25 Years a Batman Fan

I love comics, generally speaking.

More specifically, I love Batman comics. But that hasn’t always been the case. No, my love for Batman came about thanks to a particular film that just happens to be celebrating a notable anniversary today, but first, a little history.

Like a lot of people, I had different “phases” of things I was into as a kid. My earliest memories are of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the hours I would spend watching the original cartoon and playing with their action figures. My interests dipped into comics for a time, around the launch of the X-Men animated series, and the first comic I can remember buying was an issue of Uncanny X-Men.

It’s this one right here, I’m pretty sure:

And while I did generally like superheroes, mutants, and the like (Cyclops was my favorite back then, though as an adult I’ve come to love the greatness of Nightcrawler and Colossus as far as X-Men go), I wasn’t as engrossed in those worlds and properties as I would eventually become.

Along with X-Men, I loved Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and other adaptations of “tokusatsu” series (anyone else remember VR Troopers, Big Bad Beetleborgs, or Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad?), and I got crazy into dinosaurs after I first saw Jurassic Park. Like many of my generation, I wanted to become a paleontologist, I loved that movie so much, but… that obviously didn’t pan out.

1994 was a pretty big year too, with the one-two punch of Gargoyles and ReBoot vying for my attention throughout the year. Gargoyles still stands as one of the greatest animated television series of all time, if you ask me, and ReBoot… well, I still love it for what it is.

The point being that I had a lot of various interests as a kid, and for the most part I still generally enjoy each of them in one way or another.

My love for Batman came a little bit later, though, and was a pretty big turn around from what I initially thought of the character. While I enjoyed the odd episode of the Sixties series that I saw here and there, I distinctly remember seeing the episode “Sideshow” of the Batman animated series and having a particularly foolish thought: in one scene, Batman is seemingly falling to his doom, only to conjur a grappling gun from his belt buckle. Now, I don’t remember the exact words I used after seeing this, but I said something about Batman being dumb because he always has a way out of everything and that’s cheap or something. I don’t know.

Needless to say, I’ve since come to realize that victory is in the preparation.

My memories are hazy in my advancing age, what with this being almost thirty years ago, but I do remember warming to Batman a bit over the next couple of years. He wasn’t necessarily a character that I “got into,” but I liked Batman just fine, without actually loving him.

And then, in the summer of 1995, that all changed.

On June 16 of that year, a movie was released that rocketed me from “Batman kind-of appreciator” to a true, dyed-in-the-wool Batman fan.

That movie was, of course, Batman Forever.

Before this film was released, I know I had seen the first two Burton movies at least once apiece, but clearly neither one made a big enough impact on my adolescent mind to get me into the Caped Crusader.

But Batman Forever did. Sure, the quality of the film itself is highly debatable, and even moreso its depictions of Batman, Robin, the Riddler, Two-Face, and the city of Gotham at large. As a ten-year-old kid, though, sitting in a movie theater, entranced by the movie’s feats of adventure and colors and rousing action set pieces, something finally clicked with this one.

I’d like to be able to point to some aspect of the movie that made me realize how great of a character Batman actually is, or “The Moment” when it all came together and I decided, hey, Batman totally rules. I can’t, because it was one of those things that just… happened. In fact, I don’t even know when I saw the movie, whether it was opening weekend, a few weeks after its release, or in a second-run theater. All I know is I saw Batman Forever in the summer of 1995, and something about it made me fall in love with Batman’s mythos.

Well, okay, let’s be real: it was probably Robin.

Yes, 25-year-old orphan Robin. If Robin is meant to be an audience surrogate, then it worked on me, even if he was 15 years my senior. In fact, it could have been some form self-deprecation, even if I didn’t know what that was at the time: Batman is super cool and awesome, so I couldn’ t be him, but I could be the guy who dresses in bright colors, fights crime by his side, and is just generally Batman’s best friend. What could be a better deal for a 10-year-old kid?

The love and appreciation for Robin colored my affections for all Batman media from there on out. It took a few years, but loving Batman via Forever led me to seek out the then-current animated series, along with diving into comics. I would watch as many episodes of Batman as I could, whenever I could, and would practically schedule my day around episodes of The New Batman Adventures. Much as I loved seeing the episodes with Dick Grayson as Robin, seeing a fellow kid in the red and… well, black was everything I wanted in a cartoon. Since then, there have been aspects of that take of Tim Drake that I don’t like, but that’s a story for another day. The point is, Batman Forever made me love things about Batman that I was able to engage with in media other than a single movie.

Naturally, this included comics, and this is where my general appreciation developed into a genuine and full-fledged love for the medium. The first Batman story I really remember reading was KnightsEnd, the third part of the character-defining Knightfall arc.

Even without the context of the earlier events (reading a bunch of issues of Wizard around this time helped), this story had everything I wanted as a new comic fan: some genuinely epic moments, tons of different characters (I don’t know how I knew who Nightwing was when he was name-dropped in Forever, but I do know that this was the first time I ever read a story in which he was featured), and a sprawling length that invited multiple re-reads. I would pore over the pages again and again, tracing over cool shots of Robin to help depict a hero of my own making in similar adventures.

And that wasn’t the only one either. I would read the trade collections of Legacy, Contagion (yes, out of order), Prodigal, and other popular stories of the era. I read the Knightfall novel from the late, great Denny O’Neil. I kept watching Batman cartoons, even tuning into Cartoon Network to hopefully, maybe catch an episode of Super Friends, and would rewatch Batman Forever dozens of times as well.

Eventually, I got into reading monthly comics, and chose two titles in particular to follow: Nightwing— who has since become my favorite comic character– and Robin. I don’t remember the issue of Nightwing where I jumped on board, but the first issue of Robin I remember buying upon release was #47.

Fittingly, it was an adventure where Robin and Nightwing team up to take on the General, a genuine turd of a villain who is more memorable for what he is (a young kid who fancies himself the greatest military mastermind in history) than what he actually does (hire the NKVDemon and pretentiously soliloquize).

After that single issue, I spent the next several months scouring back issue bins and long boxes to try and get every issue of Robin I could find. All these years later, even after purging a lot of my collection at various times (including a pretty hefty run of Nightwing issues and all of the aforementioned trade paperbacks), I’ve kept all of my Robin issues. It just didn’t feel right to let those go.

Like a lot of fans, my devotion has ebbed and flowed over the years, due less to interest and passion and more to finances. Even after I stopped actively collecting and reading comics for a time, I would still try to stay current with what was going on in the DC Universe, and in the Batman books in particular. I remember picking up the issue of the “Hush” arc that “revealed” that Jason Todd had returned (spoilers: it wasn’t him… well, not yet, anyway), and rolling my eyes that they would dare to bring “the worst Robin” back. I dipped in and out of comics for the better part of a decade, reading a few major stories here and there, but not really sticking with anything for an extended period of time. Again, it’s not because I lacked an interest in the titles, but more that as a young high school graduate, I didn’t have the funds or the storage space to buy too many books.

Even still, I loved Batman, and kept that appreciation alive however I could. Batman Begins was released during this time, and I went into it expecting a pretty decent movie and came out thinking that it was the best Batman movie ever made. That helped stoke the fires of “fandom,” for lack of a better term, and renewed an interest in a character that I really hadn’t lost touch with to begin with.

Since then, my tastes have shifted and changed over time. For a while, I liked darkness and grit and felt that Batman worked best in real-world scenarios. While I certainly respected Adam West’s portrayal in the Sixties television series, I (foolishly) stated that he was “not real Batman.”

I’ve grown wiser over the years, don’t worry.

And then, of course, The Dark Knight came out, which I’m pretty sure reinvigorated everyone’s love for Batman. Sure, it’s a very particular take on Batman, and there are some choices made in that series that I don’t necessarily agree with, but you can’t understate just how important they were to the character and comic book films as a whole, for better or worse.

But I digress. Throughout this time, I remained a fan of the Bat, watching movies, playing video games, and reading comics as most of us do.

And then, in 2014, an opportunity arose. One that– if obtained– would allow me to write about Batman comics and engage and interact with other Batman fans on the web.

That opportunity? Batman-News.com was forming a comic review team.

Needless to say, I “got the gig.” Thanks to the leadership of Andrew Asberry, I joined an elite crew that included Josh McDonald, Elena Carrillo, and Brandon Mulholland, and a finer group of passionate and knowledgeable fans you’re unlikely to find. My first review was for Batman Beyond Universe #10, which was coincidentally enough published six years ago this Sunday.

There are not different “levels” of fandom, because if you like something, you’re a fan. However, if I was a Batman fan before joining the review team, then I’ve become exponentially more so since then. In addition to the weekly titles that I covered, which included the amazing Batman ‘66 that I so foolishly derided once upon a time, I started going back and filling in gaps in my Batman knowledge. I read more comics. Way more comics. I watched television series and movie serials that I never got around to before, like The Batman and, yes, the Sixties TV show.

Besides reading more and growing my knowledge of and love for the character, I’ve also had countless opportunities to interview creators, attend conventions, and break news about the world of Batman in comics. By extension, my ever-growing love for Batman made me love comics in general even more. I’m sure you know our story by now, but it’s because of Batman News that Brian and I connected, and eventually set off to start our own comics website, podcast, and media enterprise*.

So yeah, you could draw a direct line from me seeing Batman Forever to the very existence of Comics Now. I set out to write this piece to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie, and what it meant to me as a kid and even now as a fan, but clearly it ballooned into something more.

Because of Batman Forever, I am a fan of Batman.

Because of Batman Forever, I am a fan of comics.

Because of Batman Forever, I will be a fan for…

Well, you know.

*Kind of a joke, but TBD.