Hard Boiled Detective Turned Emotionally Wrecked Vigilante - Batman: Hush
It’s night, the moonlight lost in the clouds. The roads and streets are empty, trash and debris lining the bottom of buildings, each window emitting a soft, yellow glow. You step into the dim light of a flickering street lamp and stop. Down the alleyway is a tall, broad silhouette, cloaked head to toe in shadow. The only thing slicing through the black are sharp, angry white eyes, scowled in your direction. Whenever the street lamp flickers bright, you catch a shine from the silhouette’s outfit: pointed, horn-like ears and a zigzag cut at the bottom of a long, draping cape.
It becomes clear that the individual is Batman, but why must he stalk in the shadows like such a creep? Like, come on, he's a buff grown man over six feet tall just chilling in the darkest shadows, watching, waiting. It’s a bit creepy. Sure, these whole dark, brooding, lonesome attributes are all just a part of his character, but I believe as Batman evolved from a hard boiled detective, saving Gotham in the late 1930’s, into the modern day Batman with a deeply tortured past and traumatic, life altering events, his “dark knight” aesthetic manifested with said evolution.
Early on, especially so in his debut Detective Comics (1937), Batman wasn’t really even a superhero. At most, Batman was created off inspirations from cheesy, mystery pulp fictions and grimy, noir detectives. The whole bat costume just kind of tagged along to help appeal to kids. In these early Batman renditions, it was clear to see the artists and authors desperately trying to stick to a hard-boiled detective character, usually at the cost of giving Batman any real substance. He didn’t really have any backstory, nothing haunting him, and not even much movement. He was a slow, often static, figure, slouching in each scene he was drawn. This, too, still aligns with him falling into the hard-boiled detective category. He wasn’t really a character. He wasn’t really Batman.
Fast forward to the early 2010’s and Batman has become a completely different character. No longer is he the same simple detective who barely ever threw a punch. Now, he's a crime-fighting vigilante, sworn to bring justice, even if it needs to be done outside of the law. He works on his own, never really trusting in anyone or confiding in them. When he does build meaningful relationships, Batman fears for their lives, as everyone he has ever cared for (and cared for him back) has been killed by one of his many enemies. Between 1990 and 2015 is where we really started to see the emergence of a man always cloaked in shadow and prowling around the nighttime streets of Gotham for his next crook to bust.
This could just be because tastes in superheroes have changed and the majority of audiences want some epic, shadowed, muscular, face-punching hero rather than a slow, brightly colored, personality-less detective. But, I believe, the way Batman is known now is a direct cause from his increasingly harsh backstory and the weight it adds to him.
Early Batman lacked substance, story, drive, purpose. These things were added on throughout comics as time passed, giving him a tragic backstory with his parents dying and him becoming an orphan, or him watching a long-time enemy kill his prodigy, Robin (just to name some instances). With each new addition to such a blank state character, a darkness grew over the old Batman, consuming it until nothing was left but an abyss filled with loss and rage.
The Batman seen in Batman: Hush is a great example of this change. Where 1930’s Batman lacked emotion and action, Hush Batman was washed in it. Constantly, Hush Batman was depicted covered in shadows, never fully visible. He consisted of majority black, becoming one with the darkness of Gotham. But this darkness was within him as well, clinging to him like a disease, festering in his mind and his heart. His grief and pain and loss and anger all accumulated into his own personal shadow, cast upon him even on the brightest of nights.
Hush Batman is haunted by a past he can’t escape, memories that plague his head: His parents, his childhood friend, his late sidekick, his conflicting love. He can’t run from the grief that accompanies these memories, either. These shadows engulf him and he battles criminals in his own mind, in his own body. In his moments of deep rage, it still is birthed from a place of unimaginable loss. So, instead of running, Batman hides in these shadows, allowing them to craft him into the very monster the criminals he fights are.
“Criminals, by nature, are a cowardly and superstitious lot. To instill fear into their hearts I became a bat. A monster in the night. And in doing so, have I become the very thing that all monsters become… alone…?” (Batman: Hush #610, pg 22).
By design, Batman has become a dark, tortured figure that mirrors that of his enemies. His hunger for justice and vengeance keeps him on the side of good, but it is accompanied by endless grief and pain and sorrow. Then, the rage comes, the violence, and he is no better than those that have made him that way. So, he hides in these shadows. He uses them to instill fear. He fears himself as well, the monster his darkness has made him become. The shadow cast on his heart and mind makes him Batman, Gotham’s hero of the night, but at the high cost of all he holds dear.
-Null
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