The result is a vastly different Gotham City than that of the recent Christopher Nolan movies, perhaps one that seeks more to honour Batman's legacy than reinvent it.Įd Brubaker, after all, is a proven nostalgic. Scott McDaniel's and Karl Story's artwork, too, combines Neal Adams's seminal chiaroscuro with the eight-bit palettes of the Nintendo era. And so, fittingly enough, Brubaker's Batman is a hybrid affair, merging those old gumshoe plot lines with 1960s camp and the gritty noir of the Dark Knight Returns. Add to that ballooning bibliography the trade paperback re-release of Ed Brubaker's run at the character, beginning with Issue #582 in this initial volume, and extending into a second edition later this year.īatman is something of a mongrel, blending elements of Zorro, Tarzan, the Phantom and the Shadow creator Bob Kane's original sketches were actually superimposed over a Superman outline.

More than a dozen official series currently feature or have splintered from the central Batman narrative these include a manga version, another co-starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the throwback Batman '66 books (recently: 'Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E.'), Grayson, in which the original Robin plays a slick, bespoke-suited spy, and a conspicuously Hogwarts-inspired take called Gotham Academy. Last July, Ontario motorists were baffled by a vintage Batmobile pulled over on Highway 401 with a uniformed Batman tinkering under the hood a month later, another Batman was killed while attending to his own broken-down Batmobile outside Baltimore, Md.Īnd then there are the comic books, which are legion. And Batman isn't just enjoying an extended cultural moment on the silver screen he's making real-world news as well. With that in mind, there's an inevitability to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, one of two DC extended-universe films featuring the Caped Crusader coming out this year ( Suicide Squad being the other a new feature-length cartoon, Batman: Bad Blood, was just released direct-to-video). Three-quarters of a century later, through multiple TV shows, movies, video games and product tie-ins (ceiling fans! rubber duckies! golf club covers!), Bruce Wayne's alter ego might have surpassed even Clark Kent's as the world's most iconic comic-book figure.

Within the year, the character had his own series.

'The Case of the Chemical Syndicate' introduced readers to 'a mysterious and adventurous figure' who moonlighted as a clandestine sleuth-ninja in jack boots, a spiky-eared mask and a scalloped cape. In May, 1939, a character known as 'the Bat-Man' appeared in Detective Comics #27.

Batman by Ed Brubaker