Tales of the Dark Knight!

I don't write comic books, but I've been reading them for decades and I like speculating about the characters. The recent Batman Vs. Superman film got me thinking about how I would write Batman if DC Comics were to hire me.

Bruce Wayne, Gothamite

One thing which becomes obvious when you start thinking about Batman is that Bruce Wayne must really like his hometown. Consider: he's rich enough to live wherever he chooses, his parents were brutally murdered in front of him on a city street, and the place is a hellhole of crime and corruption that combines the worst of Baltimore, Detroit, and Boston.

So why does Bruce stay there, let alone spend all his free time investigating crimes the cops are too incompetent or corrupt to solve?

Answer: Bruce Wayne must love Gotham City, as strongly as H.P. Lovecraft loved Providence or Samuel Johnson loved London. And like both of them, it seems natural that Bruce must have spent a lot of time wandering around his favorite city, getting to know all its neighborhoods, all its quirks, all its secrets. Bruce Wayne is the ultimate Gotham Cityite. He knows where to get the best Gotham-style fried pork rolls and pizza-on-a-stick, he knows the bouncers at all the bars by name, he can point out which house Edgar Allen Poe stayed in during his six months in Gotham, and he knows which streets still have the original gas lamps. He's got season tickets to all the local teams and the symphony, and is the main benefactor of the struggling Gotham Historical Society.

How do we square this love for Gotham with Wayne's own tragic history? My guess is that his original guardian after the death of his parents packed young Bruce off to boarding school, which he hated. Maybe it was run by Jonathan Crane, alias The Scarecrow. After the first couple of times the resourceful lad escaped the school and snuck back to Wayne Manor, the guardians threw up their hands and let the family retainer Alfred Pennyworth look after the lad in the crumbling old house. This gives Master Bruce a lifelong taste for wandering around Gotham unsupervised.

The Last Resort

Another thing which needs fixing is Bruce Wayne's decision to dress in a scary costume and fight crime al fresco. In the comics, that's his lifelong ambition from about the age of ten onward, which seems kind of nuts. He's the scion of Gotham's oldest and richest family. There are other ways he could try to solve the city's problems.

My suggestion is that he already has tried — and failed!

After college and law school, ambitious young Bruce Wayne uses family connections to get himself hired as Gotham's youngest Assistant District Attorney (doubtless sharing an office with Harvey Dent). He's eager to take on the gangs that terrorize the city . . . and quickly gets his face rubbed in the fact that Gotham's city government is irredeemably corrupt. From the cops on the beat to the Mayor, everyone is on the take. The gangs run wild because they are hand in glove with Gotham's polticians. Wayne is stuck prosecuting small fry while the big predators are untouchable.

That's the sort of thing that might tempt a man to turn vigilante — and which would explain why he is at pains to conceal his true identity. In time Wayne's double life makes it harder and harder for him to continue his public career, and he has to make the choice: remain an ineffectual A.D.A. or devote himself full time to being the Batman? Not a hard decision.

Those Wonderful Toys

The Batmobile has to go, at least in its present form. I'm sorry, but in an age of ubiquitous traffic cameras, there's simply no way Batman can go tearing around Gotham in a unique, highly visible vehicle. Even the legendary incompetence of the Gotham police can't justify that.

No, Batman has to go the James Bond route: his vehicle must look ordinary — but with an arsenal of gadgets and special features hidden away under the skin. In fact, I'd suggest that Batman uses half a dozen different "Batmobiles," depending on the situation. There's one that looks like a delivery truck (for Wayne Courier Services, no doubt), another that's an old beat-up Caddy, another that's a taxicab (Wayne Taxi, of course), maybe even a minivan. This way Batman can appear and disappear as if by magic. It need hardly be said that all of them are absurdly fast and maneuverable, with smoke dischargers, ejector seats, mobile crime labs, and whatever else Batman needs.

Batman's outfit needs some tweaks, too. He should have several different costumes. (Bruce Wayne is, after all, a gentleman, and therefore understands the importance of dressing correctly for every occasion.) There's a "combat suit" when he's decided it's time for breaking heads, all Kevlar and night-vision goggles and sharp-edged Batarangs. There's a more concealable one for stealthy operations. And there should be a "breakaway" Bat-suit, so that he can quickly switch from costumed vigilante to ordinary citizen.

This iteration of Batman is more of a detective and a vigilante than a superhero. Unlike some previous takes on the character, this Batman doesn't think of the cloaked avenger as his "real identity" and Bruce Wayne as a social mask. He really is Bruce Wayne, Gotham's last defender. This Batman can tackle some thorny philosophical or ethical questions: is it right for him to appoint himself to the job? Would it be right to turn his back on the problem? Is Bruce Wayne a madman or a savior — or both?

Call me, DC. I work cheap.

 

 

Comments

[jic]

"Another thing which needs fixing is Bruce Wayne's decision to dress in a scary costume and fight crime al fresco. In the comics, that's his lifelong ambition from about the age of ten onward, which seems kind of nuts. He's the scion of Gotham's oldest and richest family. There are other ways he could try to solve the city's problems.

My suggestion is that he already has tried — and failed!"

They did something similar in the the 1980 version of his origin story, *The Untold Legend of the Batman* (published in a mass-market paperback that's out of print, but Amazon has a bunch of second hand ones priced from a penny). In that one, Bruce Wayne decides to become a police officer, but changes his mind in college after his law professor points out the difference between law and justice. Bruce decides that police officers are "too often hamstrung by the very laws they're sworn to uphold", and that he'd be more effective as a masked symbol of justice working outside the system. In this version of Batman the police and prosecutors in Gotham City are not especially corrupt or incompetent, so the writer probably thought there would be nothing to gain by having Bruce actually join the police and then become disillusioned, and he basically becomes Batman straight out of college.

[Cambias]

That version makes Bruce kind of a jerk. If the Gotham cops and DAs aren't corrupt (or at least massively incompetent and underfunded) he's just a wannabe who's too impatient to do the job properly.