Alter Ego: Bruce Wayne, Various cover identities ("Matches" Malone, Sir Hemmingford Grey, etc.)
Occupation: Multimillionaire Industrialist, Playboy, Philanthropist and Crime Fighter
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: Thomas Wayne (father; deceased); Martha Wayne (mother; deceased), Philip Wayne (uncle), Jack Wayne (grandfather), Laura Elizabeth Wayne (great-grandmother)
Group Affiliations: Justice League of America
(current); Justice League International (formerly); Outsiders (former leader)
Base of Operations: Gotam City
Height: 6'2"
Weight: 210 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black
First Appearance: Detective Comics #27 (May 1939)
BATMAN: Modern Age (Post Crisis)
Born c.1953. (Adjusted to c.1962 by Zero Hour)
Started career c. 1978. (Adjusted to c.1984 by Zero Hour)
First comic book published in 1986.
Bruce Wayne had a short but very protected childhood. Born to the wealthy parents Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce grew up knowing the ideal life only experienced by few boys. The only son of the very wealthy industrialist Dr. Thomas Wayne and his socialite wife Martha, young Bruce was insulated from the harsher troubles of the world as he played on the grounds of stately Wayne Manor outside the rat race of Gotham City.
Thomas taught Bruce that a man's greatest asset was his intellect. That brute strength and violence were no match for reason and self-discipline. He tried to instill the old values of duty and respect for the law into Bruce's young mind.
Martha set an example of compassion for Bruce as she devoted time and energy to charitable causes. She helped him to understand the nobility of aiding those who were weak and helpless rather than exploiting them.
Having little contact with other children, Bruce found a friend and constant companion in Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne major domo... The Wayne’s had hired Alfred because his extensive education made him qualified to act as a sort of tutor to young Bruce, while his military training in combat medicine meant that he'd be the perfect person to have around should some accident befall their precious son.
While playing on the grounds, young Bruce fell into a cave opening. Inside the cave were very large bats, who'd might as well have been demons or monsters for the effect they had on the child.
The sheer terror of this brief incident would leave an indelible mark on Bruce's mind, although he would seem to forget the event shortly afterwards.
When Bruce was around seven years old, the Wayne’s took him on a rare excursion into the city. The old theater in Gotham's Park Row neighborhood was playing the Mark of Zorro, which Bruce wanted to see. Although Thomas wished his son would idolize a more intellectual hero like Sherlock Holmes, he indulged the boy this once. Park Row had once been a socially elite neighborhood, and that's how Thomas and Martha tended to think of it despite the gradual decline it had been undergoing recently. So noone gave it a second thought when Thomas took his little family for a short walk after the movie.
As the Waynes passed Chryme Alley (originally named after a family, a clerical error would later designate it as "Crime Alley", which would become the popular name for the entire neighborhood), a man with frightened, hollow eyes and a voice like broken glass being crushed would accost them. In his robbery attempt Joe Chill would shoot both of Bruce's parents to death. Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down in Crime Alley in front of his eyes, an event which scarred him for life. Although the mugger's bullets didn't touch Bruce, they killed him as surely as they destroyed his universe. Violence had destroyed Reason. Brute force had destroyed Compassion. All sense left Bruce's life. All that remained was rage. A need to avenge his parents' murder... To make the mugger pay.
Following their death, Bruce made an oath to devote his life to the elimination of crime and evil in all its many forms. Vowing to protect the innocent and bring killers and other criminals to justice. Some small part of Bruce found a reason to go on living in that. To avenge the victims of crime... To make all criminals pay... To put things right. An utterly impossible task, but one to which Bruce dedicated his existence.
At age 14 he embarked on his global sojourn, attending courses at Cambridge, the Sorbonne and other European universities. Beyond academia, Bruce acquired more practical skills. Frenchman Henri Ducard made him an apprentice in man hunting. The ninja Kirigi schooled Bruce in stealth and the ways of the shadow warrior. African Bushmen taught hunting techniques, while Nepalese monks revealed healing arts.
As he grew up, Bruce studied and practiced anything and everything he thought might serve him in his task. He mastered various forms of martial arts as though possessed by a demon. He traveled the world to train under the greatest fighters, hunters, detectives, and even magicians he could find. His lack of attention to formal classroom studies gave Bruce's regular teachers the impression that he was lazy and not very bright... His frequent disappearances to pursue his personal training goals lead people to assume that the teen-age Bruce was off on hormone-driven misadventures. Bruce learned to use this to his advantage, allowing people to think he was AWOL from boarding school to chase a little redhead in Paris or a blonde in Barcelona, when in fact he would be participating in a judo tournament in Japan under an assumed identity or learning to control his heart rate in a Buddhist monastery in India.
So it went for 12 years as Bruce matured into manhood, eventually returning to Gotham City, place of his birth. Bruce returned to Gotham to begin his fight. But he knew something was missing. He needed something to bring all his training and special weapons together... But he didn't have the patience to wait for it. Dressed in a nondescript disguise, Bruce went on a "recon" mission, just to see how bad Gotham had become.
The city had degenerated into a veritable cesspool, with most of the police force on the take, and the city officials in the pockets of organized crime. On the street level, criminal scum hunted anyone weaker than themselves like sharks hunting guppies. It wasn't long before Bruce found himself stupidly getting involved with a pimp who was manhandling a child prostitute. In no time Bruce was in the middle of a street brawl with the pimp and his stable of hookers, which ended with a gunshot from a trigger-happy cop. Bruce barely made it home alive. In his shock-induced delirium, Bruce mocked himself for "putting the fear of God" into the criminals... Then he realized that fear was the key. He had to find a way to make the criminals terrified of him from the first glance. Home, in the study that had been Thomas Wayne's, within easy reach of the bell that would summon Alfred, who could stop the bleeding before it was too late, Bruce resolved that he would die if the answer didn't come to him then and there.
As a toddler, Bruce had fallen into the bat infested limestone caves beneath Wayne Manor. As an orphan child those same bats haunted his nightmares with the rush of leathery wings. Only in adulthood would Bruce embrace the bat as inspiration.
Without warning it came. The same image that had struck him dumb with terror so many years before. The unearthly, flying predator of night. The bat. He would become a bat! After years of study and training, the Batman was born.
Here he began to work for the better of the city, both by setting up the charitable Wayne Foundation, and as a costumed vigilante, Batman, who inspired fear in criminals and respect, eventually friendship, in police captain James Gordon.
After recovering from the gunshot, Bruce began his career as Batman in earnest. Starting with the street scum, he worked his way up to the upper echelons of the criminal world. Along the way he ruined many bad cops, finally including the corrupt Police Commissioner.
In addition to Alfred, Batman had other important help in his crusade. Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent was his original "inside man". Police detective Lt. James Gordon was originally in charge of hunting down the Batman, but instead developed a working relationship with the Dark Knight by the time he became Captain. Later, as Commissioner, Gordon would grant the Batman "special officer" status.
A couple of years after becoming Batman, Bruce took in Dick Grayson, who became his first Robin. Dick was good for Bruce, since teaching Robin to use his head first and fists second reminded the Batman of the same thing. As often happens with maturing boys and their guardians, Dick and Bruce eventually had serious disagreements about Dick's future. In his late teens, Dick went off to pursue a life and super heroic career separate from Bruce's.
Not long after, Bruce discovered a kid named Jason Todd (whose father had been murdered by the villain Two-Face, and whose mother died of illness) living on the streets. Batman took the boy in, and eventually trained him to replace Dick as Robin. This Robin was later murdered by the insane, deformed criminal known as the Joker.
The death of Robin left Batman barely in control of his rage. And he took this rage out on himself as much as the criminals who crossed his path. He pushed himself needlessly, took unnecessary risks, and sustained too many injuries. This behavior even prompted Dick Grayson, now acting as Nightwing, to intervene. Bruce's pain was beyond Dick's power to heal, but some degree of reconciliation was achieved between the two.
Batman definitely did not want another Robin, but one was sort of imposed on him in the form of Tim Drake. When he finally stopped resisting the idea, Batman discovered that Tim was a great Robin, and, like Dick, was good for the Batman.
Just as Tim was getting established as Robin, Bane came into the picture. Bane was a criminal mastermind. He had his physique, strength, and constitution enhanced to superhuman proportions by a chemical called Venom that was periodically injected into his brain by a wrist-controlled device, but was clever enough to know that this alone did not make him a match for Gotham's defender. So he blew up Arkham Asylum and let all of Batman's most insanely dangerous foes loose at the same time.
When the Venom-fueled Bane destroyed Arkham Asylum and unleashed its inhabitants on an unwary Gotham, Bruce Wayne learned that his obsession might be more than he can endure. Driving himself past the point of exhaustion to capture Arkham's most dangerous inmates, Batman led himself right into the clutches of Bane, who had deduced his identity and invaded the sanctity of Wayne Manor and the Batcave. There, surrounded by all the trophies and weapons of his crusade, Bruce Wayne was defeated, his back broken and his spirit destroyed. Crippled and wheelchair-bound, the humbled Wayne left Jean Paul Valley his costume and began an arduous quest to regain his strength and will to fight, including calling upon the beautiful but deadly Lady Shiva to retrain him in the fighting skills he had spent years mastering.
Restricted to a wheelchair, and needing to go overseas to track down Tim Drake's kidnapped father, Bruce appointed Jean-Paul Valley to act as Batman in Gotham. Valley had been subjected by the Order of St. Dumas to a series of subliminal training sessions called "the System". Valley was completely unaware of this training until the System was activated to make him into St. Dumas' enforcer knight, Azrael. Batman had defeated Azrael and learned the basic nature of the innocent Valley's conditioning. Hoping to put the System to good use rather than evil, Batman had taken Valley in to train for heroic duties... In his weakened, injured state, Bruce made the mistake of thinking that Valley was in control of the System, and could use it to act as Batman.
With Bruce Wayne out of the picture, Jean-Paul Valley began to remake the Batman, with a great deal of influence from the System. Soon "Batman" was a heavily armored, flamethrower-wielding, borderline maniac. One of his first actions was to nearly kill Bane. After that, Valley became more and more savagely out of control.
Upon learning that Valley had become a darker, more violent vision of Batman, Wayne returned to Gotham to forcibly reclaim the mantle of the Dark Knight. Shortly thereafter, Bruce Wayne departed Gotham once again, leaving the city's custodianship in the hands of his former partner Dick Grayson for a brief time. After recovering from his spinal injury, Bruce would have to undergo an extreme form of martial arts re-training to regain his confidence and prowess. After this, he was able to defeat the now insane Valley and resume his place as Batman.
When Wayne finally did return, it was for good, adopting a darker look and stronger arsenal to reflect the changes in his body and mind Bane's attack had wrought upon him. Since that time, he has returned to the Gotham night and attempted to rebuild his life as both Bruce Wayne and Batman, in addition to reaffirming his relationships with Tim Drake, Dick Grayson and Alfred. In the aftermath of Bruce Wayne's flight from the law as an accused murderer, Batman and his crime fighting crew have become a stronger fighting unit than ever.
Though regarded by many Gothamites as an "urban legend" built on superstition and fear of the city's darkened streets, Bruce Wayne knows all too well that the Batman is a cold, hard reality of his own fabrication. Since his parents' death in Gotham's dreaded "Crime Alley," Wayne has spent his life in pursuit of physical and mental perfection in order to wage unrelenting war on crime. Watching over Gotham's streets from its gargoyles and parapets, the Dark Knight is the city's last best hope against evil. And it is this obsession that drives the Batman, for Wayne has vowed that no innocent should suffer the pain he has endured.
Batman has also worked with various teams of super-heroes, most recently the JLA, often accused of being uninterested in his team-mates and of keeping too many secrets, he recently astounded his team-mates by revealing his identity to them in order to regain their trust.
Batman has one of the keenest intellects in the world, and is practically unbeatable in unarmed combat with a 'normal' human. The bumbling playboy Bruce Wayne is his least real identity, serving largely to act as a diversion from his real self and to provide an ethical employer and charitable foundation in Gotham. His weakness is his intense dedication to the fight for justice to the exclusion of his friends and his feeling that Gotham is 'his' city and his alone.
During the event known as Infinite Crisis, Batman nearly broke his most sacred law. When it appeared that Alexander Luthor may have killed longtime ally Dick Grayson, Batman produced a gun, prepared to take Alexander Luthor's life. Fortunately, Dick was still alive, and Batman avoided making what would have been the worst decision of his life. [1] Regardless, the incident shook Batman's reserve, and he realized that he had crossed the line. It was time to re-evaluate his identity and retrace the steps that forged him into the man he is today.
To this end, he departed Gotham City on a quest to "kill the bat". Along with Robin and Nightwing, he traveled to the Middle East where he re-honed his martial prowess under the tutelage of a desert cult known as the Cult of the Ten-Eyed Men. [2]
Batman returned to Gotham City with a stronger sense of self, and a clear optimistic view of the future. This optimism was challenged however when he found himself united with Damian - his alleged son with villainess Talia al Ghul. Batman attempted to become a father figure to Damian, but quickly realized that the young boy's mind was already diseased by a violent upbringing. Their time together was short, and Damian eventually returned to his mother.
