What do you think of when you hear the name Batman? A dark, brooding figure, unapproachable even though technically good? An unlikeable character who, even though he is technically fighting for a good reason, goes way too far in his attempts to rid the world of crime? Or you may think of the hilariously campy version from the 1960s TV show, a figure who, while a wonderful interpretation of the character in his own right, is very clearly not the actual cannon Batman.
For a long time, I thought only those two versions existed. I did not, and still don't, care to watch the most famous Batman movies such as the Dark Knight ones, partly because I did not want that darker version of Batman, whom I assumed was the “official” one, to become more real in my mind than the lighthearted version of the TV show which I love. I did not want to have to accept Batman as a less-than-likeable figure, when at the moment I actually really liked Batman and wanted to root for him. (I also do not watch these movies because I hear tell they have slighted Robin, but that's another story.)
It was not until I read some of the very earliest 1940s Batman comics that I began to understand who the character really was. These thrilling, roller-coaster ride stories feature another kind of Batman, a Batman who is dark and intense and someone whose advice and stories you can take seriously, but at the same time is personable and morally upright and cares about those around him. There is a third version of Batman out there, a version who is meant to be taken seriously and is still a likeable person you can root for in every sense.
It occurs to me to wonder how many people do know this version of Batman, the original version and thus the most cannon of all cannons. It doesn't seem fair for would-be fans of the Dark Knight to have to choose between someone unlikeable and someone they can't take entirely seriously. That's why I want to talk about Batman in his earliest form, the Batman I have come to know and love, and hopefully generate a little more attention for him in the process.
Batman was first released in 1939. He was created and usually penciled by Bob Kane and his stories almost always written by Bill Finger. I would not be surprised if Bob Kane's being a Scorpio accounted for many of the Scorpio traits Batman displays: intensity, secretiveness, intuition, a tendency to fixate obsessively on one problem until it is solved, and his decided vengeful streak. I am convinced that even though his birthday is never mentioned, Batman himself must be a Scorpio too.
Batman's backstory was dramatized very early on, as a one-page flashback strip, with all the details for anyone who wants to reference it later. Young Bruce and his parents are on their way home from the theatre on what appears to be a quiet night when they are stuck up by a robber. Thomas Wayne fights back and is immediately shot and killed. Martha Wayne (she was not given any first name in that strip, so I see no reason why that name cannot be considered cannon) starts screaming for the police and so the robber shoots her too to keep her quiet. No explanation is given as to why he did not shoot Bruce. Perhaps he wanted to get out of there before a police officer came to investigate the noise from the shooting. Perhaps he didn't consider the young, suddenly orphaned boy to be any threat to him. Whatever the case, it was a fateful decision as Bruce vows to get revenge for his parents (revenge is a huge motivator for Batman throughout the strip) by devoting his life to fighting against all criminals. He spends fifteen years training and then thinks about what his emblem should be, wanting something that will strike fear into the hearts of the superstitious criminals. A bat flies in through his open window and Bruce takes this as the sign he was looking for. Batman was initially referred to by the narrator and the other characters as “the Batman”, which is also what terrified criminals yell when they see him looming at them out of the shadows. Although the strips never say, I suspect that's where Bruce took his superhero name from, that and possibly news reports talking about the strange new “bat-man” patrolling Gotham City – although for the first little while, Batman's hometown was not yet known as Gotham City, and was in fact identified a couple times as Manhattan!
Published as it was by Detective Comics, it's not surprising that there was always an element of mystery and investigation to the Batman stories. I don't know whether or not mystery is a part of the strip today, or in what way if it is, but I am sure Batman must still patrol the streets and the rooftops of Gotham City at night, on the lookout for trouble – and he almost always finds it. (There has been many a strip where Bruce and Dick were all set to take a nice vacation and then ran into a crime of some sort! He never gets any peace.) Other cases Bruce Wayne discovered by hanging around Commissioner Gordon's office – he is an old friend and trusts Bruce enough to talk about cases in front of him, and even to let him come along for his police investigations. Commissioner Gordon assumed this was just a way for Bruce to pass the time, never suspecting his friend was secretly the masked vigilante solving crimes for him. Sometimes Batman's cases were full-on murder mysteries, with a range of possible suspects that we, the readers, would try and figure out the guilty party from along with Batman. Other times, the mystery was not about who was behind the crime spree, but rather what, exactly, his plan was. (I say “his” here because the villains were almost always male.) But it took a little time to settle on this formula. For the first eleven strips or so, there's a definite experimental feel, less grounded than later strips, as if Batman himself is unsure of what this new life represents for him. Some strips featured supernatural creatures – Batman faces vampires and a villain with the power to remove a person's face – before the strip settled into a familiar pattern of Batman fighting a variety of ordinary crime bosses. (Although some of these weren't so ordinary – some of Batman's greatest enemies, such as the Penguin, started off as particularly clever crime bosses!) Even certain visuals reflect this uncertainty – for instance, before the Batmobile was introduced, Batman drove a bright red car, which must have provided terrible camouflage in the middle of the night. Also in a lot of the early strips, Batman brings just one or two weapons along when he goes out investigating a crime, perhaps realizing later that it would be far wiser to bring every single weapon he can fit in his utility belt, since he never knows what clever, fiendish methods his enemies might use to try and get rid of him this time. And for the first two strips, he isn't even wearing gloves! I like to think Bruce spent so long planning for his career as Batman, and spent so much energy making sure he'd thought of everything, that one of the most basic necessities for being a masked superhero completely slipped his mind.
The tone of the strip was dark, but not in a depressing, there-are-problems-in-the-world-we-can't-solve-and-they're-so-complex-we-don't-even-know-who's-right kind of way. Reading a Batman strip from this era is more like getting on a roller coaster and being swept up into the most wild, thrilling ride. The Batman strips were expert at diving into what I like to call the quagmire – exploring the very worst of what could possibly happen to Batman and Robin, shying away from nothing, venturing just close enough to let us glimpse what awful fate might be in store for them if they don't get out of this, and then always pulling them back just before the physical or emotional damage becomes irreparable. You knew that by the end of the story, Batman and Robin would be just fine and up for another round of adventure, the bad guys would be brought to justice (unless they escaped so as to be reintroduced later, but even then, their henchmen would be in jail and their current evil plot safely foiled) and everything would be all right again. You know that this really is the end of our story because the strips are self-contained, and it won't turn out that this was just a warm-up for some even bigger plot we don't want to get our heads around right now. You know everything really is all right because Batman takes place in a very black-and-white world, where the line between right and wrong, good and bad, is crystal clear. No, you can relax at the end of a Batman story, happy and satisfied and free to enjoy the leftover thrills from that wild ride. And in the meantime, there are fun character interactions which provide a much-needed balance to the nonstop action. Some of the best ones feature Bruce and Dick having some nice bonding time, doing something ordinary and fun and totally unrelated to crimefighting. I wish we could have seen even more of these interactions, because they were always delightful but often much too short!
The Batman newspaper strips that ran from 1943-1946 have a slightly different feeling, but are no less exhilarating. The Dailies are some of my personal favourites; they felt like nothing so much as a 1940s film noir, with slow buildups to the mystery's answer and sudden bursts of excitement that could appear at any moment. The Sunday strips, while they were still genuinely exciting, felt much lighter than any other Batman stories at the time, almost like the earliest forerunners to the sixties TV show.
I pinpoint the eleventh strip as the exact moment when Batman's story began to take shape and settle down, because that was the strip where Robin first appeared. That one is among my favourite Batman strips of all time. It's so special to see Dick's backstory, how he used to perform in a circus with his parents as trapeze artists, how he, like Bruce, had to watch his parents die right in front of his eyes when a mob boss named Boss Zucco threatened to harm the circus performers if the owner didn't pay for his “protection”, and how he found a new home with Bruce as a millionaire's ward and secret superhero. We get to see exactly how Batman and Dick met, and Robin's first-ever superhero mission during which he absolutely shines and also disobeys Batman's instructions to stay behind and wait for him, which is going to become a common thing as the strip goes on. And while we don't get to see for ourselves the moment when Batman reveals his true identity to Dick, the simple fact that he decided to, that he knew he would have to let this boy he just met in on his secret as soon as he invited the newly orphaned Dick to come live with him, and still extends the invitation without the slightest hesitation, is just so compelling. Batman saw himself in that orphaned boy, I think. They even look similar, if you compare Dick to the drawings of young Bruce in his flashback origin strip. This was probably also why he agreed right away to train Dick to become a superhero, and I must say it was quite a relief to not have any “you're just a kid; you should be living a normal life!” moment in this strip! It's hard to say exactly how old Robin is when he first appears – the age I heard was eight, although there's a strip some time later implying he's only just having his eighth birthday, but that would make him seven or even six in all the strips before that, and going by the drawings, I really can't buy him as being that young. Whatever the case, I love the way the strip always treats him as equal to the grown-ups, never implying he's too young to be worrying about things like crimefighting. We are eventually told he goes to school, though. That was a bit disappointing. Up till that point, I had been wondering if maybe Bruce realized that typical schooling wouldn't help a budding superhero nearly as much as being a Student of Life and that his young ward could learn all the skills he needed much more effectively by observing and working with Bruce (in both his identities). But Batman always does put great emphasis on formal education. Oh well, I suppose he can't be perfect. After all, one of the best things about him is how human he is. (But someone please tell me, how does Dick even have time for school and homework what with all the crimefighting, training, and very necessary resting he already does during his day?!)
Batman is very clever at figuring out who the villain is, where he will strike next, and how best to stop him, using a nice balance of logic and hunches which never turn out to be wrong. A few times he's had a hunch that something might be a trap but has gone anyway. This was in order to find out what the villain was up to, and of course, he would then get captured and need to escape. There were quite a lot of captures and escapes adding to the excitement of the strips, and the villains (both regular villains and supervillains) used multiple deathtraps on Batman or Robin or both of them, their excuse often being that they couldn't shoot them or else the police would come. Of course, like any good villain setting a deathtrap, they never stuck around to watch and make sure they actually died... Naturally Batman always did figure out a way to escape, usually something quite clever. His escapes wouldn't always work outside of the comic-book world they were set in, but within the rules of his world they were quite impressive, and it was always fun to see what he would come up with to rescue himself and/or Robin this time. (Robin didn't have quite as many great escapes as Batman, but he still got plenty of moments to shine.) Eventually, I think the criminals caught on to Batman's cleverness and started adapting to it, finding even more cunning ways to commit their crimes and to get Batman out of the way, and so the cycle continues.
Bruce Wayne discouraged the idea that he might secretly be a masked vigilante by pretending to be lazy, bored, and generally too uninterested in the world around him to possibly have an interest in fighting crime. This usually made for some very amusing character interactions. I was sad to see that this idea barely came up at all after a while, because it was always fun to see Bruce's attempts to allay suspicion. I supposed Bruce didn't need to play up his persona so much anymore. He'd probably already established himself in people's minds as the lazy playboy, so that they would continue to think of him this way no matter how he was acting. Eventually the people around him started calling him stupid too, which wasn't even part of his original non-superhero persona! I guess his ruse worked even better than he'd hoped.
Did anyone in the early Batman strips ever suspect, or figure out, who Batman really is? Yes they did. But Batman always had his ways of convincing them they must have been wrong about assuming he's Bruce Wayne. A good way to demonstrate the differences between the comic books, Dailies, and Sundays is to take a look at how each format handled this particular plotline:
In one of the comic-book strips, an ordinary gangster suspects Bruce Wayne is really the Batman, because he (Bruce) was always hanging around Commissioner Gordon's office. Batman persuades him to give up on the idea by using his special Bruce Wayne dummy, a lifelike representation of him which is designed to be hollow so that Dick can slip inside and move the arms, giving the impression that Bruce Wayne is sitting inside his home reading a book while Batman is outside confronting the criminals. (I always thought the crooks in the Batman strips didn't pay enough attention to Robin. If they did, wouldn't they notice that this was one time Robin was suspiciously absent? Or, for that matter, when trying to determine who Batman is, wouldn't they look for someone with a connection to a young boy who might possibly be Robin – and notice that Bruce Wayne just happens to have a ward the same age?? But they never think of that.)
In the Dailies, an unscrupulous man who gives out scandal scoops on the radio vows to uncover Batman's true identity – and very nearly succeeds, enlisting the help of two foreign enemy agents to kidnap Batman and photograph him with his cowl off. Bruce comes so close to having his identity exposed we can almost see into the abyss of his life without Batman. Only an unlikely string of clever and/or lucky incidents saves him from that fate.
In the Sundays, a villain notices Batman and Robin fighting his goons at a Mardi Gras party and knowing that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were supposed to come dressed as Batman and Robin, begins to suspect that they are the real thing. He's very easily persuaded otherwise when he sees Bruce and Dick never wore the Batman and Robin costumes he provided for them, somehow never considering that they would have been wearing their own, genuine costumes and didn't need to bother with store-bought ones!
One thing I particularly like about the Batman strips is that the main character, the one we all look up to and root for, is a very admirable millionaire. We have all seen that type of story where all wealthy characters are portrayed as unhappy and/or negative for no real reason, and so to have something out there that counteracts that message – hey, having a lot of money isn't a bad thing; look how Batman's using it to protect Gotham's citizens from crime – I feel is very important. And that's yet another reason I don't approve of Batman's becoming darker, less approachable, and possibly unlikeable later on.
In the beginning, though, Batman is definitely someone with feelings, relationships, and a personality we can connect to. I get the impression his more appealing traits have been lost over the years, and that today he's probably best known for being dark and brooding. Well, this always was a very real part of his character. But there were many other layers to Batman that seem to be less well-known today, or even forgotten entirely. For instance, many people might be surprised to know that Batman actually has a sense of humour. There is often a mischievous glee about him as he makes quips at the crooks even as he fights them – eventually they caught on and were able to banter with him in return during these fight scenes – he has some wonderful witty repartee with Robin, and quite often he's shown smiling, not the small, reluctant smile of someone who doesn't do it a lot, but a genuine, happy grin. Batman is honest and upright, with definite ideas of right and wrong, and a determination to always defend what is good and right, never deviating from his strict moral code. Bruce Wayne was also quite the playboy. I don't know whether this trait is still a part of his character today – I do know that I was never able to understand why anyone would call him a “playboy” when I had only ever watched the TV show – but here he has a definite weak spot for women. He was sometimes given a steady love interest in spite of this, which never really seemed to work as well as having him attracted to random women – maybe because someone in a steady relationship can't do those things that would establish him as a playboy, unless you make him an unfaithful boyfriend (which would not be a good idea for such an upright character!); maybe it's simply because, if you're going to make a love interest for your hero, you want her to be as compelling and well-developed as anyone else in your cast! At the very beginning of the strip, Bruce had a fiancée called Julie Madison. In her introductory strip, Batman shows incredible amounts of concern for her as he pursues her across Europe to save her from some vampires or werewolves (this was from that short period when the comics tried a supernatural approach). But it's made clear that Bruce never trusted Julie with the knowledge that her fiancé was secretly a masked superhero, even after this grueling adventure. Julie in turn exhibits no personality or initiative of any kind in this strip, only ever appears from then on for brief moments to tell Bruce he should be more like Batman, and breaks off her engagement with him in what was maybe the fourth strip she ever appeared in. To the best of my knowledge we never see her again.
Far more compelling than any of his relationships with women was Batman's friendship with Robin. Batman is the ultimate loving father figure towards Robin, though in the text they never acknowledge the father-son aspect of their relationship, instead calling each other best friends. Bruce takes Dick on outings to the amusement park, the museum, and the ice cream parlour (Dick Grayson at the amusement park was something I never knew I needed until I read it). He teases Dick in a friendly way, guides him to follow a good moral code, and affectionately calls him “youngster”. And of course he showed zero hesitation in allowing Dick into his life and letting him in on his most closely guarded secret, which is more than you can say for any of the women he has supposedly close relationships with. I think Batman's whole personality became more lighthearted and playful once Robin showed up, as if Robin's boyish enthusiasm had rubbed off on him. He seemed overall happier with Dick around. Batman was absolutely devastated whenever anything happened to Robin and would stop at nothing to keep him safe. Some of the strip's best moments involve Batman diving into perilous situations without a moment's hesitation – swinging through flames, running in front of a moving car, venturing out into a storm with a wounded shoulder – to save Robin, or a Batman gone devastated and vengeful because Robin had nearly been killed by a criminal, sometimes so nearly that Batman thought he was dead.
Robin is often described in the text as reckless, and we are definitely shown this as much as we are told. He delights in danger and in fighting bad guys, and the amount of times he gets himself into trouble and there's a moment of heart-wrenching tension as we wait to see if Batman will manage to get him out on time (even though we know he always does) are more than I can count. These parts are some of the most emotionally compelling, and also some of my favourites. Of course, none of these incidents ever stop Robin or make him any less enthusiastic. Dick has the endearing ability to bounce back from everything – from seeing his parents killed right in front of his eyes to very nearly being murdered himself on multiple occasions! He has an unshakable cheerfulness about him and his greatest joy is his superhero life. “Oh boy, action!” is a line spoken by Dick on more than one occasion, when another crimefighting mission seems imminent. Sometimes Batman tells him to stay behind and do his homework, but it's anyone's guess whether Dick will listen or not – if there's crimefighting to be done, Dick wants to be a part of it! Other times Batman ventures off on his own but tells Robin to come get him if he's not back within, say, an hour, and this seemed to work better. Robin was such an important and special person in Batman's life that I can never accept the character leaving the duo later, or being replaced with other boys wearing the same costume and taking on the same name, as the strips for some incomprehensible reason thought it would be a good idea to do, long after the time period I cover here. Robin was much more than Batman's apprentice-superhero-of-the-day who would eventually leave the team and make way for the next boy. He was Batman's best friend and the first family he had since his parents' deaths, and the single most important thing in his life. There was actually a strip in which Batman, in order to protect Robin from a criminal gang, pretends he doesn't want to fight crime with him anymore, and Dick thinks Batman has replaced him with another boy. He was devastated, and his thoughts about the “other boy” were nothing but hurt and resentful. Now, I admit that isn't exactly the same as having a grown-up Robin replaced by another boy when he's already left the team. But I still don't believe he would ever want anyone else taking his place, wearing his special uniform, or using his unique superhero name. Besides, who's to say Robin will leave the team when he grows up?! There's no reason Robin couldn't fight by Batman's side forever, and they would continue as the Dynamic Duo that now happens to consist of two men instead of a man and a boy. Even if Robin did fight more often on his own as a grown-up, and even if Batman did then train another boy as a superhero – which wouldn't be a bad idea, he's clearly a good teacher and Gotham City needs all the superheroes it can get – wouldn't the new boy be the one to take on a brand-new identity, and Dick would keep his own alter ego? What are the odds of a new boy having the same personality as Dick and connecting with the Robin identity the same way, anyway?!
Batman and Robin's world is further fleshed out by a number of other fascinating characters:
The Joker is one of the creepiest villains I have ever seen. He is given no backstory, no real name, and no motivation (although he does like his precious stones) other than wanting to kill and steal for the fun of it. We're left with no idea who this strange man really is, or even if he really is a man. He's shown taking off makeup – both flesh-coloured and clown makeup – to reveal a chalk-white face underneath, and his green hair looks so fresh and healthy that it might very well have naturally grown in that way. The effect is chilling in a way that no explanation or backstory or scarred, destroyed appearance could ever achieve. He's unpredictable in where or when he will strike, and there seems to be no pattern as to when he will decide to let his victims live or even when he will turn on his own henchmen. And just to make things creepier, the Joker also has a way of appearing immortal. I can't count the number of times in the early strips when we see the Joker falling into some apparently fatal situation – often deep water – only to find out he somehow survived next time he appears. There was even one strip where he turns himself in to the police and allows himself to be executed, and he still manages to survive! It makes me wonder whether, even if Batman were the type to try and outright kill the Joker, he would find it impossible to actually do it.
Commissioner Gordon is actually quite competent at his job. This might seem like an odd thing to say, but when you consider all I'd seen before was the TV show, you'll understand how strange it was to see a Commissioner Gordon who actually knew what he was doing and wasn't completely helpless if Batman wasn't there doing everything for him! In fact, at the very beginning Commissioner Gordon didn't want Batman around at all, feeling that his presence was making the Gotham City police force look bad. But eventually he changed his mind and in one of the strip's most powerful moments, he makes a compelling speech about why he now fully accepts Batman's help and how the police will now work alongside him instead of against him. One thing about the Commissioner, though: if he's a smart, competent person and isn't portrayed as dim or foolish at all, then in 1967 when Batgirl comes into the picture, it's a lot harder to accept how he can possibly not recognize his own daughter underneath a slim mask that doesn't even hide her eyes. He begins to look like a neglectful, uncaring father to be so unfamiliar with Barbara's face, and my opinion of him dropped quite a bit. But that happens after the time I'm covering here. (Batgirl's introduction can be found in a collection called “Batman: the TV Stories”.)
Catwoman was my favourite character in the TV show, and here we can see her slowly developing from a mysterious master of disguise originally just called “the Cat”, who teamed up with other (male) crooks and often needed Batman to help her out when they betrayed her, to a cunning, talented, but still morally grey crime boss in her own right. Her personality also became more defined as the strips went on – just like most of the other female characters, she started off pretty generic. I have yet to find out whether Catwoman achieved a fully fleshed-out personality in the comics before her first onscreen appearance in the TV show, or if Julie Newmar was the first to give her one, but she did develop a lot throughout the strips. Catwoman proves to us how she got her reputation as a master of disguise, her identity changing many times. She disappears and resurfaces throughout the early strips, often with a completely new hairstyle and a new name to match. I suspect nobody had established her as Selina Kyle yet, because in one strip she's known as Marguerite Tone, and there's no indication that this might not be her real name – until the next Catwoman strip, where she has shorter, lighter hair and is going by Elva Barr. I still have yet to find the first strip where Catwoman is called Selina Kyle. That will be exciting when I do! Batman is clearly smitten with Catwoman in the first strip she ever appears in, letting her escape arrest on purpose because she has “lovely eyes”; two Catwoman strips later, it's revealed that she feels the same way about Batman. Also, like the typical early Batman female, she was never truly evil. She enjoyed stealing but never killed or needlessly attacked anyone, and even went out of her way to save Robin's life at one point. I always felt that a reformed Catwoman would be the best match for Batman of all – far better than any of the other women they tried to pair him up with!
Alfred appears in 1943, and originally he was not Bruce's guardian after his parents were killed, although I do like this idea for later on when Alfred is a long-established character. Instead, Alfred's father used to be the Wayne's butler and made his son promise on his (the father's) deathbed to go back and look after the Waynes. Alfred is the sort of character who fancies himself much smarter than he really is, but somehow ends up stumbling onto all the important things anyway. That was how he found out Bruce and Dick were really Batman and Robin, just by stumbling into it, and this probably explains why we usually don't see Bruce letting anyone else into his house! I get the impression this aspect of his character was changed drastically as the strip went on, as was his physical appearance – he's actually quite portly when he first appears, but by the time of the Dailies and Sundays, he's taken on the skinny shape we all remember. Perhaps he made use of Bruce's home gym....*
The Penguin doesn't look that menacing, especially compared with the Joker, but don't let that fool you. He has no qualms about murdering in cold blood anyone who stands in his way, all without deviating from his polite and refined mannerisms that contrast with his actions in a way that only makes him creepier. In the Penguin's introduction strip, he very nearly puts Batman out of commission for good – and to think that when they first saw him, not knowing yet that he was a criminal, Dick and Bruce's first inclination was to laugh at the funny-looking man who so resembled a penguin! But a more comical side to the character does appear in the Sunday strips. There we are introduced to the Penguin's – or rather Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot's – Aunt Miranda, a no-nonsense lady who raised him and still does not hesitate to tell him off when she feels he has misbehaved. She has no idea he is a criminal, although I don't think she'd treat him any differently if she did!
Linda Page is by far my least favourite of the early Batman characters. I never understood why it was necessary for a character meant to be a playboy to be given a steady girlfriend in the first place, but if he is going to get one, they should try to make sure she doesn't turn out terribly written and often just annoying. Linda is pretty much there for only two reasons: to be rescued from bad guys like most of the non-recurring females, and to take over Julie's job of criticizing Bruce Wayne for being so lazy and telling him, constantly, that he should be more like Batman. I get that this was supposed to be a funny sort of irony, Linda telling Bruce that he should be more like himself, and it would have worked if either Linda wasn't supposed to be someone Bruce particularly liked, or if the rest of the time we saw Linda and Bruce being affectionate and supportive of each other. But this criticism of Bruce is all we ever see of their relationship. We're never shown a single truly positive moment to establish theirs as a relationship we can root for or Linda as a likeable character. We barely see Linda or their relationship at all. And while Julie at least got up and left Bruce after she decided he wasn't hardworking enough for her, Linda sticks around long after she's outstayed her welcome, giving us the impression that she must not have too much self-respect, or she'd go it alone until she can find a romantic partner she doesn't feel the need to criticize all the time. It makes the character come across as weak no matter how much they try to establish her as “feisty”. So when it comes time for Linda to fulfill her second purpose – getting in trouble with the bad guys and needing Batman to come rescue her – I don't actually care what happens to her or whether she gets rescued or not. Perhaps they were trying to make the emotional impact of these strips stronger by having it be Batman's girlfriend who needs help instead of just some random woman, but as it turns out, I find the strips where the damsel in distress is just some random woman a lot more compelling, because they at least haven't done anything to make themselves unlikeable. Or the strips where it's Robin who's in trouble – someone who is actually important to Batman and to us. Now those strips were the most compelling of all!
(In the Dailies, there is one strip where Linda appears, and she actually behaves like a decent character. We see some of her personal identity outside of being Bruce's love interest as she works her job as a nurse, she helps fight off the bad guys and the way she stands up to them is far less “feisty little damsel in distress” and more “human being who doesn't want to get murdered”, and she actually has a pleasant, positive date with Bruce where they're able to disagree politely and she doesn't criticize him once. I believe those strips used different writers.)
As well as the Penguin, the Joker, and Catwoman, a number of other noteable villains made their first appearance in this era, like Dr. Hugo Strange, who uses his scientific genius to wreak havoc on what was not yet Gotham City, and is creepy enough to rival the Joker (he's actually the only major Batman villain to be introduced ahead of the Joker); Two-Face, who achieves that near-impossible balance of giving a villain a backstory you can sympathize with, while still making him creepy enough to avoid unwanted reader sympathies when we see the monstrous villain he has become; the Scarecrow, a former professor obsessed with the concept of fear but as yet without his fear gas (and without any tragic backstory, just a good old creepy villain); and the very first Clayface, who actually first appeared in one of those murder-mystery strips so that his identity was unknown until the very end. There were actually a number of gang leaders who gave Batman enough of a challenge to be counted as proper Batman villains themselves if they had been recurring, like Smiley Sykes, whose gang nearly killed Robin and sparked a terrible vengeance in Batman; and Big Mike Russo, who took over the penitentiary and almost succeeded in having Batman executed. Batman's other main arch-nemesis, the Riddler, comes a bit after the time I'm covering here, making his first appearance in 1948. For the record, his introduction strip is quite a fun one, and you can definitely see the inspiration for the TV show brewing as early as that. He's like an overgrown schoolboy in his love for puzzles and crime, which makes him a very appealing character. (For those interested, I found his introductory strip in a compilation collection entitled “Batman Arkham: the Riddler”.) I would definitely say that out of the four major Batman villains, Catwoman and the Riddler are far from truly evil, nowhere near the villainous levels of the Penguin or the Joker.
Just like the title character, the Batman strips have a very definite moral code, and there's never any wavering from their established ideals as to what makes a character good, redeemable, or bad. Because there are a lot of ruthless criminals in these strips and a lot of side characters get hurt or killed, I very much appreciate the way Batman treats every victim as important and worth saving. He never even lets the villains die, if he can help it, although that said, he doesn't exactly mourn them when they do. Not if they're someone truly evil, and that's almost every criminal here. These strips have a definite message about the kind of person you should or should not aim to be, and the characters are living embodiments of those principles. When someone is a bad guy, they're usually too far gone to have any sort of redeeming qualities, and the strip never tries to convince us that maybe if you looked at it differently, the crime bosses were right and Batman was wrong. Most of the bad guys at this point are simply selfish and greedy, not sympathetic victims of tragic pasts or mental illnesses. We're free to be completely happy when Batman saves the day – unless a good character has been killed off and must be mourned, which does happen. Of course, the strip doesn't try and tell us that every single person to ever commit a crime is automatically evil. There's always a distinction between the good guys who have been led astray and the hardened criminals who are beyond help. Usually those in the former category are either very young men, sometimes even boys, or women. I would have liked to see a few pure evil female characters, or some young girls being led astray into crime, or a scenario where a morally grey man decides to go straight while a hardened woman stays with the criminals, but that's one of my few complaints. It's worth noting, too, that just as all hardened criminals are presented as inherently bad, all legal establishments and upholders of the law are portrayed as inherently good. Few corrupt or misguided officials exist, and when they do, the strip makes very sure to tell us how rare this is and how this isn't at all a reflection of how the legal systems usually work. This viewpoint is probably a 1940s war-era thing, encouraging patriotism by always making the law and its upholders look good. Now, I don't think this portrayal of the system is actually accurate, and you may notice how virtually all of my other fandoms lean more towards the viewpoint that just because someone is in power or within the law doesn't necessarily make them right. But what I like about Batman's portrayal of this issue is the (even if it was unintended) idealism. The portrayal of a world that really does work like that, where the law is always upright and honest and so delivering wrongdoers to the Proper Authorities will always result in a happy ending. It adds a layer of hope to the stories that a strip full of corrupt politics just wouldn't.
One thing I do feel the need to point out is the distinct lack of any interesting, well-developed females. There isn't much to differentiate between the women we do see, and their main function is usually to be the damsel in distress. Female villains are rare at this point and, when they do appear, they are usually working for a much more ruthless male boss or crime partner, they're shown as either morally grey or simply misguided, and they almost always turn on their evil bosses at the end and prove themselves redeemable. It got to the point where I could immediately eliminate any female suspects in the murder-mystery strips, without waiting for any evidence that would point against them or towards somebody else, and that guess never turned out to be wrong. An exception to this rule came along in the newspaper Sunday strips: the Sparrow was the boss of her own crime organization, she was unapologetically evil, and she even went so far as to put the Joker in a deathtrap when he refused to work for her. I really would have liked to see her become a recurring character, because she was one of the best females Batman had released yet. Actually, the Dailies and Sundays featured a number of stronger and more interesting females: a lady blacksmith who helped Bruce defeat some crooks, a young woman who owned and managed her own oil wells, and the Penguin's inimitable Aunt Miranda, to name a few, although they also featured the more common damsels in distress and a woman who decides she's not that evil and turns against her villainous boss. But even in the comic books, the female villains such as Catwoman or Queenie (a character who worked for the Joker; she only appeared in one strip, but still remains one of my favourites) were far more interesting that the female good guys, because they at least were more than passive victims. Now, I do understand all this because, if you look at the credits on the earliest Batman strips, you will notice the names are almost entirely male, so it's probably just a case of the team not knowing how to write the opposite gender as well as their own (I've had this problem myself), as well as expecting their audience to be mostly or entirely male, even though I find there's a lot more in Batman strips to appeal to women than you might think. Honestly, the lack of interesting women doesn't bother me that much because for the most part these characters stay only as long as they can contribute to the story, leaving before they have a chance to outstay their welcome, and more importantly, the males are given proper feelings and relationships with one another, so it's possible to connect with them when I can't connect to any of the females.
One thing I truly love about the way these earliest strips were written is the way they present their message. Yes, there are criminals in the world and there are bad people who do horrible things without regard for the lives of innocents, but the focus is more on the solution to this problem: people like Batman and Robin who devote their lives to bringing justice and are making a visible difference of good in their world. What's more, many a strip suggests that if all young people would take a step towards being more like Batman and Robin, and truly understand that crime doesn't pay and instead take an honest path, then the type of crime we see in the Batman strips could be eliminated. Does their solution make it sound easier than it really is? Maybe, but that's the beauty of it. There's no shades of grey here, no depressing message that the situation is really so complex that it may never be solved. You can end a Batman comic feeling good, exhilarated and good, not depressed and drained and thinking about knotty world problems and how near-impossible it is to solve them. What good does that sort of message do anyone?!
In sum, I would definitely recommend reading these comics, especially if you've seen a little Batman and are wondering whether you'd like to get into the Dark Knight or not.
*Editing Layla, circa 2024: So apparently in Batman Chronicles volume 11, there is a strip showing how Alfred lost the extra weight and took on the tall, thin appearance we might remember better. The canon explanation involves Bruce's home gym, but doesn't end there, and I don't want to say any more because his transformation in the strip was a surprise for both Batman and the readers.
All the strips I reference here can be found in the Batman Chronicles volumes 1-9, or in the Batman Dailies and Sundays collections, unless otherwise specified.
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