Where Batman comes from Searching for the über (ur?) Bat text BY DOUGLAS WOLK
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With Batman Begins in theaters and the Batman media blitz in full force, it’s worth thinking about how Batman began and how he lives — that is, which stories about him are the ones on which everything else is based. For Star Wars, for instance, the movies are the central texts; for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s the TV show. But it’s hard to pin down what the Platonic form of Batman is right now.

For his first few decades (he debuted in 1939), there were only a few Batman comics: he appeared regularly in Batman and Detective Comics (eventually published by DC), and those were the reference points. The campy ’60s TV show derailed the look and feel of Batman stories for a few years, but in the early ’70s, the comics re-established him as an ingenious but humane detective who’d learned to use mystery as his chief weapon for bringing order to a city full of garish madness. The focus of this incarnation of Batman was the remarkable half-dozen issues of Detective Comics by writer Steve Englehart and artists Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin. (They’re collected in Batman: Strange Apparitions.)

Everything changed again with Frank Miller’s mid-’80s mini-series The Dark Knight Returns and his subsequent Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Strikes Again projects. Miller’s Batman was vengeful, obsessed with the death of his parents, and emotionally crippled; he was also a brilliant, military-minded tactician who remembered his dead sidekick Robin only as a "good soldier." And his Gotham City was utterly menacing, high-tech but riddled with decay and crime. Miller’s interpretation spawned the tone of the first few Batman movies and a lot of the last 20 years’ worth of Batman comics.

Now, though, there’s a deluge of Batman comics — he’s the star or a significant cast member of at least a dozen monthly titles, and his character and setting have become weirdly diffuse. He’s even critiqued in the kid-oriented series The Batman Strikes!, which, inspired by the animated TV show (now on the WB), has a much more playful tone. In a recent issue, Batman foils Miller Franklin’s plot to create a destructive weapon using the Novick Diamond. Irv Novick drew Batman comics in the ’60s and early ’70s, when they were generally much less grim.

Three mini-series are also running right now (notably Batman: Dark Detective, which reunites Englehart, Rogers, and Austin), and of course Batman Begins has prompted trade paperback reprints of recent serials and older stories. Next month will see the debut of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder — a new series by Miller and artist Jim Lee that’s being promoted as a top-shelf star vehicle. But when a Batman comic has to position itself as a mass-culture crossover, the ball is clearly not in the comics’ court any more.

The best Batman comic being published these days is one in which he barely appears. Gotham Central is a police procedural set in Gotham City. The exhausted cops who make up its cast have no special powers (well, one of them might be a little bit psychic), but the robberies and homicides they investigate involve super-criminals as often as not, and then there’s that vigilante in the bat costume who’s a wild card in any case they’re working on. The new collection Gotham Central: Half a Life, by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark, is the gripping tale of a lesbian GCPD detective whose connection with the villain Two-Face results in her being outed and framed for murder. Batman appears on only nine pages, but his shadow looms over the entire book. That may be his most effective role right now: less of a character, more of a presence.