‘Well, Commissioner, anything exciting happening these days?’ Those were the first words — all seven of ’em — spoken by a new character introduced in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics. That character was a chap called Bruce Wayne. You may know him better as the Batman. And, if you subtract May 1939 from now, you’ll realise that he is three quarters of a century old this year. So, yes, Bruce, there is something exciting happening these days. It’s your 75th birthday.
Mr Wayne is sprightly for a septuagenarian — particularly given that he was hardly fresh-faced and spring-limbed at birth. When the writer Bill Finger and the artist Bob Kane designed this new comic-book hero they took inspiration from plenty of old non-comic-book heroes. A wealthy gent who fights injustice from behind a mask? That’s basically the Scarlet Pimpernel or, from Thirties pulp novels, the Shadow. A detective who makes all the others look defective? That’s Sherlock Holmes. Even the poses that Batman struck in that first issue were based on Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s performance in The Mark of Zorro (1920).
And yet Batman has persisted. Pawing through a copy of Detective Comics #27 now — you can download it to your iPad, if you don’t have the million dollars for an original — it’s remarkable how much is familiar. The ‘Commissioner’ that Bruce Wayne is chatting to in the first panel is none other than Police Commissioner Gordon. When the Batman first appears, beneath a swollen moon, he’s dressed in a grey bodysuit with a black cowl and cape, two pointed ears and a bat emblem across his chest. The only thing that really jars is his indifference to a criminal’s death by acid: ‘A fitting end for his kind.’ Harsh.
Within a couple of years, much of Gotham’s groundwork was in place.
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