Past Batman and Batman's Past

It's almost impossible not to be familiar with Batman today. Through countless media iterations and revisions, the character has reached iconic status. Batman persists as a cultural artifact in part because of his backstory; the tragedy gives justification and depth to what would otherwise be a ridiculous premise. We talked in class about the exclusion of the backstory in the early issues of Batman, and professor Serrano began the discussion with an interesting challenge: try to approach Batman as though you were unfamiliar with the character and were seeing him for the first time. Personally, I don't think such a thing is possible, and it made me  wonder about the role of backstory in the creation of the character. To what extent was the tragic backstory always a part of Batman? There are no hints of it in the first few issues and the tone of 'Batman the detective' seems entirely at odds with the tone of 'Batman, the orphan driven to compulsively pursue justice through unresolved grief and guilt.' It's a drastic departure, and what I realized when I tried to approach Batman with fresh eyes is that I can't read that in the original presentation of the character. It's something that I have to read into the character.

Authorial intent is difficult to navigate in any circumstance, but the Batman mythos becomes complicated by the fact that, for part of his existence, his backstory was unknown. Obviously there's a huge precedent for gradually uncovering the background of a character. Yet as Collin pointed out, it's difficult to tell when the backstory entered into the question. Was it there from the beginning or created after the character gained traction? Would Batman have had the same backstory if the comics hadn't gained popularity so rapidly, or would he have remained a static character? Did Kane and Finger create the character with depth in mind, or at least, with a space for depth to be created, given the chance? Since questioning authorial intent often devolves into these pointless rhetorical questions, it is perhaps more constructive to look at how we come to grasp the Batman legacy and mythology. At least for modern readers, encountering early Batman becomes an exercise in trying to retroactively project his origin story into the character in the complete absence of any evidence or indication that we should. The early Batman stories almost work better without the backstory because we don't encounter the cognitive dissonance of trying to "uncover" the extended narrative in the first appearances of the character. But not only is this almost impossible for anyone with any familiarity with the character, it almost seems to do disservice to Batman's status as an icon: trying to omit the origin story from our understanding is removing an integral part of Batman-hood. Like in Tezuka's "Hell," the image comes to acquire and enforce certain meanings as takes its place in cultural parlance.