The Creation of a Legend
Father�I'm afraid I may have to die tonight. I've tried to be patient. I've tried to wait. But I have to know. How, father? How do I do it? What do I use to make them afraid? If I ring this bell, Alfred will come. He can stop the bleeding in time. Another of your gifts to me, father. I have wealth. The family manor rests above a huge cave that will be the perfect headquarters�even a butler with training in combat medicine. Yes, father. I have everything but patience. I'd rather die than wait another hour. I have waited 18 years...18 years since Zorro. The Mark of Zorro. Since the walk. That night. And the man with frightened, hollow eyes and a voice like glass being crushed...since all sense left my life. Without warning it comes, crashing through the window of your study and mine. I have seen it before somewhere...it frightened me as a boy�frightened me�yes, father. I shall become a bat. (Miller and Mazzucchelli, p.22)
That is an excerpt from Batman: Year One, a retelling of the Batman's history of how he came to be what he was-a vengeful vigilante. The Batman's comic book life can be summarized into five eras: the earliest days, the monster days, the "new-look", the television era, and the Dark Knight Detective era (Gold, p.14). So that I don't end up writing a novel, I'm going to concentrate on the first of those and the last of those, which is the image of The Batman that endures today. Batman was created in 1939 by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, two young men trying to make their way in the newly created comic book business. Kane intended for Batman to be a "sinister good guy" (Daniels, p.20). Daniels states, "He was a grim figure in his first years, casually killing criminals, and Bob Kane liked this dark version best - but it was not to last" (p.31). To explain why a man would be driven to fight crime as violently as the Batman, Kane and Finger decided that when Bruce Wayne, Batman's alter ego, was only eight years old, his parents would be savagely killed in front of his eyes. The memory of that moment haunts Wayne for the rest of his life, as is shown in the above quote from Year One. Daniels, speaking about a Batman story called "No Hope in Crime Alley", says, "This story�showed Batman still haunting the side street where his parents were murdered and helped solidify the interpretation of the hero as an obsessed, driven man" (p.141). Batman himself takes a morbid look at the course of his life in the book War on Crime. He says, "In my darkest moments, I'm taunted by the suspicion that my parent's murder was the best thing that ever happened to me. Cynically, I tell myself it has given my life a destiny and the means to fulfill it"(Dini and Ross, p.36). Still, in the same book he comments, "It is not the moments of tragedy that define our lives so much as the choices we make to deal with them" (Dini and Ross, p.56). Batman's own nemesis, the Joker, would probably not hesitate to agree with the Dark Knight, save for the fact that Batman is the one who made that comment. In the Killing Joke, the Joker tries to explain his insanity by saying that all it takes is one bad day. He even analyzes Batman saying:
You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up like a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else�only you won't admit it...you have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God, you make me want to puke.(Moore and Bolland, p.32)
If only the Joker knew how close he was to the truth. Superman even gives his take on the dark hero in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns saying, "Nothing matters to you-except your holy war"(Miller and Janson, Part. 3, p.35). But, as Daniels said above, this image of an obsessed vigilante willing to do anything for justice didn't last. He was changed to be more family-friendly like other superheroes not too long after the creation of the character, thus compounding the aforementioned problem of change and comics being mainly for kids. Though Kane was on the right track to a solution, it would not be till years later that Batman finally became the landmark character that changed the comic book medium.
