‘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.
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