgrade. Dick Grayson was forced to resolve all of the existential baggage of escaping Bruce's shadow to become the new Batman, Damian Wayne was saddled with being Robin and flipping the usual dynamic of The Dynamic Duo in reverse (which was the point), Tim Drake got to be his own man in the way Dick had become as Nightwing with the Red Robin title that made him a globetrotting vigilante, Alfred started leading the Outsiders, and Barbara stepped up as a mentor to Stephanie Brown, who a much-needed facelift as the new Batgirl... unfortunately at the expense of Cassandra Cain, who was relegated to being out of the books for awhile, but it was nevertheless a fresh time in the Batman pantheon. Dick made a great Batman, arguably better than Bruce in some respects, and Gotham was livened up by the change in direction. Paul Dini and Morrison both did some of their career best work during this time, writing the definitive Dick and Damian team that would never be matched by other writers that tackled the two. Looking at you, Pete Tomasi. 

However, by 2011, Bruce was back from the dead and everything became alot murkier. There were not only two Batmen running around with no real identifying division between them - they didn't give Bruce one title and Dick the other, for instance, because Dick was relegated to being Tony Daniel's Bruce Wayne fantasy mock-up and Batwoman was occupying Detective Comics under Rucka in a run that remained largely separate from the rest of the books (with the exception of one crossover arc in Batman & Robin). And then Batman, Incorporated happened, where Bruce outed himself as the man who funded Batman for years in a weird moment of Morrison wanting to have his cake and eat it too of Bruce just exposing himself to the world like Peter Parker in Civil War without any ramifications. This is where I began to loathe the Tony Stark-lite version of the character, and by the time that things started to turn around and it looked like Bruce was going to be back to his old self, well...

The darkest timeline was upon us. DC rebooted their continuity in a dumbfounded attempt to gain new readers, convoluting everything in the process by not committing to the reboot concept from the outset. Instead of starting from the ground up, everyone was fully established five years in and had legacies and sidekicks just as potent as they would have under a decade in the regular continuity. Batman suffered under this convolution largely through the Robins, who were all made to be tightly packed into a contrary five year timeline that ended with Tim Drake never even having been Robin at all. Worse yet, Barbara Gordon was needlessly back to being Batgirl, Stephanie wasn't even around for the first few years, Cassandra was even more scarce, and everything was dialed back to some weird "faux" timeline where everything totally happened but also didn't. Thank god for Scott Snyder's excellent run in the main Batman title, because without it, Bruce would've suffered a catatonic state for the entirety of The New 52. Poorly written books like Detective Comics and Justice League certainly didn't help him. 

With Snyder, Batman flourished with game-changing arcs like The Court Of Owls and Zero Year, which recontextualized Batman's origin to include both the grim avenger of the Golden Age Beta years and the superhero of the Golden Age Alpha years, aswell as giving the books a kickass Riddler again. For the first 30-something issues, the book was absolutely untouchable in quality. Greg Capullo is equally responsible for bringing the shadows of Gotham back in a big way, and I loved his rendition of the classic costume in the Zero Year flashbacks, even giving Bruce the purple gloves again. But around the time of the Endgame arc, The Joker's second big appearance, Snyder's quality started to dip. The Joker was hinted to be an immortal "Pale Man" who existed before Gotham was even a city, Batman and The Joker were both killed in a weird sci-fi take on the fountain of youth, and Jim Gordon took up the mantle in a giant mech bunny suit. Needless to say, shit was weird. Too weird to really bounce back from until the very end, when an amnesiac Bruce came back to the mantle in a kickass new costume in a two-part finale that Snyder managed to save the book with before The New 52 bottomed out and gave way to a better tomorrow.

Finally, through Detective Comics, Batman and the Bat-family were back to being a cohesive unit. With the revelation that Doctor Manhattan had fucked with the timeline of everybody and that the five year constraint was really a set of stolen years from the heroes of the DCU, Bruce was allowed to resume business as usual and have his series of sidekicks and enemies under a cushy, vague decades-long career as Batman. James Tynion IV deserves alot of credit for bringing back alot of character dynamics that had been missing for a hell of alot time, such as Cassandra being apart of the main family again, Tim and Stephanie being an item, Bruce and Kate Kane being definitively confirmed as blood related and thusly bringing Batwoman into the fold, Azrael being a thing again and not just as a series of weird mantle-holders that never made any sense, and there being a sense of a real Bat-Family re-established in the books. From beginning to end, Tynion's Detective Comics run was great, having recently wrapped up. 

The main Batman book, on the other hand, has suffered a bit from highs and lows. I've expressed my frustrations with Tom King's run already, but it really bears repeating that King isn't really a writer that seems to understand Bruce Wayne. He literally had an arc where Bane came back as a legitimate threat again, tore through Arkham to get to Bruce, beat Bruce within an inch of his life, and then have Batman totally win the day because... he was Batman. It made no sense, and gave way to an even sillier storyline with The War Of Jokes And Riddles, where a Batman in his early days attempted to murder The Riddler only to be stopped by The Joker and this was made to be Bruce's greatest shame. It was dumb, out of character, and meant only to serve King's Mary Sue version of Batman. But on the plus side, everything to do with Bruce's engagement to Selina Kyle was very well handled, and for a good thirty or so issues, King made the most of a situation I didn't think would ever happen. Where it goes from here is anyone's guess, but unfortunately, it doesn't look to be heading in a good direction judging by hints within the books and I may be dropping the title altogether in the near future.

So there you have it. My unabashed take on the entire fucking history of Batman, at least in the books. I'm sure there's alot I glanced over and a ton of stuff I meant to touch upon, but screw it. I think I covered enough ground to warrant a read from anyone who wants to listen to me drone on about this stuff.
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