Despite doing this article for over six years now, I’ve spent precious little time writing about Batman. Ironic considering the glut of Batman media that DC continually puts out and my own propensity for Batman-adjacent series to read. But sometimes there’s a miniseries that piques my interest enough that I can’t help but want to dive into it. And when it’s a kind of sequel series to one of my favorite Superman stories, then I can’t not take a look at Mark Russell, Michael Allred, Laura Allred, and Dave Sharpe’s Batman: Dark Age. 

The fallibility of Bruce Wayne’s memory can only explain so many discrepancies in his history. What do you mean he wasn’t there in Crime Alley with his parents when they were gunned down? Who are the False Face Society and why would they want Thomas and Martha Wayne dead? And how did Bruce become such a delinquent before being drafted into the army to learn guerilla tactics from Ra’s al Ghul in Vietnam? Hey now, don’t worry about that, he still has time to put on the cape and cowl and menace Gotham after returning home from the war and beginning a new war on crime. But just as Bruce’s fight begins and the age of superheroes reaches its zenith, new fights begin in the universe that try to drag him from his home.

Much like the creative team’s first effort with Superman: Space Age, this series is focused on influence and legacy. As this series begins with Thomas Wayne promising Gotham as a City of Tomorrow, that becomes the goal Bruce sets for himself. While revenge does play a part in all of this, there’s that core of saving a city that has fallen into disillusionment and disrepair as a result of the False Face Society that keeps him going. The Kents pushed Clark to always do the right thing, while the Waynes showed Bruce how to make Gotham a home. More than anything, both characters strive continually to meet those expectations they’ve put on themselves through their parents’ words, but Bruce has the more tangible goal of working within Gotham. He isn’t trying to save everyone, just the one place he’s known as his home and maintaining what his parents had always wanted for him and the city. If he can do that much, then he’s done enough.

While there’s an oddity to the events of Batman: Dark Age, it does make a thematic sense as we’re seeing this entire story through the lens of one author—the familiar broad strokes of Batman’s history are here, but with a different direction. It’s one of the chief reasons Russell, the Allreds, and Sharpe have done so well with these re-imaginings: they have the entirety of pre-Crisis canon to work with and coalesce all of that history into a single whole. And that might be the best way to showcase the history of these characters since we’re coming up on a century’s worth of stories for them all. 

Get excited. Get condensed.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.