I’m excited to announce that comic historian and site contributor Troy Doliner has launched the latest episode of his stellar project/series/channel on YouTube—The Almanac Comicopia. This brand-new episode focuses on Year One for Golden Age (Earth-2) Batman.
Yours truly (me, Collin!) is the humble narrator on this piece, with some excellent voiceover work by Troy and several other voice actors. We hope you enjoy it.
Please check it out, share the link, and leave some love in the comments!
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween and its coda The Last Halloween together form one of the most intricate meditations on myth, guilt, and recurrence in the modern superhero canon. Across nearly three decades, Loeb’s evolving collaboration with Tim Sale and other artists transforms a murder mystery into a study of narrative itself, revealing how Gotham’s tragedies repeat because its people are bound to reenact them. This essay argues that The Long Halloween constructs ambiguity as its governing principle, dispersing truth among fractured testimonies, while The Last Halloween reinterprets that ambiguity as spiritual recurrence, turning the “Holiday killer” from a person into an idea. Read together, the two works reveal Gotham as a closed moral system, forever staging its own rituals of guilt and purification.
The final issue of Batman: The Long Halloween–The Last Halloween was released recently, and its arrival prompted me to return to the larger saga for another analytical pass. There are new revelations in this story that, while they don’t significantly change The Long Halloween, recolor the story retroactively.
To approach these works on their own terms, one must first understand how The Long Halloween resists the traditional detective story. Its mystery cannot be solved cleanly in the style of Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. Instead Loeb and Sale’s intention was arguably more to create an experience for the reader where the interpretive tools of classic detective fiction like deduction, evidence, and revelation break down. Loeb and Sale replace them with atmosphere, chiaroscuro, symbolism, and psychological implication, transforming the act of detection into an act of interpretation. There is no Poirot-like revelation, no detective standing before a room of suspects to explain how each clue fits together. Instead, Loeb and Sale construct a narrative in which the reader must infer motives, emotional states, and causal links through visual language— expressions, shadows, angles, and pacing—rather than through explicit exposition. This approach places The Long Halloween closer to literary modernism and psychological cinema than to the puzzle-box tradition of Doyle or Christie. Its “solution” is not mathematical but experiential: to understand it, one must inhabit the emotional and moral space of its characters. Like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the work sustains its mystery by withholding authorial confirmation. We are left to question whether events are the product of external malice or internal fracture; specifically, whether Gilda Dent’s monologue is confession, delusion, or symbolic reflection.
In this respect, The Long Halloween belongs to a tradition shared by films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which present the apparatus of investigation only to dismantle it, exposing the fragility of human perception and the futility of definitive truth. Similarly, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) rely on image and atmosphere to communicate meaning that eludes verbal explanation, which is the same technique Sale employs through chiaroscuro, framing, and gesture.
In comics terms, Loeb and Sale’s storytelling sits nearer to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell or Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese than to the linear logic of detective serials. Their panels are designed less to inform than to imply. The reader becomes an active participant, interpreting fragments of evidence, ambiguous smiles, and suggestive silences.
Ultimately, The Long Halloween challenges the notion that a mystery must end with revelation. It insists instead that ambiguity (moral, psychological, and narrative) is not a flaw but the very condition of Gotham itself. Like Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, its meaning resides in the shadows between certainty and doubt. The act of reading becomes an act of investigation, and closure remains forever just out of reach. It is precisely this refusal to provide a single, authoritative explanation that has led many critics to misread The Long Halloween as muddled or incomplete. Because the narrative resists the conventions of closure that dominate mystery fiction, readers accustomed to the deductive clarity of Doyle or Christie often dismiss it as illogical or poorly constructed. In doing so, they mistake ambiguity for incoherence.
Yet the text does contain logically and textually consistent interpretations, even multiple coexisting ‘solutions’ that are supported by its visual and narrative cues. The difference is that The Long Halloween demands a measure of inferential participation from its audience. The clues are present, but they are expressed obliquely: a half-lit face, an unspoken implication, the visual echo of a gesture across time. These details function like the unreliable recollections of Rashomon or the fragmented testimonies of In the Lake of the Woods—evidence that can sustain more than one coherent reconstruction of events.
This ambiguity is not a flaw but a feature of the design. Loeb and Sale invite readers to assemble meaning through intuition and empathy rather than deduction, trusting them to draw conclusions from subtext rather than exposition. When approached in this light, The Long Halloween reveals itself not as a flawed mystery, but as a study in the limits of certainty. It is a work that transforms the act of reading into the final stage of the investigation.
I have organized this essay into three major chapters. The first examines The Long Halloween as a work governed by ambiguity, arguing that its mystery resists closure by design and distributes meaning across perspective, implication, and visual language. The second turns to The Last Halloween, reading it as a spiritual continuation that reframes Holiday not as a culprit to be identified, but as an idea—a recurring psychological mechanism shaped by guilt, longing, and authorship. The third chapter traces Selina Kyle’s journey across the cycle, focusing on her search for belonging, her proximity to Gotham’s myth-making machinery, and the motif of being on the “wrong side,” which ultimately clarifies the saga’s central thematic boundary.
Part I: The Long Halloween—Ambiguity, Authorship, and Interpretation
The Long Halloween is a mystery that refuses the comforts of closure. Its genius lies not in hiding the answer, but in constructing a world where answers themselves are unstable; they are fractured among perspectives, and motives, and facial expressions. In a medium often bound to verbal clarity, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale instead craft a work where meaning is communicated through chiaroscuro and gesture, through what is seen and almost seen. The reader must play detective not only in Gotham, but within the composition of each panel.
Three Confessions, Three Truths: Gilda
The solution, such as it is, is never expository. There is no single speech to tie the threads together; instead, Loeb disperses truth among three competing testimonies: Gilda Dent, Harvey Dent, and Alberto Falcone. Each is partially correct, each partially deceived, and each defined by limited knowledge and self-deception. What results is a mosaic of partial truths that the reader must assemble.
There has been much disagreement through the years on the role of Gilda Dent in The Long Halloween. Reading the final issue, after Alberto’s confession the mystery starts to feel like a case that is closing. All that’s left to do is find Harvey Dent. But then at the end of the issue we get the bizarre monologue from Gilda Dent, who takes credit for the first three Holiday killings. She then exposes that when she witnessed Harvey come home on New Year’s with wet hair she became suspicious, but then later when she found the .22 in the basement that Harvey brought home as evidence, she “knew” that Harvey picked up where she had left off. The secret would be their “child” and the rest of the world could believe it was all Alberto. But this raises many perplexing questions. The most referenced I could find in online discussions was the “seamless handoff problem”. According to Alberto’s confession, he faked his own death on New Year’s Eve and thereby usurped the mantle of Holiday. How could he be sure that the real Holiday would not kill this same night? Why did Gilda abruptly stop the killings in the first place at exactly the right time? To what extent was pure coincidence involved?
My reading of the text suggests that Gilda’s confession is mostly true. Her motives and actions in the early chapters are rooted not in madness but in desperation. She kills Johnny Viti because he was suspected of murdering Richard Daniels, creating a time-consuming case for Harvey. This is evidenced by the phone call she receives just before the panels depicting the preparation of the .22 for the first Holiday killing. Although she does not name Viti when she alerts Harvey of the phone call, one can infer that the caller may have mentioned Viti to Gilda by name. We see her clearly upset and worried that one day Harvey himself may face a fate similar to Daniels.
By removing Viti, she imagines (erroneously) that she can free her husband from the endless prosecution cycle. After all, if there’s no one to prosecute and there are no leads to Viti’s killer then the case should go cold quickly, right? Perhaps not, but it is not a huge leap to accept Gilda could think this way. Her disguise as “Holiday” is not born of a taste for serial murder, but as a cover: a single symbolic gesture meant to mislead investigators and redirect attention to Gotham’s growing freak culture. This short-sightedness suggests Gilda likely thought murdering Viti would be a one-time thing. She chose the Holiday gimmick to throw off the authorities. She states this explicitly in her confession.
She’s not Dexter Morgan. She does not have a compulsive need to kill. It serves a specific end, however misguided.
But tragedy follows quickly. After the Sullivan family bombs the Dents’ home, Gilda strikes again—killing their attackers while maintaining the “Holiday” persona to conceal her identity. Now Gilda’s posture abruptly switches from removing the object of Harvey’s attention to self-preservation and reaction. Her motives remain consistent: eliminate direct threats to her family while preserving anonymity. You may ask how she was able to leave her hospital bed and successfully ambush five mafia soldiers. We will get to that when we discuss The Last Halloween, but for now we are left with this curious panel.
A brief glimmer of optimism follows in the Christmas issue. Harvey buys them a new house; there is talk of having a child; there is an air of rebirth. Unfortunately, it collapses when the Joker invades their home. In the ensuing chaos, Gilda pursues the fleeing Joker and accidentally exposes her identity to Falcone’s personal bodyguard Milos, whom the Joker has just assaulted. The panel sequence shows her appearing and aiming directly at the Joker’s departing car. Milos looks back towards Gilda and likely sees her face in the daylight. She fires a shot at the Joker’s fleeing vehicle. We then see her arm shift angles and fire again, this time at Milos.
It is a silent confession in linework—she has been seen and must silence the witness. Moreover, she could not risk being seen by an employee of the Falcone family, who would surely recognize her. This would put crosshairs directly on the Dent family. So the third Holiday killing was again a circumstantial reaction, and not a premeditation.
From this point, Gilda’s role ends. Her killings of Viti, the Sullivan family, and Milos all have clear motives grounded in self-preservation and love, not on obsession with murder. Her “Holiday” campaign was never meant to continue past the first murder, and only did so due to circumstance. Her later confession is therefore tragic in its sincerity but mistaken in its scope. She believes Harvey continued her work, deducing this from the “wet hair” and .22 in the basement clues, but this belief reveals more about her longing to share Harvey’s moral burden than about events themselves, as we shall see.
Three Confessions, Three Truths: The Usurpers
In truth, Harvey knows nothing of Gilda’s crimes. His crusade against organized crime proceeds independently until Alberto Falcone’s intervention. Alberto, jealous and neglected, stages his own death on New Year’s Eve. Whether he suspects Harvey or simply desires notoriety, he exploits the existing mystery to carve his own identity as the killer. When the real Holiday ceases killing, Alberto finds the stage empty and fills it himself; eliminating rivals and thrill-killing his way toward a grotesque form of self-validation. Specifically, having already seen a kill in December, Alberto decides to take a risk. He stages his own death on New Year’s Eve (still in December). So far there has only been one Holiday killing per month. No matter how the real Holiday killer would react to this, he has decided he is usurping the title. Perhaps he expected Holiday to come after him, in which case he’d be ready. Perhaps there would be multiple simultaneous killings on New Year’s Eve he would find a way to take credit for. Either way, he commits to the gambit. More likely, he heavily suspected it was Harvey (as did the rest of the Falcone family), and usurping the title would likely draw Harvey to him so he could set a trap. But to his surprise, the real Holiday killer disappears. We then see the abrupt shift from murders of those aligned with the Falcone family to the rivals of the Falcone family like Carla Viti, Sal Maroni, as well as to people who could implicate Alberto personally such as the gunsmith and the coroner. If caught, he would then take credit for all the holiday killings to fulfill his own ego. So is there coincidence here? Yes, a bit. But after three Holiday killings there would be no question in anyone’s mind that there is a consistent pattern. With this information, Alberto attempted to preempt Holiday and from his point of view happened to succeed without conflict.
Moreover, there is a gap in the killings from Alberto’s perspective. He knows he faked his own death and so he knows that the real Holiday killer did not kill anyone in January. In February Alberto kills a few of Maroni’s goons and sees that the real killer still does not reappear. There is a sense that he is testing the waters here. From there his killings only get more bold until Boss Maroni himself is dead. Alberto gets addicted to the spectacle of it. His confession later is partly honest: he did fake his death, he did kill several victims, but he lies about the first three. To admit ignorance of the original murders would undercut his legend. If his confession were completely truthful, you could perhaps justify him killing Johnny Viti as the heir of a rival family, but murdering the Sullivan family and Milos becomes a much larger pill to swallow.
That brings us to Two-Face’s confession.
Two-Face becomes a killer only in the final act—murdering Carmine Falcone and Vernon Fields. His confession points to Alberto and himself, but only for the murders of Carmine Falcone and Vernon Fields. I don’t believe Two-Face is trying to protect Gilda here. In fact, it doesn’t seem that he even knows who Gilda is. From Dark Victory:
Loeb takes the split personality concept literally. Harvey Dent and Two-Face do not seem to share memories. They are two different people in one body. The visual cue as to who is speaking is clear from the unhinged speech balloons courtesy of stellar letterer Richard Starkings. This literal personality split is supported often in Dark Victory, as seen with Two-Face’s callous execution of Janice Porter and in the sewer courtroom scene.
Each of the three confessions thus expresses a distinct, subjective truth. Gilda’s is emotionally honest but factually incomplete. Harvey’s is accurate in scope but ignorant of Gilda’s role. Alberto’s is self-serving yet anchored in real deeds. Loeb’s brilliance lies in allowing all three to be simultaneously “true” within their limited fields of knowledge.
The Thematic Synthesis
Re-reading The Long Halloween through this lens clarifies the deliberate architecture of its ambiguity. The narrative’s surface, including its chronology of holidays and crimes, conceals a deeper moral structure about perception and guilt. Even the “gap” in killings between December and February, when Alberto is presumed dead, reinforces the pattern: each participant acts within a vacuum of information, misreading silence as confirmation. Gotham itself becomes a city of misinterpretations.
Sale’s chiaroscuro art reinforces this uncertainty visually. Sale’s Gotham is a city half-drowned in shadow, where truth flickers like light reflected from rain-slick pavement. Every face is halfhidden, every gesture doubly suggestive. The art does the heavy lifting to tell the actual story. Gilda’s shifting gaze, Harvey’s divided profile, and Batman’s silhouette are clues as vital as any line of dialogue.
At the story’s moral center is Batman’s conviction that Harvey Dent remains redeemable. The final chapters affirm that Batman was not wrong to believe in Harvey. Two-Face’s vengeance is limited to Carmine Falcone and Vernon Fields—acts of retribution, not madness. In that sense, The Long Halloween is not about the fall of Harvey Dent but about the world’s failure to see him whole. His duality mirrors Gotham’s: every character caught between truth and self-deception, light and shadow.
What makes The Long Halloween enduring is that it gives readers a choice. One may treat it as an atmospheric crime epic—a stylish fusion of noir and superhero mythology—or engage it as an interpretive puzzle demanding close reading. Had The Long Halloween concluded with a neat exposition dump, it might have been remembered merely for Sale’s uniquely beautiful art. But by refusing that closure and entrusting meaning to the reader, it has endured decades.
Here, then, the first mystery ends not with an answer but with a stance: Gotham’s truths are legible only in shadow, and the reader’s work is to inhabit that ambiguity. Yet Loeb and Sale return to this ground once more, not to tidy the evidence but to test what happens after uncertainty hardens into memory. If The Long Halloween made the reader a detective of meaning, The Last Halloween asks what those meanings do to the people who carry them, how rituals become habits, and how feeling becomes destiny. The question shifts from “Which account is true?” to “Why do these accounts need to be told again?”, representing a turn from solution to recurrence that prepares the way for Gilda Dent’s fractured authorship and Mario Falcone’s inheritance of ruin.
Part II: The Last Halloween—Spiritual Continuity, Exegesis, and the Idea of Holiday
If The Long Halloween is a study in ambiguity via a mystery whose truth fractures across competing testimonies, then The Last Halloween is a study in recurrence. It does not resolve the earlier enigma so much as replay it through the distortions of memory, trauma, and myth. Loeb, Sale, and collaborators return not to explain who Holiday was, but to explore what Holiday means as an idea, a pathology, and a legacy. In doing so, The Last Halloween transforms the mystery’s original question (“Who did it?”) into a psychological one (“Why must it happen again?”). The new series reframes The Long Halloween’s open-endedness through Gilda Dent’s fractured identity and Mario Falcone’s corrupted idealism, revealing that Gotham’s cycle of violence is less a whodunit than a whydunit: a ritual repetition of guilt and purification. Where The Long Halloween left readers in the chiaroscuro between truth and doubt, The Last Halloween dwells in the aftermath—a world where the mask has fused to the face, and the mystery itself has become a condition of being.
While Dark Victory followed The Long Halloween narratively, it did not share its interpretive ambiguity. Despite being a fantastic story, its mystery was more mechanical, its motives clear: Sofia Gigante Falcone—the Hangman—sought revenge against those who helped Harvey Dent murder her beloved father. She adopted a gimmick, as Gilda once had, to mislead the authorities. Her deception was calculated, not psychological. The Last Halloween, by contrast, returns to the spiritual territory of The Long Halloween. It is ambiguous, elliptical, and morally gray. It brings closure to the saga while reviving its essential mystery. The Holiday killings begin anew, only they aren’t killings at all. Is the gunman Gilda? Mario? Two-Face? Calendar Man? What was the plan? Loeb again places the reader in the detective’s seat, asking us to interpret motive from shadow and intent from implication.
The Real Gilda Dent
In The Long Halloween Special—Tim Sale’s final issue and prologue to The Last Halloween—we learn something critical about Gilda Dent. Like a banshee in the moonlight, we see her escaping from a mental institution in Nantucket.
Presumably, this is to where Gilda disappeared after the events of The Long Halloween. However, institutions like these don’t read as places meant merely for acute trauma, but for something deeper and more structural. From here some time passes, but eventually Gilda finds Harvey again three weeks before Halloween. Harvey is elated to see her. We see both Harvey and Two-Face speak, as Two-Face attempts to push her away (Two-Face is now acquainted with Gilda), but she will not be repelled.
The couple moves back to their old home, until one day Gilda is abducted by Calendar Man, who is convinced that Gilda Dent was in fact the original Holiday killer.
Harvey rescues Gilda while Batman distracts the Calendar Man, but Batman leaves us with a narration that prologues The Last Halloween.
This is all a clear signal from Loeb and Sale. Gilda’s confession was true. She was the first Holiday killer, and any solutions to The Long Halloween that dismiss Gilda as a delusional lunatic who imagined herself as Holiday are no longer tenable.
When The Last Halloween starts, we are told that the Dents have been hiding for a year. After an encounter between Catwoman and a recently returned Mario Falcone, who foreshadows his intentions, events kick off quickly. Catwoman is apparently shot. Her body is missing, but Batman and Robin find the classic Holiday-style .22. James Gordon Jr. goes missing while trickor-treating with his parents. Solomon Grundy is abducted, and Two-Face is shot in his side and in his head directly in front of Gilda by three men wearing clown masks. On the final page the lead clown removes his mask and speaks cryptically, confirming that others appear to know about the connection between Gilda and Holiday.
On Christmas, Batman investigates the Dent residence for clues, but finds Gilda under very curious circumstances. She appears to be anticipating both Harvey and Mario.
Batman finds that Gilda is looking after James Jr., and she gives him the following story.
Gilda implicates Mario Falcone as the perpetrator. Batman confronts him, but he contradicts her, and implicates both her and Harvey; explaining that Gilda is worse than Harvey Dent. Gilda is arrested and held at the GCPD jail.
The next time we see Gilda, something is different. She is rescued from the GCPD by Solomon Grundy and this is her reaction.
But this is not Gilda. Gilda has soft features, wide eyes, and arched brows. Her posture tends to fold inward, shoulders rounded. But this person has a hardened face, sharper cheekbones, narrowed eyes, thinner lips. Her body is straightened; she looks taller, almost statuesque. No, this is not Gilda. Here we see Holiday with her face split right down the middle. It is never stated explicitly, but the visual storytelling clearly tells us why she was somehow committed to a mental asylum. But this was not the first time we have seen Holiday’s face; Holiday has narrated once before.
This recolors The Long Halloween. Playing by Loeb and Sale’s rules, the split personalities do not share memories. Gilda is not necessarily aware if or when she is Holiday. The strange red herring where Gilda confronts Harvey about the .22 is clarified as Gilda genuinely suspects Harvey may be the killer. Gilda is not the ruthless, efficient killer—Holiday is. Whenever Gilda and Harvey are threatened, Holiday emerges to take control. This fact also recolors Harvey and Gilda’s relationship, as their common mental illness at least partially explains their connection and why they are drawn to each other at such a deep level.
The next time we see Gilda, she (as herself) is being escorted to see Harvey by Dr. Thorne, who explains to her that after his brain surgery, Harvey may not even recognize her. Perplexed by this, Gilda meets Two-Face who refers to her as “Mrs. Dent” and questions why she is visiting him. This frustrates Gilda, causing Holiday to re-emerge. Taking Two-Face by surprise, she manages to overpower him and nearly strangle him to death, demanding her husband back. She is only stopped by Solomon Grundy who removes her from the room. Not only do we get a sense of how physically capable Holiday is, but it is now clear that Holiday sees Two-Face as an enemy who threatens Harvey. In her dissociation, Holiday does not seem to necessarily understand that killing Two-Face implies Harvey’s death as well, or at the very least, she is willing to take more chances with his life to recover Harvey.
The next informative appearance of Gilda (as herself) is when she brings the Calendar Man to Two-Face at his hideout at the old burned out Falcone mansion and informs Two-Face of his and Gilda’s unborn child. She still believes she is talking to Harvey, but curiously she manipulates him with what we later learn to be a lie.
Lastly, we get the big reveal. Batman and Robin discover that Mario Falcone was committed to a particular mental asylum, as was Gilda under an alias. The video footage of Gilda’s escape reveals Mario’s phony FBI agents assisting Gilda’s escape. Batman and Robin conclude that Mario and the Dents were involved with this new bout of Holiday shootings since the beginning. We then see the form of Gilda as Holiday finally names herself and confirms that she has been working with Mario, and the plot to shoot Two-Face in the head was their shared plan. Gilda tells Mario that Two-Face knows about the baby, implying an urgency to act. Holiday is clearly manipulating Mario, as she fails to mention it was she who told him about the child; she never mentioned Mario to Two-Face; and also the phrasing makes it seem like Holiday means that the baby is hers and Mario’s, not hers and Harvey’s. She is instigating something, and from the conversation earlier with Two-Face, we learn that both Holiday and Gilda are willing to lie (apparently to the people they love) to achieve their goals.
The Tragedy of Mario Falcone
The exact role of Mario Falcone is left ambiguous throughout The Last Halloween, but we can assemble a list of facts. We know from Dark Victory and The Long Halloween Special that Mario burns down his family estate and was subsequently sent to a mental asylum for some time. We know also from Dark Victory that Mario Falcone despises that his family is a criminal organization, as evidenced by his cooperation with the police and his acting against Sofia. He wanted his family to be legitimate and respected like the Waynes.
We know that both of his siblings turned out to be prolific serial killers. It is also clear that Mario despises the freaks as well for destroying his family—especially Two-Face. We see clues throughout the story of his involvement in the new Holiday shootings; a Sicilian-style message to Gordon about Grundy, a .22 in his safe. The revelation with Holiday confirms that Mario was the thug wearing the clown mask who shot Two-Face in the head. We know that despite being involved in the new Holiday shootings, Mario was viciously attacked by someone dressed as Holiday on Valentine’s Day, most likely Julian Day since Mario nervously asks which Holiday is standing in his room.
From the scene in the jail after Mario is rescued by Batman, we know that Mario has some kind of pact with Selina. His mother Louisa Falcone has a special hold over him, as she convinces him to finish his work and retake the Falcone empire.
Lastly, we know that Mario is in some kind of romantic, manipulative relationship with Holiday. We also know that this relationship is specifically with Holiday and not Gilda, as Gilda implicates Mario in the kidnapping of James Jr. and Mario denounces Gilda to Batman.
Given what we learn about Gilda and Mario, and what we already know about Two-Face, we can now dissect their motives.
Holiday’s Plan and the Eschaton at Arkham Asylum
At first glance, the scheme that unites Holiday and Mario Falcone appears contradictory, even schizophrenic. It is a web of maimings, kidnappings, and shifting allegiances that resists linear explanation. Read as the product of Gilda’s fractured psyche, however, the details resolve into a grim, internally consistent logic. Let’s go through each shooting and the major events one-by-one.
• Halloween. Selina shoots herself in the leg with a .22 and flees to Arkham for medical treatment (more on why she did this in Part III). The pistol and a smashed pumpkin are left on the ground where her body should have landed. Two-Face is shot by a group of thugs wearing clown masks. We know the shooter is Mario. It seems Holiday and Mario, in consultation with Dr. Thorne, planned to restore Harvey in an incredibly risky way by inflicting targeted brain damage. We saw already in the sewer that Holiday is willing to risk Harvey’s life to bring him back. An unwitting Gilda is present at the scene of the shooting and is horrified by what she witnesses. It is unclear why Mario asks her to talk about Holiday. Perhaps he explains to her Holiday’s plan to get Harvey back and destroy Two-Face forever; and the manipulation she may need to commit should it not work. Beforehand, Solomon Grundy is abducted and sent to the bottom of the bay. This is understandable as Grundy is Two-Face’s bodyguard and would need to be removed to get close to Two-Face. Lastly, James Gordon Jr. is abducted. Why? Well, we know from the Penguin that Gilda ordered it. Its purpose seems to primarily be to help Gilda fulfill her fantasy of raising a child.
• Thanksgiving Eve. The Penguin is shot by a group of thugs wearing Scarecrow masks. He begs for his life saying he won’t talk. He is clearly referring to his involvement in the James Gordon Jr. abduction. The thugs spare his life and he is sent to Arkham for medical treatment (presumably by Mario’s phony FBI agents who arrive at the scene).
• Christmas Eve. A group of thugs wearing Batman masks shoot the Riddler. He is maimed such that he cannot write or speak, presumably to make him incapable of communicating with Batman. The FBI agents insist he go to Arkham despite their location being a larger distance from the nearest hospital. Batman finds James Gordon Jr. with Gilda, who blames Mario for the abduction. Batman confronts Mario, who rebukes Gilda, but accidentally shoots Batman. In the scuffle, Batman injures Mario’s leg.
• New Year’s Eve/Day. There is no shooting. Batman and Robin correctly point out that Gilda is in jail and Mario is nursing an injured leg at the time. Gilda is freed from jail by Solomon Grundy. Robin inadvertently empties Arkham Asylum, but the Joker mysteriously vows to catch all the released inmates.
• Valentine’s Day. The nature of the killings changes. Instead of masked thugs maiming costumed criminals, now Holiday (or most likely Julian Day dressed as Holiday) attacks Mario directly, injuring him and killing his two phony FBI agents. We don’t know the exact circumstances of this behavior but we know that the inmates being released from the Asylum likely threw a wrench in Holiday and Mario’s plan of collecting costumed freaks at Arkham. It seems the Joker was their contingency (hence their shootings stopped), but Calendar Man, having just been released from Arkham Asylum, has usurped the Holiday mantle unilaterally and attacked Mario. Mario and Holiday are somehow aware of this, which is why Mario asks Holiday which one he or she is in a panic just before the battle. Calendar Man essentially admits this later after being caught by the real Holiday. It is unclear how Mario/Holiday convinced the Joker to play his role, but he may have thought the pitched battle idea would be entertaining. In any case, the Joker does indeed begin bringing the freaks back to Arkham.
• St. Patrick’s Day. Holiday (Gilda) learns from Dr. Thorne that the plot to bring Harvey back via gunshot to the head and brain surgery has failed. Holiday (Julian Day) shoots Mr. Freeze and injures Robin to escape.
• April Fool’s Day. We see Mario is held hostage by Catwoman (under mind control) and Poison Ivy. After Batman intervenes to rescue Mario, Poison Ivy is maimed by Holiday (Julian Day). The real Holiday maims and captures him. It is unclear why Day has switched to maiming costumed criminals. He likely maimed Robin to avoid being caught (as he was being chased by Robin) and to continue his hunt for Mario and Holiday. He may have maimed Poison Ivy because he somehow knew she was holding Mario and did not get the chance to interrogate her. In any case, Day knows about the pitched battle at Arkham from the beginning and wants Batman present to stop Holiday.
• Father’s Day. Holiday shoots Batman at the ruined Falcone estate to prevent him from apprehending Two-Face before the battle.
• The Roman’s birthday. The Falcone family has mustered soldiers from the old country under the leadership of the newly returned matriarch Louisa Falcone. Mario will lead them into battle. Two-Face suspects that Gilda’s news about a child was a lie as the dates do not align. This manipulation places Two-Face at Arkham Asylum where he is there to confront Dr. Thorne and investigate his medical records just before the assault. His conversation with the Joker implies he knows what is coming, and the coin toss seals his fate. Batman and Robin discover the connection between the Dents and Mario. Batman discovers a shooting trophy for a Gilda Powell, indicating a history of marksmanship and recoloring The Long Halloween (especially her ability to outshoot the Sullivan family). Holiday manipulates Mario and sets the assault on Arkham in motion.
• Halloween. The assault begins.
Holiday is not simply a relapse into violence; it is Gilda’s defense mechanism elevated into a delusional, ideological, but purposeful attempt to “cure” Gotham City by forcing its two diseases, the mob and the freaks, to destroy each other in a pitched battle.
Gilda’s stated aim is the key—that anything she did was to be with Harvey.
She cannot recover her husband as he once was, nor can she accept his metamorphosis into Two-Face. Her subconscious answer is annihilation: if she cannot bring Harvey back to a sane world, she will instead make the world as deranged as the two of them. The Holiday persona becomes the instrument of that purification. By resurrecting the pattern of ritual shootings from The Long Halloween, she re-enacts the trauma that defined their marriage, but now with the larger target of the entire ecosystem that tore them apart.
The apparent mercy of the maimings thus conceals strategic intent. Each wound drives a “freak” to Arkham Asylum, concentrating Gotham’s monstrosities in one containment site. Why not murder the freaks one-by-one? Well, then they would not be present as an opposing force to cripple the mob. As such, Arkham becomes the crucible where gangsters and costumed criminals will collide. What looks like randomness is actually herding behavior: Holiday is engineering a final holiday in which the city’s twin infections—organized crime and super-villainy—are lured into open war and mutual annihilation. In doing so, she unwittingly mirrors Batman’s own metaphor for Gotham’s illness: Thomas Wayne’s dictum that a doctor must let the fever burn before operating.
Gilda’s mistake is believing she can accelerate that process through violence; she cuts into the wound while it is still septic.
Mario Falcone, meanwhile, mistakes her mania for shared purpose. He, too, despises both mobsters and freaks for desecrating his father’s legacy and ruining his family’s honor. In Holiday he finds a zealot whose madness can serve his restoration fantasy. She believes she is clearing the path for love’s rebirth; he believes he is reclaiming Gotham for the Falcone name, a love, and a new family.
Two-Face was lured to Arkham Asylum by Gilda’s ruse, but has an opportunity to destroy the Falcone family once and for all. Calendar Man’s cryptic description of two men who hated each other and one person who knew and maybe even loved them both captures this unholy alliance precisely. The “two men” are Mario and Two-Face, and the “one person” is Holiday, the manipulator who unites their hatred into a single self-destructive idea: Holiday as purification.
The final siege of Arkham, then, is not chaos but culmination. It is the fever breaking. But the annihilation never happens. Batman intervenes and things fall apart for Holiday. In Batman’s version of the metaphor, Holiday is the infection. All the costumed freaks and gangsters being drawn into one place gives him the opportunity to operate surgically and dismantle Holiday’s plan. Batman disarms both the mob and the freaks before their battle becomes too deadly.
Things Fall Apart
Holiday’s machinations collapse when Batman disarms the opposing forces and Selina informs Mario off-panel that Holiday’s pregnancy is a farce and thus Mario’s future was a lie. After realizing he was manipulated by both Holiday and his mother Louisa into becoming a criminal, he snaps. The final confrontation takes place between Batman and Robin, Two-Face, Gilda, Commissioner Gordon, and Mario. Mario is holding Gilda at gunpoint, and Two-Face realizes when the gunman removes his clown mask that Mario was the one who shot him. She pleads for Harvey to take control again, and Mario threatens to finish the job he started with Two-Face. This triggers Gilda’s defense mechanism and Holiday re-emerges. She wrestles the gun from Mario and shoots him, though reluctantly. We see that Holiday did indeed love Mario, but not enough to override her primary purpose. This act reawakens Harvey for the first time in the entire series.
Gilda has gotten her Harvey back, but when he returns he sees how sick she has become, having missed all of the events of The Last Halloween. After executing Mario, Harvey offers to surrender to Gordon in exchange for Gilda receiving help instead of prosecution. Gilda has restored Harvey, but ironically they cannot be together.
All of which returns us to the only question that matters in Gotham: not who wore the mask, but what the mask became.
The Idea of Holiday
In the end, The Last Halloween closes the circle not by naming a killer but by confronting what the name Holiday has become. Calendar Man’s pronouncement—“A Holiday is not a he or a she. It is an idea…”—reframes the entire saga in mythic terms. The murders were never only acts of violence but rituals in a city addicted to repetition, each echo proving how small a spark is needed to reignite Gotham’s fever. The “little gun” becomes an instrument of contagion: proof that terror in Gotham does not depend on identity or raw power, only on symbol. In this view, Holiday is less a person than a pattern, an idea that re-embodies itself whenever love, guilt, or justice turn inward and consume their host—replacing agency with ritual performance. It is the city’s seasonal heartbeat and its dark liturgy repeating in new guises.
Yet Batman’s closing reflection insists on the inverse truth: The Long Halloween was about one man: Harvey Dent. By grounding the myth back in the tragedy of a single soul, Batman resists Calendar Man’s fatalism. He sees in Harvey not a symptom but a person, a man whose crusade against corruption became another mask in Gotham’s masquerade. Loeb and his collaborators let both readings stand, unresolved but interdependent. Calendar Man speaks for Gotham’s eternal recurrence, Batman for its flicker of redemption; between them lies the essence of noir—a world where the human and the mythic perpetually blur. The “idea of Holiday” is thus the city’s curse and its confession: every act of salvation risks becoming performance, and every performance hides a plea to be saved.
If Gilda Dent embodies the inward collapse of Gotham’s myths, Selina Kyle embodies the outward yearning they leave behind. That is, a longing for order, for identity, and for a family she can never fully claim.
Part III: When in Rome—Legacy, Yearning, and the Wrong Side
If Harvey Dent represents Gotham’s fractured conscience and Gilda Dent its private mythology, then Selina Kyle represents something far more elusive: the city’s yearning. Across The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and When in Rome, Selina moves not between sides but between the identities of thief, vigilante, lover, and heir. She adopts each of these in response to an unspoken absence she carries within her. She orbits the Falcone family not out of loyalty or greed but from the need to anchor herself to a lineage, or a belonging she has never possessed. Unlike Harvey and Gilda, whose identities collapse under the weight of Gotham’s myths, Selina continually reinvents herself in an effort to outrun hers. As the phrase “when in Rome” suggests, Selina is adaptive, and her arc is therefore existential. In tracing her journey—her fixation with the Roman, her thwarted intimacy with Bruce, her flight to Italy, and her final confrontation with the truth of her origins—we find a character shaped less by crime or heroism than by the persistent ache of wanting a family, wanting a past, and wanting to know which side she ought to be on. Understanding this longing is essential to understanding The Last Halloween, where Selina’s critique of Batman and Gotham ossifies into the clearest articulation of what it means to stand on the “wrong side” in a city defined by masks, myths, and competing visions of order.
Before The Last Halloween and before her self-imposed exile to Italy in When in Rome, Selina Kyle’s trajectory through The Long Halloween and Dark Victory reveals a character defined not by villainy or opportunism, but by yearning and a persistent gravitational pull toward the Falcone family. Her scenes across these works form a parallel narrative presented as a psychological contour map that charts her attempts to locate herself within Gotham’s shifting structures of power, order, and identity. Long before she articulates it aloud, Selina’s actions betray an emptiness she is desperate to fill, even as she performs the role of the aloof, unflappable thief.
Origins of a Fixation
Throughout The Long Halloween we see Selina primarily acting as a foil to Carmine Falcone. She is constantly robbing him, spying on him, interfering with his business and thwarting his plans. Selina’s first appearance in The Long Halloween shows her robbing the Falcone penthouse. Shortly afterward, she intentionally allows herself to be seen spying on Batman, Harvey Dent, and Commissioner Gordon. She does this not for strategic advantage, but for Batman’s attention. She offers him the location of a warehouse full of Falcone money. This tip results in Batman and Harvey setting Falcone’s cash pile ablaze. Her involvement is neither cleanly heroic nor criminal. Instead, she appears almost testing the boundaries of allegiance, as if seeking a role neither Batman nor the Falcone empire is ready to define for her.
When Alberto Falcone is apparently murdered on New Year’s Eve, Selina intervenes in Batman’s tense confrontation with Carmine Falcone by disarming the Roman with a bola. She flees, but Batman catches her (both literally and metaphorically). She leaves a small scratch across his lip. The next night, on her Valentine’s Day date with Bruce Wayne, she teasingly asks if he “cut himself shaving.” The implication lands heavily: she knows more than she lets on, and Bruce knows she knows. Their dance of half-truths has begun.
Their connection deepens when Bruce falls under Poison Ivy’s control, who then enacts financial maneuvers favorable to Carmine Falcone. Selina senses something wrong immediately and rescues him by breaking Ivy’s hold. Later, Batman privately acknowledges, “I owe Catwoman much.” This admission underscores a dynamic that Selina will repeatedly try to define: she wants recognition and to be someone on whom Bruce depends and trusts.
Her fascination with the Falcone family resurfaces poignantly on Father’s Day, when she spies on Carmine and Sofia from afar. When Carmine brushes past his daughter’s affectionate gesture, Sofia’s face falls as she quietly utters, “Poppa…” Selina reacts to this (listening through the microphone) in an angered or disgusted way. She appears to be angry at Carmine for his minimal acknowledgement of Sofia’s gift. This empathy for Sofia will present itself again.
Her conversations with Bruce grow more intimate. On Independence Day, she presses him to “let go” of Gotham, but the subtext is that he should let go of his role as the social face of Gotham. That is, he should abandon the billionaire performance he hides behind. Selina has no interest in the champagne galas or the empty social rituals of Bruce Wayne; she wants him to admit that the mask he wears by day is the true façade. “I know places,” she tells him, “things we could do together,” hinting not at domestic escape but at a life lived openly in the shadows. She wants them to live together as fellow creatures of the night rather than as a socialite and a thief. When the Bat-Signal ignites the sky, she removes the ambiguity: “Like that.” The moment encapsulates their unspoken understanding. Both know who the other really is beneath the mask, and Selina is offering Bruce a freedom he almost never allows himself: the chance to stop pretending to be Bruce Wayne at all—and to live, openly, as the man she knows he truly is.
When Catwoman assists Batman in defeating Scarecrow, she again floats the idea of escape and partnership. Batman focuses on the Roman, and it reminds her of the gulf between them. She retreats: “Your loss.” Selina’s ambiguity reaches a breaking point when Batman catches her spying on Falcone yet again and demands to know why she is always near the Roman. She invites candidness by playfully suggesting they “trade secrets”, but when Bruce inadvertently hurts her while grabbing her arm, she realizes the wall between them is not coming down. She offers a cryptic explanation and quickly vanishes.
At the climax, when Gotham’s “freaks” assault the Falcone penthouse, Catwoman is already inside. Batman asks which side she’s on—the story’s first explicit invocation of the motif of choosing sides. “The same side I’m always on,” she replies. It is neither a dodge nor a declaration, because Selina’s loyalties are not ideological—they are emotional, and nowhere is this clearer than in her reaction to Sofia. When Two-Face executes Carmine, Sofia charges him in a rage, and Selina instinctively leaps onto her back to restrain her. The gesture reads as personal. From her rooftop spying, Selina has watched Sofia struggle for acknowledgment from a father who withholds affection in ways painfully familiar to her. The two women are not friends, but they occupy adjacent emotional terrain as daughters of a man who may never claim them. Selina’s intervention can therefore be read as an attempt to save Sofia, to keep her from being shot at point-blank range by Two-Face. At the same time, it may reflect Selina’s own conflicted desires: to prevent another murder she feels symbolically entangled in, or even to witness Two-Face’s retribution against Carmine Falcone without letting that violence consume the only Falcone daughter who mirrors her longing. Sofia crashes through a window and falls, apparently to her death, and the ambiguity of Selina’s presence remains. She may have suspected Two-Face’s intentions toward the Roman and come to see them fulfilled—yet in the end, her impulse is not to celebrate the killing but to cling, however briefly, to the fragile thread of kinship she imagines between herself and Sofia.
In The Long Halloween, Selina Kyle’s motives produce neither a heroic arc nor a villainous one. Instead, they reveal a woman suspended between worlds. She is drawn to the Falcone dynasty, drawn to Batman, but belongs to neither.
Outlines of Abandonment
Dark Victory extends this psychological thread. Selina attends the Roman’s funeral—an act Batman cannot ignore. Her presence signals something deeper than opportunism to Batman: she is mourning a man she who is connected to her in ways she has not yet revealed. The next day, she brings Mario Falcone to Wayne Manor, positioning him as the legitimate heir to the Falcone legacy. This is extraordinary: it establishes that Selina is operating within the inner circle of the family she once robbed. Whether she sees in Mario a brother, a mirror, a possible answer, or merely a political actor is left deliberately ambiguous, but her proximity to the family is unmistakable.
On a rooftop, she warns Batman that the Falcone family intends to kill his friend Harvey Dent. When Batman coldly asserts that Harvey is “not a friend,” she slaps him. “I hope you’ll show a little more interest when they come after me,” she adds. Again, the plea for emotional acknowledgement undercuts her bravado.
Bruce and Selina share a brief, tender moment at Thanksgiving, but Bruce is distant. On Christmas, he stands her up. She waits until after midnight, heart sinking, before walking out. Bruce visits Selina after New Year’s with a hollow excuse about a missed flight. Selina declares the relationship over, but then, in a gesture that betrays the depth of her yearning, tells him to stay.
Her search for Carmine’s body (per a tacit agreement with Sofia) leads to one of the defining sequences of Loeb and Sale’s portrayal of Catwoman. After tracking down the Riddler, coercing him into helping her, and infiltrating the morgue, she awakens in a cremation chamber just before burning alive. Batman rescues her. In the aftermath, she confronts him:
“What am I to you? An ally, competition, a criminal?”
“No secrets,” she pleads. “Take off the masks.”
Selina yearns to belong fully to his world and to have his full trust, but Batman ignores the emotional stakes and interrogates her about her connection to the Falcones. Her face falls. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says, departing with the same bitter refrain from The Long Halloween: “Your loss.”
Selina then leaves Gotham in the quiet devastation of realizing there is simply no place for her in Bruce Wayne’s life as he lives it. Her parting note makes this painfully clear. She recounts being stood up on Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and now Valentine’s Day, understanding at last that Bruce’s world has no room for someone like her, and perhaps—she admits with a moment of self-awareness—that the reverse may also be true. She does not accuse him of mistrust outright; instead, she mourns the distance he maintains and the way he retreats into duty whenever intimacy approaches. Her letter is less an ultimatum than a confession of exhaustion: she cannot keep waiting for a man who is never truly present. “I don’t want to be found,” she writes, a line that lands with unusual finality. Selina is running from the ache of wanting something Bruce cannot give. Rome becomes the only place left to go when Gotham offers no answers and Bruce Wayne has no space for her. If she cannot belong in Batman’s world, perhaps she can still find a family in the Falcones.
The Ghosts of Rome
Selina’s exile to Italy in When in Rome fails to distance her from Gotham; instead, it pulls Gotham deeper into her psyche. Rome becomes a stage upon which her unresolved fears, desires, and memories reenact themselves in distorted form. The dreams that punctuate the story serve as psychological case studies, each peeling back a layer of Selina’s identity. Through them, Loeb and Sale reveal that Selina’s quest is for a stable sense of self that has always eluded her, and that she is haunted by a conflated form of both Batman and Carmine Falcone.
Selina’s first dream in Rome is the most direct fusion of her two gravitational centers: Batman and Carmine Falcone. In the dream, she confronts Batman, who repeats the phrase she once said to Batman: “No secrets.” When she removes his cowl, she does not find Bruce Wayne beneath it, but Carmine Falcone. The Roman immediately shoots her. This is the emotional grammar of Selina’s psyche made literal. Both are unreachable men that she wants to share her life with in different ways. That removing Batman’s mask reveals Carmine suggests that Selina’s search for intimacy and her search for identity are entangled. Love and lineage are indistinguishable to her. Both promise belonging, both withhold it, and both wound her. The Roman shooting her articulates a lifelong fear that discovering the truth of her origins will be the thing that destroys her.
In the next dream, Selina senses Batman approaching her with a gun. She awakens and violently tackles Blondie, who is standing beside her bed. The dream expresses another facet of her internal conflict: the fear that trusting Batman (or anyone) will leave her vulnerable. Her body reacts before her mind can interpret the scene; she defends herself against an imagined betrayal. This anticipatory defensiveness speaks to a lifelong pattern: Selina strikes first because she assumes no one will protect her. Her attack on Blondie is more than a jump-scare reflex. It is the embodiment of her anxiety around intimacy. Even in sleep, she cannot allow herself to be caught off guard. The dream is not about Batman harming her, but about the impossibility of letting her guard down.
After sustaining injuries on the boat, Selina dreams again. This time she lies on an operating table, Batman looming over her in a surgical mask, scalpel raised. He tells her he is trying to save her. She accuses him of “dissecting every little part” of who she is. Then she calls him “Bruce. This dream is one of the most revealing in the saga. It dramatizes three layers of Selina’s psychology: She subconsciously acknowledges Batman is Bruce Wayne. Even in sleep, her mind connects the two masks, refusing the artificial divide Bruce maintains.
She also fears that intimacy means being cut open and judged. To be “saved” by Batman here is to be dissected and to have her identity examined and possibly invalidated. Her deeper fear is plain: If Bruce truly saw her inner self, he might reject it.
The dream mirrors her emotional reality in Gotham. Batman investigates her motives, Bruce refuses to share his truth, and both “study” her without inviting her in. On the table, Selina voices what she cannot say aloud: “You’ll never accept me for who I really am.” The scalpel becomes the symbol of her existential dread: that the truth of her identity (whatever its shape) cannot survive scrutiny. The dream that follows is a memory reframed through longing. Selina recalls her robbery of the Roman’s penthouse from Batman: Year One: the break-in, the scratches across Carmine’s face, the escape into the Gotham night. What fixes in her mind is the object she found hidden in his safe—a locket containing a photograph of Carmine and Louisa Falcone holding an infant. This is the primal scene of her obsession.
What makes the moment so revealing is how little it logically proves, and how much Selina demands from it. There is nothing in the photograph to indicate the child is her. It could be Sofia. It could be a relative. It could be anyone in a sprawling crime family. But Selina’s reasoning is not evidentiary, but rather it is emotional: Because the photo is hidden in a safe, the child must be a secret. And if the Falcone family has a secret daughter, then that daughter must be Selina. The concealment of the locket becomes, in her mind, proof of a concealed lineage.
The locket offers ambiguity, but Selina’s hunger converts ambiguity into certainty. It does not reveal a fact so much as offer a myth capable of filling the void of her unknown past. She clings to it, even as Batman insists she return it. In the dream, he is not a moral voice but an obstacle to the only narrative that makes her feel chosen rather than discarded. Faced with a choice, Selina chooses the story she needs over the truth she cannot bear, even if it makes no logical sense at all.
As Rome unravels around her, Selina dreams a final time. This time she dreams of Batman appearing in her room to confess that he loves her. They kiss. The dream is tender, simple, idealized. And… she wakes up kissing the Riddler. This is the most heartbreaking dream because it reveals the core truth of her exile: Selina wants love to be easy, and it never is. Not with Bruce, not with Gotham, not with her imagined past. Where the other dreams are nightmares of identity, this one is a fantasy of emotional resolution. It is the dream she wishes were real and the only one that perhaps never will be.
Selina’s journey ends with the discovery of Louisa Falcone, now a nun in a remote monastery. Louisa resembles Selina, echoing the visual cue that began Selina’s entire obsession. But Louisa denies everything. She claims to have only one daughter—Sofia. Again, Selina is rejected by a f igure she hoped would accept her, and again, she leaves heartbroken. But the truth is subtler and more cruel: Louisa immediately orders Blondie to kill Selina after she departs. Louisa knows exactly who Selina is.
When Blondie later confesses that Louisa lied—that there was a second daughter, hidden away to preserve the family’s standing—the tragedy becomes complete. Selina gains only a story, not proof. Only circumstantial hints, never certainty. Even the truth is given to her by a dying man. She returns to America with the Capo di Capi ring but without closure. Rome has answered nothing. The ache remains.
The dreams in When in Rome are not surreal interludes but the internal architecture of Selina Kyle’s character: her longing for family; her fear of intimacy; her unresolved identity; her displacement between Batman and the Falcones; and her inability to fully trust the world (or herself). Rome does not give Selina answers; it gives her a mirror that reflects her own insecurities and sense of unfulfillment. She lacks a place to belong, a story to inherit, and someone who might finally choose her. Crucially, when she returns from Italy at the end of Dark Victory, Selina begins to recognize these patterns for what they are. Standing at Carmine Falcone’s grave, she accepts that she can never prove what she believes, and chooses to say goodbye anyway. In doing so, she achieves psychological closure without narrative certainty. This is the moment Selina diverges from Gilda’s trajectory—refusing the Holiday mechanism by allowing ambiguity to remain unresolved, rather than be consumed by it.
Transcendence
Selina Kyle is the only character in The Long Halloween saga who feels the full force of Gotham’s myth-making machinery and still refuses to let it define her. In The Last Halloween, she is placed closer than any other character to the psychological mechanism that produced Holiday—and, critically, she does not cross it. Where others allow longing, guilt, or rage to crystallize into identity, Selina recognizes the pattern as it forms and resists its final consolidation. If Gilda Dent’s tragedy was giving the idea of Holiday a body, Selina Kyle’s clarity lies in understanding that idea while refusing to become it. She sees that Holiday was never simply a killer, but the endpoint of a process: what happens when emotion overwhelms selfhood and narrative replaces choice. Selina feels the same consuming forces that produce Holiday—abandonment, desire, the hunger for meaning—but she never allows them to overwrite her sense of self. Where others harden feeling into destiny, Selina holds it at arm’s length. She experiences the Holiday impulse without surrendering to it.
Her arc in The Last Halloween unfolds across three movements that mirror—and ultimately interrupt—the Holiday pattern: her brief induction into Bruce Wayne’s family myth, her seduction by the Falcone family myth, and her final confrontation with Batman over belonging, identity, and what it truly means to be on the “wrong side.”
Selina’s first major appearance in The Last Halloween quietly reopens the wound that began her journey in When in Rome. Once again prowling the Falcone penthouse, she stops before the large portrait of Carmine and Louisa Falcone. It is unmistakably the same image as the one in the locket—but here the infant is missing. The frame has been altered. The child erased.
If a locket hidden in a safe suggested a secret, this public portrait with its most meaningful element removed suggests something more disturbing: a secret actively denied. Selina asks Mario where the rest of the painting is. He appears genuinely confused. She quietly vanishes before he can answer. Even after her graveyard goodbye, the portrait still pulls her back, although this time she retreats more quietly than usual—letting go is an iterative process.
Later, Selina encounters Robin speaking with Calendar Man in Arkham Asylum. She does not know who the boy is, but she understands immediately that he matters to Batman. And because she understands how myths consume the vulnerable, she intervenes.
Selina does not act out of heroism, nor out of authority, but out of recognition. She understands how Calendar Man operates—how he feeds on fixation, on the desire to matter, on the hunger to be seen. She recognizes in Robin the same vulnerability Gotham once exploited in herself.
Selina’s intervention here is the inverse of the idea of Holiday. The idea of Holiday preys on obsession. Selina interrupts it. In doing so, she reveals her role in the saga: not as a creator of myth, but as someone who has learned how easily myth devours those who mistake longing for destiny.
Later, when Mario accidentally shoots Batman, the Batmobile autopilots home and crashes into the Batcave. Alfred and Robin restore Bruce’s heartbeat and remove the bullet, but he falls into a coma. Alfred tells Robin that survival cannot be forced.
“He and he alone needs to find the will to live.”
Days pass. Robin despairs. And in a moment that is reckless, questionable, and unmistakably childlike, he decides to give Batman something no medicine can provide: a reason. So he abducts Catwoman. Robin gasses her, drags her unconscious body into the Batmobile, and brings her into the Batcave. Finally, she stands in the inner sanctum of Batman’s mythology. When Selina awakens—furious and disoriented—her anger dissolves the moment she sees Batman lying motionless on the table. The mask is still on. The body beneath it is fragile. She leans close and whispers in his ear. What she says (as we learn later) is not comfort or confession, but accusation: “You’re on the wrong side.” The words and a kiss restore him.
This moment solidifies Selina’s relationship to the idea of Holiday. Holiday represents Gotham’s belief that identity is forged through violence, sacrifice, and spectacle. Selina offers a counterforce: identity as choice. Batman does not awaken because of love or duty, but because Selina challenges the story he has been telling himself. He thinks he’s outside Gotham’s rituals, but he’s already living one—he just calls it the mission. Batman is willing to die for the mission. Her whisper subconsciously reorients him, returning agency where myth threatened to calcify.
After Bruce recovers, Selina asks him about Robin—who he is to Batman, what he means to him. It is a rare moment of vulnerability. She wants to understand Bruce’s emotional architecture, the system of attachments that gives his life meaning. Bruce responds by asking why she went to Rome.
“You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine,” she says.
This is the oldest wound between them. Selina cannot trust a man who withholds his truth, and Bruce cannot risk intimacy without losing control of his myth. Despite Selina’s reorienting whispers, he walks away again, having come to his prior senses. She curses him in frustration, having only almost gotten through to him.
After Batman rescues Selina from Poison Ivy—mirroring the rescue she once performed for Bruce—Selina confronts Louisa Falcone at the Gotham harbor. Louisa arrives from Italy expecting to see Mario, but instead finds Selina waiting. She no longer pretends to be blind. Armed soldiers flank her.
“You have something I want,” Louisa says.
“And you have something I want,” Selina replies.
The exchange is ritualistic. Each woman holds the other’s myth: Louisa wants the Capo di Capi ring. Selina wants clarity, lineage, the story she has chased across continents.
Before the battle at Arkham, Louisa addresses the Falcone soldiers in the penthouse. The matriarch is now flanked by her heirs. Selina stands unmasked at her left, and Mario stands at her right. Batman hides among the mobsters. Selina sees through him instantly and exposes him.
Her motives remain deliberately ambiguous. Bitterness, loyalty, resentment, foresight—all are plausible. What matters is that Selina asserts control over the narrative. She chooses when the mask comes off. In fact, Selina’s arc culminates here as an actualized, emotionally autonomous agent. Perhaps it was nearly losing Bruce, or seeing her “mother” again, but something fundamental has changed in her at this point.
Chaos erupts. Batman flees to Carmine’s office, where the portrait now hangs complete, and the infant restored at last. Two gunmen open fire. Selina, now in costume, shoves Batman aside, saving his life. The bullets shred the portrait, obliterating the image she has spent years chasing. They crash through a sunroof onto a heart-shaped bed. Batman asks about Holiday. He asks why he is on the wrong side.
Selina answers in her usual cryptic way:
She leaves him injured and bewildered. In a story obsessed with masks, Selina refuses to let anyone else decide when hers comes off.
With the portrait destroyed, Selina confronts Louisa in Carmine’s office. Without the image, Selina states plainly, neither woman can get what she wants. Louisa asks which side Selina is on.
“I’m on the same side I’m always on.”
“Yes,” Louisa replies. “But your side is now ours.”
Selina rejects this framing. She has not come to discuss Gotham or Batman. She has come to say goodbye.
Then Louisa offers the story Selina has been waiting for. She claims Selina is Carmine’s daughter—taken from her because she was a girl, hidden for her protection. She offers documents. She offers confirmation. She offers closure.
Selina removes her mask and asks the only question that matters:
“Is that the truth?”
“I never want to lie to you again,” Louisa answers. They embrace.
This moment is the purest echo of the Holiday mechanism: ambiguous evidence, conflicting narratives, and emotional necessity masquerading as certainty. Selina is offered a story capable of ending her search—but at the cost of surrendering her agency to it. Louisa may be telling the truth. She may be manipulating Selina for the ring. She may be doing both. What matters is not the answer, but Selina’s response: she accepts the story provisionally, not absolutely. She believes enough to move forward—but not enough to erase herself. This is illustrated by the fact that she retains the Capo di Capi ring. She will not be a card-carrying member of the Bat-family, nor a full-fledged Falcone, but rather, she stands on her own side as the antithesis of Holiday.
As a final demonstration of this actualization, Selina sabotages Mario’s plan at Arkham not out of loyalty to Batman or rejection of the Falcones, but because she recognizes the pattern repeating. Another lie (Gilda’s child) is about to harden into destiny. Another story is about to consume its host. She chooses to interrupt it to prevent its completion, completing her arc.
The Wrong Side and the Idea of Holiday
When Selina tells Batman that he is “on the wrong side,” she is not accusing him of moral failure, criminal hypocrisy, or ideological blindness. She is diagnosing something far more precise—and far more dangerous. In Gotham, sides are not defined by law or crime, but by whether one allows emotion to harden into identity. The wrong side is not where violence occurs; it is where feeling is mistaken for fate, where longing replaces choice, and where narrative overtakes selfhood.
This is the boundary that produces Holiday.
Holiday is not evil because it kills, but because it finalizes. It takes grief, rage, or abandonment and gives it a name, a ritual, and a destiny. Once crossed, the self no longer chooses. It instead performs. Batman crosses the boundary when he surrenders his life to the mission. Gilda Dent crosses this boundary when love and despair solidify into authorship. Harvey Dent crosses it when justice becomes inevitability. Mario Falcone crosses it when inheritance becomes obligation. Selina Kyle does not cross it at all.
When she finally tells Bruce, “You inspired me. To be whoever I wanted to be,” she offers the clearest articulation of her philosophy that until recently she was unable to articulate. Inspiration, in Gotham, is dangerous. It can become imitation. It can become identity. Selina accepts inspiration without surrender. She learns from myths without living inside them. That is what it means to be on the right side in Gotham. It has nothing to do with law and crime, but authorship and autonomy.
Selina Kyle survives The Long Halloween saga because she experiences the Holiday impulse without surrendering to it. She feels the pull of myth, legacy, love, and abandonment, and refuses to let any of them decide who she is. She understands the idea of Holiday not as a mystery to be solved, but as a mechanism to be avoided. Loeb, Sale, and collaborators frame her as both the antithesis of—and the negative space around—the idea of Holiday, establishing a foundational dialectic in Batman continuity that will recur and resolve over the years to come.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. If one includes the three Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween specials (and I do, even though I did not discuss them here), The Long Halloween saga spans 47 individual comic issues that can be read as a contiguous, cohesive, and remarkably profound run depicting the formative years of Batman’s world. I invite you to offer your own readings in the comments. It is all but certain that my interpretation of The Last Halloween will continue to evolve on future revisits, just as my understanding of The Long Halloween itself has changed over decades of rereading. See you next time.
What follows is a mythos timeline of Gotham City’s early history in the Modern Age (i.e. everything before the birth of Bruce Wayne in 1963). Notably, some RPG source books have been used as references. If you have any suggestions/additions, drop me (Anthony Fallone) a line in the comments.
—Circa 50,000 BCE. REFERENCE fromBatman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1. Cro-Magnon groups, such as the Bear Tribe and Wolf Tribe, are active on the Eastern North American coast, including at the future site of Gotham. The immortal Vandar Ang takes leadership of the Wolf Tribe, which will eventually come to be known as the Blood Tribe (aka Blood Mob).
–Circa 38,000 BCE. REFERENCE from Shadowpact #5. When an unnamed evil immortal warlock is nearly killed, his assistant puts him in a state of magickal hibernation and buries him in a hidden underground tomb at the exact future site of Gotham. (This item is said to occur forty millennia before the 21st century.) The sleeping demonic presence of the warlock (who will later take the name “Doctor Gotham”) will influence a thousand generations of area residents to come, acting as a secret catalyst for strangeness and evil at this location.
–Circa 38,000 BCE. REFERENCE from Final Crisis Director’s Cut #1, Final Crisis #6-7, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1, and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3. Following the demise of the Bear Tribe (and the death of its last living member, Anthro), a war erupts between the Deer People aka Deer Tribe and the current incarnation of Vandar Ang’s Blood Mob aka Blood Tribe. The interference of a time-traveling 21st-century Batman (Bruce Wayne) leads to victory for the Deer People. (Vandar Ang leaves the Blood Tribe and will later take the name Vandal Savage.) Influenced by Batman, bats become a central part of the Deer People’s mythology. Eventually, the Deer People will split into subgroups, but a central group will change its name to the Miagani, meaning “Bat People”.
–Early 1600s. REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3. Jon Valor aka The Black Pirate becomes the scourge of the local waterways.
–1609. REFERENCE from Batman: The Cult #1, The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City, and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne. The three islands off the east coast of North America that make up modern-day Gotham are now primarily inhabited by the Native American Miagani tribe (formerly known as the Deer People). A group of pilgrims/pioneers attempts to colonize the region but quickly disappears, leaving only a pool of blood for members of another colony to discover. With the arrival of more and more pilgrims in the area, the last of the divided Deer People move deeper into the local woods and caves, joining the Bat People (now also referred to as the Ghost People, due in part to their elusiveness).
–1635. REFERENCE from The Atlas of the DC Universe, The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City, andSwamp Thing #53. Swedish (sometimes claimed to be Norwegian) mercenary-sailor Captain Jon Logerquist establishes the settlement that will later become Gotham. Accounts of its founding differ by source. Dutch records state that Logerquist founded a settlement on the South Island named Nieuw Rotterdam, which was incorporated into the colony of New Netherland. Swedish accounts, by contrast, claim the settlement was christened Fort Adolphus in honor of the famed Swedish general Gustavus Adolphus. These versions are reconciled by the prevailing view that the settlement was first established under Swedish control as Fort Adolphus, then passed into Dutch hands and was reconstituted as Nieuw Rotterdam (aka New Rotterdam).
–1630s. The Wayne Family comes to colonial America from Scotland and settles in New Rotterdam, also known as Gotham, Gothame, Gotham Village, Gothame Village, Gotham Town, Gothame Town, Gotham Colony, or Gothame Colony. Most of the Waynes become merchants, and they found a merchant house that will soon come to be known as the Wayne Corporation (later WayneCorp).
–1640. REFERENCE From Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2. In New Rotterdam/Gotham/Gothame, Martin Van Derm is the “keeper of the register of Gotham Colony.” He is also a painter.
–1640. FLASHBACK from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2. Nathaniel Wayne is a witchfinder in New Rotterdam/Gotham/Gothame who goes by the alias Brother Malleus, most likely a reference to the book Malleus Maleficarum (1486).
–1650s. REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5—originally told in Detective Comics #205. Colonial frontiersman, Jeremy Coe, uses a section of what will become the modern-day Batcave as his hideout.
–Mid 17th century. REFERENCE from The Return of Bruce Wayne #4. A Van Derm couples with a Miagani tribesperson, not only creating a link between the Van Derms and the Miagani but also granting the Van Derms access to the Miagani’s secrets.
–Mid 17th century. FLASHBACK from The Batman Chronicles #6—and REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. (This entry is variously dated, with some sources placing it in the early-to-mid 17th century and others as late as the early 18th century. Suffice to say, it must go after the slave trade has gotten underway in the Americas.) A recently freed slave of mixed African and European ancestry named Hiram, who has been on his way to the whaling settlement of Blüdhaven, stumbles across the dead body of a murder victim. (Blüdhaven is located in Haven County, mere miles south of Gotham and separated only by a large waterway.) Hiram does his best to give the dead man a proper burial, but, upon entering Blüdhaven, he is accused of being the murderer by the victim’s brother, a local merchant named Rance Benedict, who is about to be appointed as the town constable. Hiram retreats north to the woods of what is now the civil township of Sommerset on the mainland shores west of the Core Islands. He intends to clear a plot of land to build a shanty home or a church. En route to the Sommerset woods, Hiram meets a mysterious “doctor” who warns him of a mad killer from London named Epsilah Clevenger. Clevenger is also known to the London police as “The Mimic” for his uncanny ability to impersonate others. The doctor urges Hiram not to build a home or church, but an asylum instead. That night, during a storm, Hiram believes the doctor is being murdered. He then hears Rance Benedict approaching, apparently seeking vengeance. Fearing for his life, Hiram shoots and kills Benedict in what he believes is self-defense. The doctor then reveals himself to be Clevenger, having staged the murder and impersonated Benedict. Whether Benedict truly intended violence is left unresolved. Clevenger uses the killing as blackmail to force Hiram to build an asylum. The site of Hiram’s asylum (in Sommerset Township) will become the site of Arkham Asylum many years later. (Notably, in The Batman Chronicles #6, historian Cecil Longacre writes about the long-held myth that Arkham Asylum was built on the same field Hiram once cleared to honor his faith. However, in The Batman Chronicles #23, official records from the Gotham Public Library prove this account to be wrong, confirming Benedict was killed on the land that would become Robinson Park, a considerable distance from Arkham.)
–1674. REFERENCE from The Atlas of the DC Universe and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. New Rotterdam is seized by British forces (presumably following the Treaty of Westminster). English General Adam Howe (named Joseph Howe in The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City) is appointed Governor and officially drops the name New Rotterdam, making the settlement’s only names Gotham or Gotham Village.
–REFERENCE from The Atlas of the DC Universe, The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City, and DC Heroes Roleplaying Game. Now in his later years, Jon Logerquist maintains farmland on the northern island of Gotham known as Logerquist’s Acres (present-day Park Row and The Bowery). Refusing to pay taxes to the British, Logerquist’s farmstead is burned by British authorities, and he dies in the fire. Rumor will forevermore have it that Logerquist’s ghost haunts the surrounding area.
–1718. REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2-3. Jack Valor aka the Black Pirate II (grandson of the original Black Pirate) wars with his rival Commodore Thatch aka Blackbeard aka Vandal Savage along the shores of Bristol Bay. Valor is joined by a time-displaced 21st-century Bruce Wayne, who helps him defeat Savage. Valor also communes with the Miagani aka Bat People. Bruce gives Valor instructions. The Black Pirate will have adventures in the area for decades to come. (He’ll eventually retire to Philadelphia.)
–REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6. A Van Derm meets with the Miagani aka Bat People. Together, they create a small box/casket, which can only be opened by a Miagani whistling sound. They place several items related to the 21st-century Bruce Wayne’s time-jumps in the casket. The Van Derms are tasked with guarding the casket.
–1750. REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3. Jack Valor visits the Van Derms in Gotham, upon which he sees the Bat-casket for the first time and adds his notes inside it.
–1765. FLASHBACK from Batman #452 and Batman and Robin #16. In the underground temple (i.e. the cellar) of Jacob Stockman’s farmhouse in Old Gotham (the part of South Gotham Island formerly known as Gotham Village and site of what will come to be known in the future as Stockman’s Square), an occult ritual is performed by the so-called Powdered Wig Brigade. This group, which includes Thomas Wayne (who will later name himself after Simon Magus, taking the name “Simon Hurt”), Stockman, Thomas Jefferson, and three unnamed others, attempts to summon the demon Barbatos by sacrificing a woman named Dominique. When the ritual goes wrong, everyone except Wayne flees. Wayne eventually departs, but not before locking Dominique in the cellar, where she starves to death. Shaken from the experience, Stockman writes down all he can recall about the botched ritual in his journal. He then sells the farm and moves to Canada. The unnamed members of the Powdered Wig Brigade will meet grisly ends following this item, some by suicide and others killed during the American Revolution.
–1776. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. By the time of the Declaration of Independence, Gotham is occupied by British and Hessian forces. Great Britain hopes to continue holding Gotham in order to keep the patriot forces to the north and south of the city from maintaining reliable communications and supply lines.
–1779. REFERENCE from The Atlas of the DC Universe, Detective Comics #653, Batman and Robin #10, and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4. During the American Revolution, Darius Wayne, his brother, real-life historical figure “Mad” Anthony Wayne, and Transbelvian-born General Jarsc Volzcek fight against the British and Hessian forces. The British have held Gotham for much of the war, but with the help of Darius, the Americans secure a victory as Volzcek’s forces retake the city on November 21, 1779. Darius is immortalized in a portrait depicting him defiantly setting ablaze British ships during this battle. Volzcek will also be forever hailed as a hero in Gotham.
–Late 1770s to early 1780s. REFERENCE from Gotham Underground #9. On the opposing side of the American Revolutionary War, Sir Nigel Cobblepot fights against Gotham before eventually calling the city his home.
–REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. By this point, Gotham has expanded to cover the lower half of South Gotham Island. The remainder of the island, along with the two neighboring islands and the mainland to the north and west, collectively make up what is known as Gotham. Shortly thereafter, Gotham is incorporated as a city. This is the first instance of the name Gotham City.
–1790. REFERENCE From Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #6-10 (“Gothic”)and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. Construction begins on Gotham Cathedral, which will eventually reach 150 feet. The cathedral is built along one of the borders of Old Gotham (formerly Gotham Village) on South Gotham Island. The area around the cathedral becomes known as Cathedral Square. The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City contradicts “Gothic” by saying that the Gotham Cathedral was built in 1810. We can take this to mean that construction on the Gotham Cathedral starts now, but won’t be topped out until 1810.
–1795. REFERENCE from The Atlas of the DC Universe, The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City, and Batman and Robin #12. A large plot of land is rewarded to Darius Wayne in Bristol Township’s Crest Hill district on the mainland shores north of the Gotham Islands (or south of the Gotham Islands, according to The Atlas of the DC Universe) for his heroic efforts during the war. Architect Nathan Van Derm begins construction on Wayne Manor. During the construction of the manor, an accident takes the life of Darius. Construction ceases, and the unfinished manor falls into the possession of the Van Derm family.
–Early 19th century. REFERENCE from Batman: Gates of Gotham #2. The patriarch of the Elliot family founds the Gotham Herald. The Elliots will make a fortune in the media/news business for a century to follow.
–Mid 1820s. REFERENCE from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5—originally referenced in The Brave and The Bold #89. The date is pure conjecture, but this item is said to have occurred about 175 years before the events of The Brave and The Bold #89. The fanatical religious cultists known as the Hellerites (led by Joseph Heller) become active in Gotham City. Immediately feared and hated by most of Gotham City’s residents, the Hellerites meet a tragic end as their settlement is burned to the ground by an angry mob. The entire sect is killed.
–1825. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. By this point, Gotham City’s borders have now expanded upward to include some three-quarters of South Gotham Island, including the annexation of the village of Neville.
–REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. Financier Charles Arwin Wayne comes to Gotham City from Boston with his two sons, Solomon Zebediah Wayne and Joshua Thomas Wayne. (Solomon’s original middle name had the initial E, but it was later retconned to Zebediah.) Charles manages the Wayne family’s modest fortune by buying cheap property, including swampland. Shortly after their arrival, Charles dies from tuberculosis at the age of 52, leaving his fortune to his sons.
–REFERENCE from the second feature to Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27 (“Handcarts and Hellholes: A Brief History of Gotham City”). Solomon Wayne returns to Boston, where he earns a Harvard degree and obtains an appointment to a federal judgeship. He gains his judgeship through the influence of his classmate’s father, Senator Nugent Bolle. Shortly thereafter, Judge Solomon Wayne returns to Gotham City (specifically to Old Gotham, formerly Gotham Village), where he becomes an entrepreneur, starting a dozen businesses, including the Gotham Buggy Whip Works. Over the course of six years, Solomon becomes one of Gotham City’s most prosperous citizens. Solomon’s brother Joshua, though overshadowed by Solomon, jointly maintains nearly a dozen Wayne businesses.
–1840. FLASHBACK from Legends of the Dark Knight #27—and reference from the second feature to Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27 (“Handcarts and Hellholes: A Brief History of Gotham City”) and Batman: Gates of Gotham #2. Judge Solomon Wayne declares a man guilty and sentences him to thirty days in jail for assaulting a man named Cyrus Pinkney. The man tries to attack Solomon, who then beats him in the head with a law book and the Bible. After constables send the man away to jail, Solomon talks with Pinkney, finding out he is an architect. Interested in seeing samples of Pinkney’s work, Pinkney shows Solomon sketches of Gothic architectural designs. Solomon writes a letter to his wife-to-be (presumably second wife Dorothea) about this interaction. (Note that both Batman: LOTDK #27 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City place this item in June 1865, but, thanks to retcons from Batman: Gates of Gotham, it specifically occurs in 1840. Interestingly, the second feature to LOTDK #27 tells us that Cyrus Pinkney will die at the young age of forty, which points toward the earlier placement of this item anyway. Factoring in the upcoming birth of Alan Wayne, 1840 makes more sense overall.)
–1840. FLASHBACK from Legends of the Dark Knight #27—and reference from the second feature to Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27 (“Handcarts and Hellholes: A Brief History of Gotham City”)andBatman: Gates of Gotham #2. Six months after meeting with Cyrus Pinkney, Solomon Wayne gives a speech to the Gotham Property Holders Association, promoting Cyrus Pinkney’s vision for Gotham City’s architecture, much to the chagrin of certain critics. (As mentioned above, both Batman: LOTDK #27 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City place this item on December 12, 1865, but, thanks to retcons from Batman: Gates of Gotham, it actually dates to 1840.) The second feature to LOTDK #27 tells us that Cyrus Pinkney will die at the young age of forty, which points toward the earlier placement of this item anyway. Factoring in the upcoming birth of Alan Wayne, 1840 makes more sense.)
–Mid 1840s. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. By this point, Gotham City’s borders have now expanded upward to include all of South Gotham Island as well as the western third of Center Gotham Island, creating its Chelsea and Burnley Harbor districts, which by this point have become the permanent home of Gotham University.
–Mid 1840s. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. Solomon Wayne (age 77) and his second wife, Dorothea (age 37), have a child named Alan Wayne (full name Alan Kingston Wayne).
–1855. REFERENCE from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45. Magnate Jerome K Van Derm finishes construction on the ten-bedroom Wayne Manor just outside of Gotham, adding a railroad line through the property as well. However, when Van Derm’s company goes under, Van Derm commits suicide, leaving the property vacant and in the hands of a realty agency.
–July 4, 1858. REFERENCE from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45. Judge Solomon Wayne and his brother Joshua Wayne purchase Wayne Manor, bringing the property back into the family. According to an entry in Solomon’s diary, he likes that the estate is outside Gotham but close enough for him to stay in touch with his property interests in the city. However, the main reason the Wayne brothers purchase the manor from the realtor is that they discover a swarm of bats coming from a subterranean tunnel underneath the manor grounds. As abolitionists, the brothers decide that purchasing the manor will benefit their cause, as they can help lead escaped slaves from the South up the East Coast to freedom in Canada through the underground tunnels.
–1860. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #2. Nicholas Anders, his stepbrother Bradley Gate, and his father arrive in Gotham City.
–November 4, 1860. FLASHBACK from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45. Charles Lindon, a friend of Solomon Wayne, brings a group of escaped slaves to Wayne Manor, but on their trail are bounty hunters. Joshua has gone back to find one of the slaves, Sam Barley, who wanted to return to Maryland, and fights off the bounty hunters before bringing Sam to the caves beneath Wayne Manor. Solomon, whose wife is pregnant, and Joshua go out in a snowstorm to cover their tracks, and when they run into the bounty hunters, Joshua promises to draw them away. Solomon never sees him again. Joshua leads the bounty hunters onto a rope bridge, where one stabs him, and he brings down the bridge, killing them all. Joshua knows he is dying, and he knows he can’t let his body be found, as it will damage the reputation of the Wayne family, so he crawls into the drainage outlet (what will later become the Wayne Manor wine cellar) to die.
–November 9, 1860. REFERENCE from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45. A Gotham Gazette newspaper article from 1860 shows that the Maryland bounty hunters’ bodies were found in the Gotham River. Gotham’s biggest newspaper is the Gotham Gazette (sometimes called the Gotham City Gazette). Other newspaper companies in Gotham are the Gotham Herald (founded and run by the Elliot family), the Gotham Globe, and the Gotham Times (sometimes called The Gotham City Times). The presumable radius of coverage for these news agencies includes at least the whole Greater Gotham area. It’s possible that some of them already have national syndication. It’s also not entirely clear if the Globe and/or the Times exist at the juncture.
–Early 1860s. REFERENCE from Gotham Underground #2. Several gangs rise to prominence in Gotham, including the Irish Wounded Ravens, Italian East-Siders, Free Men Gang, Jewish Sons of David, and All-Americans. When a masked gang member kills a man named Jeremiah Whale, authorities are unable to pin the crime on any particular group. Soon, entire gangs start wearing masks to hide their identities.
–1861-1865. REFERENCE from Gotham Underground #9. During the American Civil War, Union Army Colonel Nathan Cobblepot rises to hero status after defending Gotham in the Battle of Gotham Heights.
–1860s. REFERENCE from Detective Comics #843-844 (and gleaned from several other titles). The original Cosa Nostra crime organization in Gotham City is the Sabatino Mob, which now comes to America from Sicily. Over the next decade, other Sicilian mafia groups will quickly emigrate to Gotham City as well.
–REFERENCE fromthe second feature to Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27 (“Handcarts and Hellholes: A Brief History of Gotham City”). Cyrus Pinkney dies on the eve of his fortieth birthday.
–REFERENCE from Batman: The Chalice. The Holy Grail has long been in the hands of the Wayne Family, passed down from generation to generation. Solomon Wayne now plays an active role in the Wayne family’s long guardianship of the Holy Grail, but he will fail to pass this task along to his descendants. (Note that The Chalice incorrectly refers to Solomon as Bruce’s grandfather.)
–REFERENCE from the second feature to Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27 (“Handcarts and Hellholes: A Brief History of Gotham City”)and The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Judge Solomon Wayne dies at the age of 104. Alan Wayne inherits the family business and fortune.
–1870s. FLASHBACK from Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3-4. Alan Wayne has become depressed and is intending to commit suicide by jumping into the river. However, on this same night, he is passed by a melee (involving Vandal Savage, Jonah Hex, Thomas Wayne aka the future Simon Hurt, and others). Alan rushes into the fray, saving the life of a woman named Catherine “Katie” Van Derm. (Katie is the granddaughter of Jerome Van Derm. She also has an unnamed brother.) Not long after, the two get married and move back into Wayne Manor. Tragically, Katie dies while giving birth to her and Alan’s son, Kenneth Wayne.
–1870s. REFERENCE from Batman #568. The Gotham Botanical Gardens are established courtesy of a grant from CL Wayne (possibly made in the name of Catherine Wayne).
–1870s. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1, The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City, and The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Alan Wayne forms Wayne Shipping, which provides oceanic transport in addition to transcontinental railway shipping. Shortly thereafter, Alan Wayne forms Wayne Manufacturing and Wayne Chemical aka Wayne Chemicals. According to The Essential Batman Encyclopedia, Wayne Shipping, Wayne Manufacturing, and Wayne Chemical were born out of the Industrial Revolution and the Reconstruction Era, which helps us place this item here. Wayne Chemical’s focus is, aptly, on chemicals and chemical compounds.
–1870s. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1,andthe second feature to Batman: Gotham Knights #42, and The Batman Files. Gotham’s skyline, heavily influenced by the designs of the deceased Cyrus Pinkney, begins to grow from the ground up. The first of the Pinkney-designed buildings is built in what will later be Gotham’s Financial District on South Gotham Island. Gargoyles will be a prominent feature of the city’s buildings for well over a century to follow, drawing visitors and inspiring artists, including the famous poet, Lincoln Killavey.
–REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. Alan Wayne spearheads the development of the Gotham Railworks and the building of Robinson Central Terminal. Using the power of the locomotive, Wayne Shipping, which carries scores of European goods to the developing American interior, fosters the growth of the Wayne Corporation (WayneCorp). Alan names his son Kenneth as the sole heir to the Wayne fortune and businesses.
–REFERENCE from Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood #1and Detective Comics #843-844 (and gleaned from several other titles). The Sabatinos begin to lose their mob influence in Gotham City as the “Five Families” structure emerges.
–1877. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #2. Architect Nicholas Anders and his stepbrother, Bradley Gate, are approached by Alan Wayne, who wants the two men to design and build a large suspension bridge to provide access to Center Gotham Island from the west. Alan has been wanting to expand his family business, which includes the railroad, since 1871.
–REFERENCE from Gotham Underground #9. Having gained his fortune in the steel industry, Theodore Cobblepot is on his way to becoming Gotham City’s longest-running mayor. Unfortunately, the Cobblepot family fortune will later be squandered away by his son and then grandson on an unsuccessful hotel.
–1881. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #1. By this point, Wayne Railroad and Transportation Company has been established. Alan Wayne introduces Nicholas Anders to newspaper tycoon Edward Elliot (owner of the Gotham Herald) and Mayor Theodore Cobblepot. Upon completion of the New Trigate Bridge, Nicholas and his stepbrother, Bradley, are commissioned by the city to build two additional bridges, one connecting to the North Gotham Island and one connecting to the South Gotham Island.
–1880s. REFERENCE from Detective Comics #629 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. Blackgate Prison starts and finishes construction on Blackgate Isle, a small island in Gotham Bay.
–FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #2-3—and references fromBatman #474,Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27, and Detective Comics #641. Nicholas Anders and Bradley Gate meet with the founding families. Six months after this meeting, the first Wayne Tower (also known as the Corolla Building, later to be known as Old Wayne Tower) begins construction in the Old Gotham part of South Gotham Island. Shortly after Wayne Tower’s construction is completed, Nicholas takes his stepbrother’s surname, Gate, and the two become known as “The Gates of Gotham.” Within a few months, Nicholas also gets married and has a daughter. (Note that, according to Batman: The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight, while Wayne Tower is indeed completed, it technically won’t be fully topped out—likely with an addition or modification—until 1939.)
–FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #3. Nicholas Anders finishes construction on Theodore Cobblepot’s new club, the Iceberg Lounge. Alan Wayne proposes that Nicholas and his stepbrother build a retaining wall along the eastern shoreline of Gotham City to provide additional land and a foundation for an even larger bridge connecting the main city to one of the outer counties.
–1890. REFERENCE from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Amadeus Arkham is born, presumably in Gotham County. He also has a brother, though little is known about him. His family home, which will later be renovated into Arkham Asylum, is in Sommerset Township. At a young age, he will watch his mother struggle with mental issues, which will eventually inspire him to move to Metropolis, Delaware to become a psychiatrist.
–Summer 1892. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #3. Nicholas meets with the founding families, including Cameron Kane. Kane is helping finance the new bridge with the assurance that it will connect to Kane County, the land just north of Gotham City. However, the group is split between Kane County and the large plot of land owned by Alan Wayne. The decision is left to Nicholas, who decides to connect the bridge to Wayne’s land. The Essential Batman Encyclopedia states that Gotham City is located in Kane County, with the county’s name serving as an informal nickname due to the city’s disproportionate size relative to the county’s boundaries. Some comics, including Gotham Central #20, show that at least some Gotham City addresses are in Kane County, which would seemingly give credence to this idea. The simplest explanation is that a city the size of Gotham, like every major US city, exists across multiple counties. Notably, in Gates of Gotham #3, Wayne’s land is described as being east of Gotham City. However, according to the most commonly referenced Modern Age map of Gotham City (created by Elliot R Brown in 1998), there is no major landmass directly east of Gotham City, as the city is adjacent to Great Bay, just north of Brigantine and Atlantic City, NJ. As such, there is only water directly east of Gotham City. Additionally, on the Brown map, the mainland north of Gotham City is Kane County, so Bristol Township (home to Wayne Manor) is within it. Now, it could either be the case that Kane County was later annexed or absorbed by Gotham County (most sources say that Bristol Township is within Gotham County) or that “Kane County” was just an informal name for the mainland north of the city but still within Gotham County, as most of the property there is owned by the Kane family. In either case, Gotham City is the county seat and the largest city in whichever county it is located in. Matthew Manning’s The Batman Files also mentions Bristol County. This could be an error, and he meant to say Bristol Township, or Bristol Township may be in Bristol County, which will later be annexed into Gotham or Kane County. It’s also possible that Bristol Township and Bristol County are different places. Again, ultimately (and most importantly), Gotham City is the county seat of either Gotham or Kane County.
–1892-1893. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #3. Bradley and Nicholas work for several months to construct the colossal bridge, but they are ultimately met with disaster. Bradley is working on the bridge’s foundation below the waterline in his underwater protection suit when the bridge suddenly comes crashing down on him. Nicholas only finds Bradley’s helmet among the wreckage.
–1893. FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #4. A funeral is held for Bradley Gate. Alan Wayne, Edward Elliot, Theodore Cobblepot, and Cameron Kane are in attendance. Nicholas is blamed for the accident that caused his stepbrother’s demise, and the bridge is adjusted to lead to Kane County (north of the city) instead. Nicholas spends the next month searching the wreckage in his underwater protection suit to find proof that Cameron Kane sabotaged the bridge. Desperate, Nicholas approaches Alan Wayne at his home, claiming Kane caused the disaster to raise the value of his land as Gotham City’s new gateway. Alan tells Nicholas that he and the other founding family heads won’t help him investigate Kane, as they intend to keep this a secret, as “secrets are influence.”
–FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #4. Nicholas Gate, wearing his underwater protection suit, breaks into the Bristol Township home of Cameron Kane and is shot at by Cameron’s son, Robert Kane. Angered, Nicholas strangles Robert to death. Police arrive and take Nicholas away.
–REFERENCE from Batman: Gates of Gotham. Cameron Kane oversees the construction of the Robert H Kane Memorial Bridge, named in honor of his murdered son. The bridge connects Gotham City, specifically Gotham’s East End (on North Gotham Island), to the land north of Gotham. The construction of the bridge significantly increases the Kane family’s wealth.
–FLASHBACK from Batman: Gates of Gotham #5. Alan Wayne delivers a journal to Nicholas Gate, who has been committed to an asylum, saying it will help with his recovery. Outside the asylum, Alan asks Cameron Kane if he had anything to do with sabotaging the bridge and killing Bradley Gate. Kane denies any involvement. (It’s worth noting that this item is explicitly dated as 1889; however, that date is a continuity error that conflicts with other items in the very same story. For example, Nicholas’s killing of Robert Kane—the reason for his incarceration—could not have occurred any earlier than 1892. Also, the asylum shown in this item is specifically Arkham Asylum, which is also another continuity error. As per Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Arkham Asylum won’t open until 1921.)
–1895. REFERENCE from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #39 and The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. (The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City gives the incorrect date of 1894.) After having an affair with a sex worker, unscrupulous banker Cyrus Gold refuses to yield to blackmail when she tries to extort him for money after becoming pregnant with his child. This leads to her pimp bludgeoning Gold with a shovel, stealing a hundred dollars from him, and tossing his body into Slaughter Swamp. As he drowns, he curses them.
–1899. The main Gotham City Police (GCPD aka GPD) Headquarters Building is constructed in the Old Gotham section of South Gotham Island. It will become vacant sometime in the early 20th century when the GCPD moves to a new HQ.
–1899. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. Twelve-year-old Giuseppe Bertinelli arrives in Gotham City via the Dixon Docks. His family has come from Ciminna, Sicily.
–REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. Alan Wayne dies at age sixty-three, making Kenneth the new owner/head of WayneCorp. Under Kenneth’s guidance, both Wayne Chemical and Wayne Manufacturing significantly grow. However, Kenneth dies at a relatively young age from alcohol poisoning, leaving the Wayne fortune to his wife, Laura Elizabeth Wayne, age 37 at the time of her husband’s death. Their son, Patrick “Jack” Morgan Wayne (named Patrick Alan Morgan Wayne according to The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City), is only an infant at the time of Kenneth’s death. Laura, in addition to managing the company, becomes a staunch prohibitionist, pushing for legislation to enact the alcohol ban. During this campaign, Laura becomes acquainted with prohibition leader, Jenny Atticus. Notably, Patrick also has a younger brother named Silas, with whom he is (and will remain) very close. (Although not much is known about them, Benjamin and Abigail Wayne may be contemporaries of this generation of Waynes. Their gravestones are depicted in Batman: Shadow of the Bat #45).
–1900. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. The Gotham Expo begins the century by unveiling an experimental underground railway tunnel connecting South Gotham Island with the mainland near Blüdhaven. Like the rest of the Gotham Expo, the subway experiment is decorated in an “Alice in Wonderland” theme and will continue to operate until 1920, when its parent company, the Greater Gotham Underground Railway, collapses in a stock-bubble scam.
–Mid-1910s. REFERENCE from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Amadeus Arkham, having earned a residency at Metropolis State Psychiatric Hospital, leaves the greater Gotham City area for Metropolis.
–1918. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. Just after World War I, Gotham City begins its process of annexing Glendale, Manchester-Lyntown, and Burnley-Bryanttown—three sister cities scattered across the Core Islands.
–REFERENCE from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #115. Patrick Wayne has a daughter named Agatha Wayne.
–REFERENCE from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #133. Patrick Wayne has a son named Thomas Wayne.
–1920. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. The Greater Gotham Underground Railway goes out of business after its involvement in a stock-bubble scam. As such, the main train transit route between Gotham City and Blüdhaven—which has been in constant operation for the past two decades—is shut down.
–1920. FLASHBACK from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Following the death of his father, Amadeus Arkham temporarily returns to his old home in Sommerset Township to care for his mentally ill, elderly, bedridden mother, Elizabeth, who has visions of a giant bat-like entity. One day, Amadeus takes a pearl-handled straight razor and cuts his mother’s throat with it to end her suffering. He then blocks out the memory, and her death is attributed to suicide.
—Spring 1920. FLASHBACK from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earthand Batman: The Man Who Laughs. Shortly after his mother’s funeral, Amadeus Arkham becomes the sole owner of his ancestral home in Sommerset Township. The next day, he returns to his family in Metropolis. Amadeus continues working at the Metropolis State Psychiatric Hospital for a bit. Not long after, Amadeus begins having the mansion he inherited in Gotham City remodeled into a psychiatric hospital, hoping to help the criminally insane. The architect who designs and oversees the transformation of Amadeus’ home into an asylum goes mad, hacking construction workers to death with an axe. He is sentenced to serve the rest of his life incarcerated in the asylum upon its completion. Despite being off to a terrible start, Amadeus, along with his wife, Constance, and daughter, Harriet, moves into the house/asylum.
—1920. FLASHBACK from Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood #1—and referenced in The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. The Bertinellis hold a firm leadership grip over Gotham City’s Italian-American mafia. (The Bertinellis will be the top family for decades to come.) The Five Families consist of the Bertinellis (the number one family), Berrettis (also spelled Beretti), Cassamentos, Galantes, and Inzerillos. Prohibition is enacted, and Giuseppe Bertinelli, head of the Bertinelli Family, recruits the Berettis and Galantes to flood the streets with alcohol. At the same time, the Cassamentos and the Inzerillos are trying to do the same thing, which leads to war. The war between the Bertinelli-Beretti-Galante alliance and the Cassamento-Inzerillo alliance will continue until the end of Prohibition, and it will take the lives of three of Giuseppe’s sons.
–April 1, 1921. FLASHBACK from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Horribly, Amadeus Arkham returns home to find his wife, Constance, and daughter, Harriet, raped and murdered by Martin “Mad Dog” Hawkins.
–November 1921. FLASHBACK from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane opens its doors in Sommerset Township, located on the mainland west of Gotham City. (Notably, this item is contradicted by a scene in Batman: Gates of Gotham #5, which depicts Arkham Asylum as already existing in 1889.)
–April 1, 1922. FLASHBACK from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. On the first anniversary of his family’s murder, Amadeus Arkham kills “Mad Dog” Hawkins by overdosing him on electroshock therapy. The death is ruled as an accident.
–Mid 1920s. FLASHBACK from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #133. With his mother (Laura Wayne) stepping back a bit in her old age, Patrick Wayne shares responsibilities as a co-head of WayneCorp, heading up various construction projects all over Gotham. Soon after, Patrick meets a rough-and-tumble street kid named Brass. Taking a liking to the spunky kid, Patrick brokers his release from police custody (specifically from Detective Loeb). Patrick employs young Brass to work security at a brand new “slum development” construction site. Brass also meets and gets to know Patrick’s bookish son, Thomas. Patrick will come to think of Brass as somewhat of a second son as the years wear on.
–REFERENCE from Batman Annual #13Part 2,second feature to Detective Comics #806-807, and Batman #675. A British man named Beagle takes over as the head butler of Wayne Manor.
–1928. REFERENCE from the second feature to Batman: Gotham Knights #42. Architect Leonard Oldman designs metal gargoyles that are installed atop several of Gotham’s skyscrapers.
–1929. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. The stock market crashes, throwing the United States into the Great Depression. Gotham City’s mayor is Archibald Brewster at this time.
–1929. REFERENCE from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. In the wake of the stock market crash, Amadeus Arkham is locked away in his own asylum after trying to kill his stockbroker. He will remain incarcerated there until his death in 1963.
–Early 1930s. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. When his mother, Laura, dies, Patrick Wayne inherits the family fortune and expands the WayneCorp portfolio, officially founding Wayne Technologies (WayneTech). Batman Secret Files and Origins #1 says that Patrick starts WayneCorp “out of the ashes of the Great Depression,” but, to be specific, this expansion occurs during the Depression, despite all odds. Also, Patrick doesn’t start WayneCorp; he specifically starts the Wayne Technologies division of Wayne Corp.
–1931. FLASHBACK from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #133. Due to the Depression, WayneCorp struggles financially. Despite this, Patrick’s slum development project comes to a close (thanks in part to the tenacity of Brass). Noticing that a WayneCorp employee named Smitty has been skimming off the top, Brass reports it to Patrick Wayne. Impressed, Patrick’s relationship to Brass continues to grow stronger, sometimes even eclipsing the love he shows for his son Thomas.
–FLASHBACK from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #133-134. The placement of this item is tough. Because we see Brass smuggling hooch, it’s been placed here in the 1930s. However, LOTDK #135 is said (by Brass himself) to occur only ten years later, yet it seems to occur in the 1950s. We’ll have to assume that Brass’ “ten years ago” line is incorrect. Onto a synopsis! Brass continues to rise in the ranks of WayneCorp, earning an office job alongside Patrick Wayne. Despite having been promoted to the office, Brass still handles hands-on security for the company. (Patrick shows Brass a model of Wayne Manor, calling it an unrealized project that he wants to build. Of course, thanks to retcons and other stories, Wayne Manor has already long been built. It was actually finished in the mid-19th century. As such, the reference to an unfinished Wayne Manor here must be ignored, or it must be regarded as Patrick wanting to update the property.) Soon afterward, Thomas enrolls in a new private school. Meanwhile, Brass begins conducting illegal deals with various mobsters. When vengeful ex-employee Smitty attacks Patrick (via a vehicular hit-and-run), Thomas applies first aid to his father and gets him to the hospital. This act causes Patrick to appreciate his son, finally seeing him as more than just a bookworm. While Patrick recovers in the hospital, Brass violently shakes down his boss’ rivals. When Patrick returns to the office, he gets into a heated argument with Brass, who wants ownership of the Wayne Manor property as part of a lucrative (but shady) land development deal he’s made with a local gangster. (Again, please ignore any references or images here to Wayne Manor being under construction, or reimagine them as a renovation.) Patrick calls Brass a crook and severs their relationship, both as co-workers and friends. Brass will have bad blood with the Waynes forevermore. Notably, the Waynes will keep tabs on Brass, moving forward, getting detailed reports about his actions.
–Early 1933. FLASHBACK from Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood #1—and referenced in The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. As Prohibition ends, the thirteen-year-long mob war between the Bertinelli-Beretti-Galante alliance and the Cassamento-Inzerillo alliance is finally decided. In the end, the Inzerillos sell out the Cassamentos, and Giuseppe Bertinelli serves as a partial mediator, attempting to foster unity among the factions, yet underlying tensions persist. Giuseppe is named capo di tutti capi, which roughly translates to “boss of bosses.” The Five Families of Gotham City’s Italian-American mafia continue to comprise the Bertinellis (still the number one family), Berettis, Cassamentos, Galantes, and Inzerillos. (The Bertinellis will continue to be the top family for decades to come.)
–1939. REFERENCE from Azrael: Agent of the Bat #70. Leslie Thompkins (full name Leslie Maurin Thompkins) is born.
–1939. REFERENCE from Batman: The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight. Wayne Tower is topped out (likely with an addition or modification) at 78 stories (1,207 feet).
–Late 1930s to 1940. REFERENCE from Batman #611, the second feature to Batman: Gotham Knights #10, and The Batman Files. Alan Scott, formerly of Metropolis and Capitol City, debuts as the superhero Green Lantern, becoming the protector of Gotham City. Scott goes on various adventures in Gotham City, gaining semi-immortality in the process. One of Scott’s biggest rivals is Solomon Grundy, the former Cyrus Gold, now an undead super-villain based out of Gotham City’s Slaughter Swamp. Starting in 1940, Scott joins the Justice Society of America and begins fighting in World War II (both as Green Lantern and as a US Army soldier).
–REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #135. Under Patrick Wayne, WayneCorp commits itself to ecological responsibility and responsible industrialism. Part of this move is due to Brass having attached a negative stigma to the Wayne business name, and Patrick wants to shed this image. Patrick will spend the next decade trying to be more ethical.
–1941-1945. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. Patrick Wayne gets involved in the war effort. Wayne Technologies (WayneTech) aircraft plants in Somerset and shipyards in Neville fuel the American war effort during the Pacific War (1942-1945). Notably, Green Lantern Alan Scott splits time between defending Gotham City and fighting overseas in the war.
–Mid 1940s. REFERENCEfromBatman #611, the second feature to Batman: Gotham Knights #10, and The Batman Files. Following the end of World War II, the Justice Society of America moves its headquarters into a Gotham City brownstone. Alan Scott will continue adventuring in Gotham City for years to come.
–REFERENCE from Batman Annual #13Part 2, Batman Secret Files and Origins #1, second feature to Detective Comics #806-807, and Batman #675. English-born Jarvis Beagle moves to Gotham (from the UK) and becomes the Wayne family’s butler, taking over for his father (the previous butler). Jarvis lives on the Wayne Manor property with his unnamed stage-actress wife and son, Alfred Thaddeus Crane Beagle. Notably, Alfred’s father is never named in the Modern Age, but in previous continuity, he was Jarvis, so it is likely still Jarvis. Also, according to Batman Secret Files and Origins #1, Alfred and his mother do not move to Gotham along with his father. Instead, Alfred and his mom stay in England but will make periodic trips to visit Jarvis. In this scenario, Jarvis will visit Essex to go on summer hunting trips with his son. It’s up to your own headcanon on whether Alfred and his mom are Gotham residents or simply frequent Gotham visitors.
–1948. REFERENCE from Detective Comics #784-786. A string of brutal serial killings, conducted by The Made of Wood Killer, an Irish immigrant named Samuel Sullivan, occurs in Gotham City. Sullivan murders the Mayor Thorndike and is incarcerated at Arkham Asylum in December of 1948. The case is wrapped up, but some loose ends remain unresolved.
–1949. FLASHBACK from Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood #1. Giuseppe Bertinelli dies, and his only surviving son, Alfredo, takes over the family mob.
–1949. REFERENCE from The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City. The Mafia’s Gotham Commission is founded. It is designed to mediate disputes between the Five Families within the greater Gotham City area. The Gotham Commission will, however, be answerable to La Commissione in New York, just as the other Mafia networks in America are.
–1951. REFERENCE from Azrael: Agent of the Bat #70. Leslie Thompkins’ brother, Jeremiah “Jerry” Thompkins is born.
–1950s. REFERENCE from Secret Origins Special #1 aka Secret Origins Vol. 2 Special #1. Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot is born. His family runs a bird shop.
–1950s. REFERENCEfromBatman #611, the second feature to Batman: Gotham Knights #10, and The Batman Files. The Justice Society of America members—including Scott—are forced into retirement thanks to a government blacklist associated with McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
–1950s. REFERENCE in Batman: Family. The Rossetti (aka Rosetti) family, a smaller Italian-American criminal outfit, rises to prominence by working for the Bertinellis. The Rossetti Mob—run by patriarch Cesare Rossetti and his son Enzo Rossetti—controls the trucking unions for the Five Families. When a mob war erupts, the Rossetti Mob begins moving liquor and guns for a smaller family, the Tarantellas.
–1950s. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1andBatman: Legends of the Dark Knight #58. Thomas Wayne goes to college. After graduating, Thomas is encouraged by his semi-retired father, Patrick (mistakenly referred to as “Alan” in Batman Secret Files and Origins #1), to enter the world of Gotham’s Midtown financial district to prepare him for inheriting WayneCorp. Instead, Thomas leaves Gotham City, traveling to some impoverished islands in the Caribbean to help administer humanitarian aid with a missionary group. His time in the Caribbean is brief. Thomas escapes communist Cuban forces and makes his way back to Gotham. Upon his return, Thomas attends Gotham University’s Medical School (presumably a four-year program). Upon graduation, Thomas becomes a surgeon, primarily working at Gotham General Hospital.
–1950s. REFERENCE from Detective Comics #575-578. Successful businessman Judson Caspian, his wife Mary Rachel Caspian, and his young daughter Rachel Caspian interrupt a burglar looting their Gotham City home. Judson jumps in to stop the burglar, only to be shot down. He lies there helplessly watching the burglar murder his wife before fleeing. Judson angrily vows to avenge his wife’s murder and will spend the next few years training his body to become a vigilante. Notably, other sources refer to Judson as a physician and list this item as occurring in the late 1940s. However, to keep Rachel from being much older than Bruce, it makes way more sense for this item to occur in the 1950s.
–1957. REFERENCE from Batman Annual #13 Part 2,Batman Secret Files and Origins #1, second feature to Detective Comics #806-807, and Batman #675. According to Batman Annual #13 Part 2, by the time Alfred Beagle is around 18-years-old, he and his mother move back to England, while his father (Jarvis) stays behind in Gotham to continue working at Wayne Manor. (In the UK, Alfred will perform in the theater, preferring supporting roles.) Again, it’s possible that Alfred and his mom never lived in Gotham, instead merely making frequent visits, meaning this item would be null and void. Either way, Alfred won’t be in Gotham for quite some time from here on out. This is because he will join the British military (either His or Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, depending on exactly when he joins) as a field medic, then become an actor and lend his services to MI5 (and other MI groups) as a teacher, instructing agents on how to go undercover.
–Late 1950s. REFERENCE from Secret Origins Special #1. A boy named Sharkey bullies young Oswald Cobblepot, giving him the nickname “Penguin,” which Oswald hates. Oswald vows to get revenge against Sharkey.
–1959. REFERENCE from Batman: Streets of Gotham #14, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne#5, and The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Roger Elliot, the patriarch of the wealthy Elliot family and owner of Elliott Pharmaceuticals, marries Marla (last name unknown). (Marla comes from a humble background, but has now married into Roger’s money.) Roger and Marla Elliot run Elliot Pharmaceuticals together. The Elliots are close friends with the Wayne and Kane families. Marla is particularly close friends with Martha Kane, the sole heir to the Kane Chemical fortune. (Martha, along with her parents, Roderick Kane—patriarch of the Kane family and head of Kane Chemical—and Elizabeth “Betsy” Kane, live at the Crest Hill Estate in Bristol Township. The Kanes and Waynes are neighbors. Martha also has at least two brothers—one named Nathan and the other or others unnamed. She also has a distant relative—possibly a cousin or even second cousin—named Jacob “Jake” Kane. These relatives will soon become estranged from Martha, at which point she won’t ever really see them again.) When Roderick Kane blunders into a foolish investment deal with con-man Judson Pierce (a friend of the Elliots), Kane Chemical more or less goes bankrupt. Pierce makes a fortune while Roderick gets screwed. Following this event, the superficial Marla stops being close friends with Martha. Shortly thereafter, a stressed-out Roderick suffers an illness. (Batman: Streets of Gotham #14 erroneously claims that Roderick dies now, but, thanks to Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, we know Roderick survives for a few more decades.) Not long afterward, famous stage magician John Zatara becomes close friends with some of Gotham’s elites, including the Elliots (Roger and Marla), Martha Kane, and Thomas Wayne.
–1960. FLASHBACK from Batman: Family. This item is said to occur one year before Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane get married. Narration in Batman: Family also claims this item occurs forty years before the main action of the Batman: Family series, but it actually must occur exactly forty-six years before to jibe with everything else. Celia Kazantkakis works as a secretary at the Copper Street Orphanage, where she was raised following her mother’s death when she was just a child. When a crooked developer named Stanford Whittaker (also known as Sandhurst Whittaker) tries to shut down the orphanage, activist Martha Kane fights to prevent it. Eventually, Martha gets the city to grant the building protected status as a historical landmark. Shortly thereafter, the orphanage is burned to the ground, and Whittaker goes to jail for arson. (In actuality, Celia burned down the orphanage to cover the fact that she had been embezzling funds.) Martha begins helping Celia find new homes for all the orphans. In the process, Martha and Celia become friends, frequenting various mob-run clubs together. Martha briefly dates Denholm “Denny” Sinclair, a gangster with ties to the Rossetti Mob. Meanwhile, Celia begins secretly dating (possibly even secretly marries) Enzo Rossetti. When Celia discovers that Sinclair is stealing from the Rossettis, she blackmails Sinclair but still tells Martha. Upon hearing the news, Martha breaks up with Sinclair. When Martha learns that Celia burned down the orphanage, she ends their friendship, too. Shortly thereafter, at the start of summer, Enzo (with Celia’s help) steals nearly half a million dollars from the Bertinellis and Cassamentos. When Enzo is exposed, he flees to Greece. Celia, having inherited her birth-father’s business and fortune, joins him, but not before burning down Sinclair’s club. Wanting to preserve order in Gotham, Cesare puts a hit out on his own son. This leads to Enzo’s assassination by Franco Bertinelli, Sinclair, and Charlie Zamboni.
–1960. REFERENCE from Batman: It’s Joker Time! #2, The Brave and The Bold Vol. 3 #31, and Batman: Streets of Gotham #17. In The Brave and The Bold Vol. 3 #31, the Atom goes into Joker’s brain and sees a memory from the latter’s childhood, which shows the boy, around this era, fighting bullies, killing animals, and eventually killing his biological parents via arson fire. In It’s Joker Time! #2, Joker tells the public a story about his childhood, which, if true, would have also taken place around this point on our timeline. In Joker’s tale from It’s Joker Time! #2, the boy’s father, a police officer, is killed in the line of duty, after which his mother begins dating (or marries) a TV clown named Kafka. Following a series of abuses at the hands of Kafka, the boy kills him (although the death is ruled accidental). In Batman: Streets of Gotham #17, the boy (nicknamed Sonny) is shown to have burns, and he claims that an arson fire killed his foster parents. It’s safe to say that the details of the It’s Joker Time! #2 story would expose Joker’s secret identity, so the tale is likely (at least partially) untrue. And Joker’s brain isn’t the type to hold concrete memories, so even the tale from The Brave and The Bold Vol. 3 #31 might be suspect. However, since Batman: It’s Joker Time! #2, The Brave and The Bold Vol. 3 #31, and Batman: Streets of Gotham #17 all seem to share a little connective tissue; it is likely that some combined version of these events happened, meaning the boy who will one day become Joker is a violent, disturbed youth who may or may not have killed people and gotten away with it. Also, there’s no location given for these flashbacks, so we’re assuming they occur in Gotham. In the end, here’s what we can glean as the most likely version of events: An unnamed boy’s stepfather dies under mysterious circumstances (i.e. a version of It’s Joker Time! #2), after which the boy is placed with foster parents who die in a mysterious arson fire (i.e. a version of The Brave and The Bold Vol. 3 #31), after which the boy (now going by the nickname Sonny) begins living on the streets (as referenced in Batman: Streets of Gotham #17 ).
–1960. FLASHBACK from Batman: Streets of Gotham #14-18—and referenced in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #136 and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5. Nearly a year after the collapse of Kane Chemical, Martha Kane begins working with Dr. Leslie Thompkins at her free clinic on Park Row. (Leslie’s clinic is also known as the Gotham Free Clinic, Thompkins Community Center, Thompkins Free Clinic, and Park Row Community Clinic.) Martha and Leslie begin caring for a boy nicknamed Sonny, who has lost his foster parents in a mysterious arson fire. Thomas Wayne is now regarded as a top surgeon but also as a bit of a drunk playboy. After a John Zatara magic show, John Zatara and Thomas Wayne attend a dinner with the Elliots and Martha. Martha wants funding for the clinic from the Elliots, but the Elliots aren’t interested. They are more interested in Wayne money. At the dinner, a drunk Thomas meets Martha for the very first time, throwing up on her shoes! Soon after, Judson Pierce meets with Martha, threatening to have her drop the Leslie Thompkins partnership because he wants the property on which the clinic is built. Martha tells him to piss off. Pierce phones gangster Salvator “Sallie” Guzzo to put a hit on her. A few days later, Thomas visits Leslie’s clinic to apologize to Martha. (Via flashback from Batman: Streets of Gotham #17, Alfred Beagle is shown as Thomas Wayne’s valet, but this is incorrect. The valet should be Alfred’s father, Jarvis. Although I guess it’s possible that Alfred was there briefly to spend time with and work with his father. If you don’t want to ignore Alfred’s presence in the flashbacks completely, then this is the only fanwank that works.) Guzzo’s men attack the clinic, but Thomas’ buff valet fights them off. Leslie takes a bullet but survives. The incident at the clinic inspires Thomas to sober up and found the charitable Wayne Foundation. Via the Wayne Foundation, Thomas starts a trust fund to support Leslie’s clinic (along with schools, orphanages, soup kitchens, and other clinics across the city). While Leslie recovers from her injury, Thomas begins working with Martha at Leslie’s clinic. Thomas and Martha fall in love and start dating.
–1960. REFERENCE from Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood #1. The Panessa family mafia strongly challenges Bertinelli leadership over the organized crime world in Gotham City, hoping to usurp the Bertinellis’ top spot or initiate a “Six Families” system. The Panessas will war with the Five Families for nearly a decade before ultimately being suppressed for good.
–1960. REFERENCE from Batman #471. Gotham City planners begin construction of an underground highway that will link with the subway. The project will prove too expensive and will remain unfinished beneath the city’s streets.
–1960. FLASHBACK from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #135. Brass, now a veteran of various wars, returns to Gotham and crashes a party at Wayne Manor. In attendance are Patrick, Thomas, Martha, and Elizabeth “Betsy” Kane (Martha’s mother). (Someone named Freddy Kane is also present. This is presumably meant to be Martha’s father, but, of course, Martha’s father is named Roderick and, by this juncture, he probably would be too ill to be partying. As such, Freddy must be a different Kane relative. We are also told that Thomas has not yet graduated from medical school, but this is a continuity error. As per Batman: Streets of Gotham, Thomas is already a surgeon before meeting Martha. Furthermore, it is mentioned that Thomas and Martha have been dating for a long time, but they’ve only been together for less than a year at this point.) In a back room at the party, Brass butts heads with Patrick and Thomas. (As noted above, Brass says he was last in Gotham ten years ago, but this isn’t true. He’s been gone since the 1930s, meaning he’d been gone for about thirty years.) During the argument, Patrick suffers a heart attack and dies. Brass immediately leaves town once again. With his father dead, Thomas inherits WayneCorp and his family’s fortune. Thomas becomes either WayneCorp’s CEO, president, or chairman of the board. (We never learn his exact title.) Soon after, Thomas and Martha become engaged to be married.
–FLASHBACK from Batman #548—and referenced in Secret Origins Special #1. Young Oswald Cobblepot’s father dies from pneumonia after getting caught in a downpour without an umbrella. Oswald’s mother becomes neurotic after her husband’s death and starts forcing Oswald to carry an umbrella everywhere he goes in case it rains. Oswald spends his time caring for and playing with birds in a bird shop, presumably one owned by his family. Technically, Oswald’s parents aren’t named in any Modern Age texts. However, in the Silver/Bronze Age, Oswald’s primary maternal figure was bird shop owner Miranda Cobblepot, who was sometimes depicted as his aunt (on his father’s side) and at other times as his mother. In the film Batman Returns (1992), Oswald’s parents were named Esther and Tucker. Later continuities adopted the names Esther and Tucker, so we can probably assume that, in the Modern Age, Miranda is Oswald’s aunt, with his parents being Esther and the dearly departed Tucker.
–REFERENCE from Detective Comics #575-578. In Gotham City, Judson Caspian finishes his training and debuts as a shrouded vigilante/super-villain called The Reaper. In this guise, Caspian wears a silver skeletal helmet, studded red cuir bouilli (boiled leather) armor, a black cape, a black hood, and two large scythes with spiked-globe grips covering his hands. The Reaper brutally and mercilessly slays hoodlums and criminals (mostly juvenile delinquents) with his scythes. The Reaper’s continued murderous actions prompt Green Lantern Alan Scott to briefly (and illegally) come out of retirement. After a confrontation with Green Lantern, the Reaper—along with his daughter Rachel—flees to Europe and retires the persona. Ironically, the Reaper’s absence, coupled with ever-increasing police corruption, will actually cause Gotham’s crime rate to soar to epidemic proportions over the course of the next couple of decades. Notably, some sources place the Reaper’s vigilantism in the late 1950s, but since we’ve shifted earlier parts of the narrative later, it also makes sense for his crusade to occur in the early 1960s rather than the late 1950s. (The Reaper’s crusade functions better immediately before Batman: Streets of Gotham #19-21 anyway, as it gives us a fanwank for why Alan Scott is temporarily back in costume.)
–1961. FLASHBACK from Batman: Streets of Gotham #19-21—and referenced in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5. John Zatara leaves Gotham, telling Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane he’s received an offer to join a re-hash of the Justice Society of America, which includes Hippolyta, Flash (Jay Garrick), Green Lantern (Alan Scott), Starman (Ted Knight), Hawkman (Carter Hall), and Dr. Fate (Kent Nelson). (Of course, the JSA isn’t currently active at the moment, nor will it become a legitimate thing right now, so this must be a temporary reunion tour. It’s possible—and likely—that Green Lantern’s recent action against the Reaper has inspired him to get the old band back together. Suffice to say, these heroes will soon go right back into retirement.) Meanwhile, Sallie Guzzo and Judson Pierce hire crooked Elliot Pharmaceuticals chemist Karl Hellfern to strike at Thomas and Martha. Hellfern injects a plague-like virus into one of Leslie Thompkins’ clinic patients (Sonny), but Thomas and his team of WayneCorp scientists create a cure and save the day. An angry Guzzo, Pierce, and Hellfern then firebomb the clinic, but the temporary reunion superhero group (Doctor Fate, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hippolyta, and Zatara) saves the day. Roger Elliot also stands up against the villains, but he gets shot by Pierce for his trouble. (Roger survives and will forever hate Pierce.) The villains flee the scene. (It’s very important to note that Hippolyta has only previously chronologically appeared before now as a time-traveler, having taken up her daughter’s mantle of Wonder Woman in the early 2000s and time-traveled to the 1940s to join the JSA. Therefore, Hippolyta’s appearance here in 1961 is technically her first chronological appearance not involving time-travel, hence why she is drawn in her regular Amazonian robes—as opposed to a Wonder Woman costume. However, a newspaper article in Streets of Gotham shows her wearing the Wonder Woman costume. If this is meant to be an image of the team’s battle versus Guzzo, Pierce, and Hellfern, then this is an out-and-out artistic error. However, it makes more sense if the newspaper has opted to use a stock image of the 1940s team. It’s also entirely possible that we should completely ignore Hippolyta in this item. After all, Dini’s Streets of Gotham is quite a mess, and her presence here—frankly, along with all the 1940s heroes—only complicates things.) Later, Guzzo betrays Pierce to the cops. We are told that Pierce is sentenced to (and will serve) 37 years in jail, but that doesn’t jibe with any version of the Modern Age timeline. There are probably some fanwanks one could put into play here, but the only sentence that really makes sense (and that we must go with) is 50 years. With Pierce behind bars, his criminal activity connected to the fall of Kane Chemical is also exposed. This results in the Kane family regaining control of their business empire and personal fortune. Meanwhile, Guzzo abducts the badly injured Sonny, turning him into his personal slave, which includes the torture of daily sexual abuse. Guzzo will abuse Sonny for years. (As stated above, Sonny will eventually grow up to be none other than the Joker!)
–1961. REFERENCE from Batman Secret Files and Origins #1. Thomas Wayne weds Martha Kane. (Thomas and Martha’s marriage will last a decade, and Bruce was eight-years-old at the time of their deaths, so that places their marriage two years before his birth.) From this point on, Thomas and Martha will be estranged from the Kane side of the family (Martha’s side).
–1961. REFERENCE from The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Now that they are married, Thomas and Martha Wayne split the Wayne Foundation into separate branches under its holding-company umbrella—the Martha Wayne Foundation and the Thomas Wayne Foundation. The Thomas side focuses on medicine, clinics, and related awards and grants. The Martha side focuses on the arts, education, orphanages, soup kitchens, and nonprofits such as Family Finders Inc. Notably, this item comes entirely from Robert Greenberger’s Essential Batman Encyclopedia (2008), which is comprehensive but not necessarily canon. After all, Greenberger, in his very same encyclopedia entry for the Wayne Foundation, gets crucial details about Leslie Thompkins’ clinic wrong (saying that her clinic is different from the one that will later be known as the Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic, which is just plain wrong). Therefore, it’s up to you whether or not you want to split up the Wayne Foundation in your own personal headcanon. Suffice to say, the Wayne Foundation, split or not, covers all the charitable items listed above.
–1961. FLASHBACK from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #204—andREFERENCE from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #206. According to LOTDK #204, this item supposedly occurs in 1951, but this obviously cannot be correct. Ten years later works better. Thomas Wayne becomes the acting chairman of the think tank known as “Madmen of Gotham.” Fellow members include: Mayor Aubrey James, Gotham Power and Electric CEO Roger Turfs, CIA Medical Research Director Theodore “Ted” Gavlin, and Police Chief Hendrik Petersen. At a Madmen meeting, Gavlin proposes putting mood-regulating drugs in the water supply as a means of reducing crime in the city. The group is vehemently opposed to the idea, shooting it down. However, in secret, Gavlin begins dumping drugs, including the experimental Neurotrol, into Gotham Reservoir. This is one of the reasons Gotham will develop into a supervillain hotbed in the decades to come.
–1961. REFERENCE: In Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #136. At a Wayne Manor costume gala, Thomas Wayne wears (for the first time) a bat costume. Seeking revenge, Brass and a few henchmen attempt to rob the gala. Brass tries to kill Thomas, but Thomas takes him down, forcing him to flee the country.
–REFERENCE: In Batman: The Long Halloweenand Catwoman: When in Rome. The Five Families start to be overshadowed by their mainland Italian rivals, mobs controlled by Don Verinni and led by Vincent Falcone and Luigi “Big Lou” Maroni. Under Don Verinni’s guidance, the Falcones and Maronis have begun to make big waves in Gotham City, although remotely/through visits to America. For now, as per Don Verinni’s wishes, the Falcones and Maronis will keep their home base in Rome. However, by 1969 or 1970, the Falcones and Maronis will have moved to Gotham, becoming the undisputed kings of the city’s organized criminal underworld.
–1961.REFERENCE from “Hush.” Thomas “Tommy” Elliot is born to Roger and Marla Elliot in Gotham City. At this point, Roger has become an alcoholic who is abusive towards his wife and son. The Elliot family is still very successful in the media/news business and the pharmaceutical industry.
–1962. REFERENCE from Batman #386. Roman Sionis is born to Charles Sionis and an unnamed mother, becoming the sole heir to the Sionis family fortune of $500 million. Charles owns Janus Cosmetics, an international makeup firm.
–1962. REFERENCE from Batman #386. Thomas and Martha Wayne go on a trip abroad. When they return to Gotham, the couple publicly announces they are expecting a child.
–REFERENCE fromBatman #474,Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #27, and Detective Comics #641. The Waynes sell Wayne Tower (aka the Corolla Building) and have a new Wayne Tower (aka WayneCorp Tower) constructed.
–Late 1962. REFERENCE from Batman: Jekyll and Hyde. Harvey Dent is born to Christopher Dent and an unnamed mother. Christopher is an abusive alcoholic and gambling addict. Depending on whether parts of Batman: Jekyll and Hyde are canon in your timeline, Harvey had an older brother named Murray, who was troubled and liked to start fires. An accident happened, leading to Murray’s death, and shortly thereafter, the suicide of his mother. Notably, the Two-Face part of Secret Origins Special #1 contains a lot of young Harvey Dent information, including details about his family. Still, this part of the issue is not canon, so please treat it with caution (or ignore it altogether).
–Late 1962 to early 1963. REFERENCE from Batman: Gotham Knights #34. With Martha Wayne pregnant in Gotham, Thomas Wayne makes a humanitarian aid visit to the isle of Santa Prisca in the northeastern Caribbean. As he did before in a prior stint in the Caribbean, Thomas gets involved in the fight against communists. Alfred will later describe this as Thomas’ final trip to Santa Prisca.
Since I’m back in the habit of showcasing projects being done by Batman Chronology Project site contributors and patrons, I’d love to share the Batman fan comic that writer Milo Nousiainen and artist Phil Buckenham are currently working on. I first shared a few pages a couple years ago on this blog, but I wanted to give everyone an update—so I’m re-sharing those plus a few new ones. Keep up the great work, Milo and Phil!
Hi everyone! I’m excited to announce that comic historian and site contributor Troy Doliner has launched an amazing new project/series/channel on YouTube—The Almanac Comicopia. Notably, I was able to influence and do a little behind the scenes work toward the Almanac Comicopia’s episode on Golden Age (Earth-2) Batman—entitled “The Birth of the Batman.” But there are also a few other episodes up already, so you should definitely check them all out, leave some likes, and some comments.
Troy has done a lot of amazing research, voiceover, and editing to put this project together. Definitely give your support if you can and hopefully we’ll see more amazing content from the Almanac Comicopia in the near future.
Hi friends! I am the guest of honor on the latest episode of The Batman Universe Podcast, hosted by the affable Scott Waldyn. Scott and I chat about all things comic book related. It’s a lovely conversation and a bit of a behind the scenes peek into the world of the Batman Chronology Project. Be sure to check it out, rate, and leave some comments. Thanks, all!
I’m super excited to share site contributor Martín Lel’s amazing new video “An Exhaustive Look at the Current Batman Chronology,” which is a two-and-a-half-hour documentary version of Batman’s Rebirth/Infinite Frontier timeline lifted straight from the webpages of my Batman Chronology Project.
Martín has put each year of the Batman Chronology Project’s Rebirth/Infinite Frontier timeline (from Bruce’s birth through to his death) into a straightforward, easy to digest narrative. The video is a tremendous culmination of both Martín’s and my work, and I commend him highly for it, especially the personal flair and touches he’s added. While you never get as many nitty gritty details or scholarly analysis with video, seeing my website adapted into video format does give a certain type of depth that just can’t be attained via a text-based chronological list. After watching through for the first time, I told Martín that his video feels like Chris Tolworthy’s “Fantastic Four as the Great American Novel” theory but applied to Batman. The feature length video not only fleshes out Batman’s overarching story with a pleasing kaleidoscope of expertly edited comic book images, but its narration also highlights several important things that might get missed when one is eyeball-scanning through a long text-based timeline. First, it really impresses upon the viewer exactly how Batman’s trials and tribulations build and connect to each other over long periods of time. Second, it shows how Batman reacts to trauma, learns, grows, occasionally regresses, rebounds, and is generally shaped—again over long periods of time. Third, it shows how Batman’s family is at the heart of his every motivation—and not just the infamous deaths of his parents, but also his very own role as loving father to a handful of kids. As Martín told me, “I 100% believe all of Batman’s history can be read as one big character arc,” and this surely resonates in the video. In short, it’s damn cool to see the Batman Chronology Project play out in this manner.
Please tell us what you think by leaving a comment here and on YouTube. Thanks!
Recently, longtime project supporter and contributor Troy Doliner, as part of a Patreon request, posited the questions: “What are your favorite Earth-1 stories (from the Silver/Bronze Age)? And what are your favorite Earth-2 stories (from the Golden Age and Silver/Bronze Age)?” Thanks, Troy!
As I thought about these questions—the more challenging they became. Because the Golden Age and Silver/Bronze Age were written mostly single issue to single issue (as opposed to arc to arc, or later trade to trade), it’s quite a difficult task to list out favorite stories compared to doing so with later continuities. That’s not to say I don’t love the continuities of old. In fact, because so much of contemporary continuity is modeled directly off of these old stories, I really love a lot of the old stuff, sometimes much more than the newer stuff.
It’s hard for me run through my memory banks to list out dozens of single stories, some of which I haven’t read in a very long time, but what I can do much more definitively is list my favorite writers of yesteryear (keeping a Batman focus), along with a few suggested examples of their work.
In my humble opinion, in regard to Earth-1 stories, Denny O’Neil is the greatest Batman writer of all time. (When I think of the Silver/Bronze Age, Jack Kirby is my #1 guy overall, but he didn’t work on very much Batman, so that’s the only reason he’s not listed below.) Unlike most writers today (who are obsessed with the deconstruction of the superhero genre and often write fascistic power fantasies), O’Neil always understood what a superhero was supposed to represent—helping the little guy and trying to make a positive impact on the world, above all else. Here’s my list of favorite Earth-1 storytellers (in order) along with a random couple favorite tales of theirs to boot.
1. Denny O’Neil – Batman #237, Justice League of America #71-75, Justice League of America #72-75, Justice League of America #82, Detective Comics #483, Batman #232-244 (“The Saga of Ra’s al Ghul”), Batman #251 (“Joker’s Five Way Revenge”) 2. Len Wein – Justice League of America #103, Batman #312-314, Batman #323 3. Doug Moench – World’s Finest Comics #289, Batman #360-400 and Detective Comics #527-566 (his final epic Bat-run to close out the era) 4. Cary Bates – Justice League of America #123-124, his entire Flash run 5. Elliot S! Maggin – Justice League of America #123-124, Action Comics #440 6. Gerry Conway – Batman Family #17, Justice League of America #125-134, Justice League of America #153, Justice League of America #183-185 7. Marty Pasko – Wonder Woman #221-222, Justice League #147-148 8. Bob Haney – Brave and the Bold #54, Teen Titans #1, The Brave and The Bold #79, The Brave and The Bold #83, The Brave and The Bold #94, The Brave and The Bold #98, The Brave and The Bold #115, World’s Finest Comics #239, World’s Finest Comics #255 9. Gardner Fox – Batman #171, Justice League of America #9, Brave and the Bold #28-30, Justice League of America #1-70 (the first few years of JLofA are not only fun but highly influential), Detective Comics #359, “Flash of Two Worlds” 10. Marv Wolfman – Batman #332-225 (“The Lazarus Affair”), New Teen Titans #1-4, Tales of the Teen Titans #42-44 and Tales of the Teen Titans Annual #1 (“The Judas Contract”), Tales of the Teen Titans #50 11. Bob Rozakis – DC Super-Stars #10, Batman Family #11 12. Steve Englehart – Detective Comics #439, Justice League of America #140-149, Detective Comics #469–476 (the famous “Strange Apparitions”/”Dark Detective” run is just okay, getting way overhyped, but it’s definitely worth reading and highly influential) X. Harlan Ellison – Special runner up, specifically for the brilliant Detective Comics #567
In terms of Earth-2 Batman stories, where would we be without the fantastic Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, Edmond Hamilton, or Don Cameron? And the art contributions by Dick Sprang, Jerry Robinson, and Sheldon Moldoff are big enough they should/could really be considered writing contributions too. In the Bronze Age, though, O’Neil and Paul Levitz (and others) were writing excellent Earth-2 material as well. Admittedly, O’Neil’s contributions to Earth-2 mostly come in the form of JSA/JLSA crossovers. (This is true of a lot of the other names mentioned above on the Earth-1 list that also make it down here.) Here are my favorite creators for Earth-2 Batman tales (and a few suggested examples of their works).
1. Denny O’Neil – Justice League of America #72-75, Justice League of America #82 2. Bill Finger (along with Dick Sprang, Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff, Curt Swan, and yeah I guess Bob Kane too) – Detective Comics #27 w/ Kane, Batman #1 w/ Kane & Moldoff, WFC #3 w/ Kane & Robinson, Batman #11 w/ Kane & Robinson, WFC #11 w/ Robinson, WFC #75 w/ Swan 3. Don Cameron (along with Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang) – Batman #12 w/ Robinson, Batman #14 w/ Robinson, Detective Comics #74 w/ Kane & Robinson, Batman #19 Part 2 w/ Sprang, Detective Comics #83, Detective Comics #109, Batman #46 Part 1 w/ Sprang 4. Roy Thomas – All-Star Squadron #1-4, All-Star Squadron #25-37, Secret Origins Vol. 2 #1, Secret Origins Vol. 2 #6 5. Gardner Fox – “The Mad Monk,” all Earth-2 crossovers with JSA/JLA, “Flash of Two Worlds” 6. Edmond Hamilton (along with Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang) – Batman #11 Part 3 w/ Kane & Robinson, Detective Comics #91 w/ Sprang, Detective Comics #215 w/ Moldoff, World’s Finest Comics #91 w/ Sprang 7. Paul Levitz – DC Special #29, DC Super Stars #17, Adventure Comics #461-462 8-12. Cary Bates, Elliot S! Maggin, Gerry Conway, Marty Pasko, and Steve Englehart – A lot of really great Earth-1/Earth-2 crossover JLA/JSA stories.
So, yes, Denny O’Neil is my number one favorite—the G.O.A.T!
Interestingly (and here’s where I slide into a tangent), I recently came across a fascinating series of Reddit posts by user FlyByTieDye, in which they analyze Batman comics across the years to ascertain who had the greatest impact on the character based upon number of writing and art credits. Obviously, this is a bit flawed since impact is subjective, and a writer or artists can greatly impact a character even with only one issue. Plus, I don’t think FlyByTieDye includes any Justice League titles in his analysis, which is a major oversight. In any case, though, his project does give us a general idea of who the big names are when it comes to shaping the Dark Knight.
Check out FlyByTieDye’s Golden Age analysis here. Check out their Silver Age analysis here. And check out their Bronze Age analysis here.
I think the desired result of this post was meant to be a list of essential (or at least my favorite) Earth-1 Batman stories and Earth-2 Batman stories, but clearly I’ve failed in that task, so apologies for that. Nevertheless, I hope that the stream of consciousness response above (which includes a quick list of favorite writers and some interesting links) satisfies my readership! If you are looking to read some really great Batman stories, while I haven’t provided such a list, I highly suggest checking out all the Bat-works of the writers listed above. Leave a comment below, and let me know some of your favorite stories from yesteryear!
When Bill Finger and Bob Kane debuted Batman in 1939, the titular character (joined shortly thereafter by his sidekick Robin) killed wantonly—sometimes in self-defense (i.e. indirectly or situationally), but sometimes purposefully and callously as well. Batman certainly had no qualms about using lethal force in his war against crime. As highlighted by hotstufflouieb on the DC Universe Infinite forums in 2020, Chris on ComicTropes in 2019, and multiple people on the SuperHeroHype forums in 2016, Golden Age Batman started by committing the following murders:
–Detective Comics #27 (1939) – Batman judo flips a bad guy off of a roof and knocks Alfred Stryker into a vat of acid. (1, 2) –Detective Comics #28 (1939) – Batman kicks jewel thief Ricky off a roof. (3) –Detective Comics #29 (1939) – Batman breaks the neck of henchman Jabah. (4) –Detective Comics #30 (1939) – Batman snaps the neck of Dr. Death’s henchman, Mikhail. (5) –Detective Comics #33 (1939) – Batman blows up three of Kruger’s henchmen, tricks Kruger into killing his own henchman, blows up a couple more of Kruger’s henchmen in a blimp explosion, then later causes Kruger to die in an airplane crash. (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) –Detective Comics #34 (1939) – Batman forces kidnapper Duc D’Orterre into a fatal car crash. (13) –Detective Comics #35 (1940) – Batman causes a henchman to get impaled by a sword, then knocks Sheldon Lenox out of a window. (14, 15) –Detective Comics #37 (1940) – Batman punches Count Grutt into a propped-up sword. (16) –America vs The Justice Society #1 (1985) – A flashback to this era shows Batman firing a gun at two crooks. For the sake of completeness, I’ve listed this here, but, since we aren’t shown the final fate of the bad guys, I’ve opted not to include them as official kills. –Batman #1 Part 2 (1940) – Batman allows a couple of Monster Men to kill one another, shoots a couple of Hugo Strange’s henchmen, hangs a Monster Man, kills another henchman, and knocks a Monster Man off a building. (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) –Detective Comics #39 (1940) – Batman pushes a giant statue onto eight cultists. Earlier in the story, Batman and an assassin tumble out of a window together (with Batman landing on top of him below). It’s unclear whether this is a death (or even whether it would count toward our list), so I’ve left it off. (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32) –Batman #2 Part 2 (1940) – Batman punches Adam Lamb down a flight of stairs. (33) –Batman #2 Part 4 (1940) – Batman knocks Goliath the caveman off of a circus tent. (34) –Batman #3 Part 3 (1940) – Batman judo flips a bad guy off of a roof. (35)
From 1939 through mid 1940, one can total around thirty-five Bat-kills (a mix of self-defense and purposely caused deaths). Remarkably, in Detective Comics #32 by Gardner Fox (1939), Batman terminates The Monk and Dala Vadim with a gun. However, these are vampire slayings, which is why they’ve been left off the list above. (As we’ll come to learn, DC writers never regarded the destruction of the undead as legitimate murder.) Of note, Robin had been busy killing as well, with two dead by the Boy Wonder’s hand in Detective Comics #38 by Finger and Kane (1940). By mid-1940, though, Batman quickly stopped killing entirely. Robin can be seen eliminating two more people in Batman #6 by Finger and Kane (1941), but his murderous behavior also comes to a halt.
What had occurred to mark such a stark change in Batman and Robin’s attitudes? As detailed wonderfully by Alan Kistler in a 2019 Polygon article, following the instant success of Batman #1 (1940), DC publisher Jack Liebowitz and editor-in-chief Whitney Ellsworth told Batman creators Kane and Finger they not only wanted them to permanently phase out Batman toting a gun, but also to have Batman kill people altogether. According to historian Jess Nevins (in his brilliant History of Comics in 500 Issues podcast), Gardner Fox was even chewed out for having included Batman using a gun in the first place. Along with a ban on shootings and murders, Liebowitz and Ellsworth made it verboten for hero protagonists to engage in whippings, hangings, knifings, or overtly sexual behavior. As Nevins explains, editorial wanted to make Batman less of a vigilante, bringing him over to the side of the law to keep him more in line with the social mores of the times. Already regretful for having painted Batman as a heartless killer, Finger was all for the changes, whereas the stubborn Kane pushed back. Nevertheless, Kane quickly acquiesced. In Batman #4 (cover date 1940, release date 1941), Kane and Finger introduced what would go on to become Batman’s famous non-lethal code of conduct, which remains in effect to this day. At the time, all DC writers made sure that Batman strictly adhered to the new rule. Interestingly enough, in Batman #4, Batman actually uses a gun to shoot one of the bad guys in the hand! An editor’s note is included, which reads: “Batman never carries or kills with a gun!” So, yes, Finger and Kane had Batman use a gun (someone else’s, non-lethally) in the very same issue where they introduced and emphasized Batman’s no-killing/anti-firearms rule. Seems a little strange, no? This was likely Kane (who, again, was reluctant to give up the guns and murder) delivering a cheeky fuck you to bosses Liebowitz and Ellsworth, before acquiescing to the new status quo. In any case, the guns and murder disappeared after that. Detective Comics #108 by Don Cameron and Dick Sprang (1946) and World’s Finest Comics #27 by Bill Finger and Jim Mooney (1947) both included further details about Batman’s non-lethal code, thus linking it to the character forevermore.
Following the institution of Batman’s no-killing ordinance in 1940/1941, Batman’s only remaining Golden Age (Earth-2) killings were all WWII-related. Ellsworth and company made a major exception to Batman’s no-killing rule for government-conscripted jobs in which he was engaged during wartime. In fact, the kill count ballooned exponentially once Batman got Nazis in his sights. Here’s the chronological list of these military-sanctioned offings.
–Detective Comics #55 (1941) – Batman throws a Nazi into a vat of molten metal and throws two other Nazis off of a blimp. (36, 37) –The Brave and The Bold #84 (1969, Earth-2 canon only) – Batman kills dozens more Nazis on behalf of the US Army. (38 to ~60?) –Batman film serial (1943) – Batman kills Axis agents on behalf of the US government. (~60 to 65?) From the conclusion of WWII onward, Earth-2 Batman’s killing days would be legitimately done. Overall, Earth-2 Batman’s Axis Power kill count is high enough that it’s hard to quantify. (He blows up bridges, planes, and ships filled with enemy soldiers. My guess is around thirty wartime kills, bringing Earth-2 Batman’s Golden Age total to around sixty to sixty-five kills.) I suggest regarding Batman’s wartime kill count with an asterisk, keeping those numbers separate from his Gotham activities.
Before we move on, we should bring up a few iffy issues from Finger. First, in Finger’s Detective Comics #47 (1941), Batman forces a blackmailer into what appears to be a fatal automobile accident. However, an editorial note that follows makes note that the blackmailer and his accomplices have been “trussed,” which implies that they’ve been captured and jailed. We can assume that no one was forced into a fatal crash by the Caped Crusader, who is thus able to uphold his no-killing vow. This was the continuation of a trend that had started right out of the gate in 1939 (and would persist for decades to follow): Bat-killings being open to interpretation, subject to certain points of view, or undone with a retcon or a caption. For example, villains like Joker or Hugo Strange “died” at the hands of Batman time and time again, only to re-appear with a revelation that they weren’t actually killed before. Second, in Finger’s Detective Comics #56 (1941), Batman knocks a strongman into a pillar in a mineshaft, causing the mineshaft to collapse. The strongman and his gang are all killed. One could argue that Batman has killed five people here—albeit in self-defense. However, Finger’s narrative intention, despite being a bit sloppy, was clearly to place blame on the strongman for the mineshaft collapse. Third, Finger’s Batman #8 (cover date 1942, release date 1941) ends with Batman kicking super-villain Professor Radium to his death. However, this is misleading. Radium had already previously died and been resurrected as a radioactive undead monstrosity. Therefore, this fits into the previously mentioned undead (zombies, vampires, and other unnatural beings) category, meaning this doesn’t actually count as a kill. Our analysis of Finger tales wouldn’t be complete without addressing Batman #15 Part 3 (cover date 1943, published 1942), which many internauts like to discuss because it features Batman extinguishing dozens of Axis soldiers on behalf of the US Army. However, most people miss entirely that this is an imaginary story that doesn’t actually occur. Therefore, Batman #15 Part 3 doesn’t violate the no-killing decree.
Notably, 1949’s Batman and Robin (the second Batman film serial, written by George Plympton, Joseph Poland, and Royal Cole; and directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet) contains some brutal scenes featuring fatalities, but there’s a strong argument to be made that Batman doesn’t actually kill anyone (or isn’t directly responsible for causing deaths) in said scenes. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it was fairly easy for Batman writers to stick to the no-killing conviction, especially with the campy tone and lighter fare of the Golden to Silver Age transition era.
Part Two: The Silver and Bronze Age (Earth-1 Batman)
In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Silver Age split DC’s line in twain, giving retroactive birth to Earth-1 and Earth-2, the no-killing rule spread across the multiverse, echoed through the actions of two separate Batmen. The elder Earth-2 Batman’s no-killing code of conduct, which had begun in 1941/1942, would continue plainly, without the Dark Knight engaging in any homicidal behavior whatsoever. Earth-1 Batman’s no-killing code was clearly heralded (and adhered to) as well. In terms of the Silver Age, it was first officially mentioned in World’s Finest #164 by Leo Dorfman and Curt Swan (1967). From that point onward, there would be nods to Batman’s anti-killing MO for years to come, with various comics offering readers important reminders of the vow from time to time.
As the Bronze Age began in the 1970s, DC higher-ups (particularly editor Julius Schwartz) called for a much darker world for Earth-1 Batman. With the arrival of this edgier style of storytelling came an immediate contradiction between the Caped Crusader’s new grim-dark violence and his classic imperturbable restraint in killing. The no-killing rule wasn’t just for the Caped Crusader in fictive Gotham City, but also for the DC bullpen churning out Bat-stories in real New York. But even the best of these writers (like Denny O’Neil) struggled to find a balance. In fact, O’Neil—along with contemporaries like David Vern Reed, Bob Haney, and Mike W Barr—would write darker and darker Batman tales through the 1970s and early 1980s, increasing the violence tenfold even though Batman’s non-lethal edict was definitively still in place. This led to a handful of instances throughout the Bronze Age in which Batman did kill, albeit only (usually) in self-defense. (If the increasing violence of the story demanded killing, then it had to unequivocally be done in self-defense to not fly too boldly in the face of the no-killing rule.) Of course, very few writers, if any, were submitting stories where Batman was killing outright, meaning that most of the Bat-killings were open to reader interpretation.
The hyper-violence of the Bronze Age also brought about the first-ever legitimate exceptions to Earth-1 Batman’s no-killing rule. The first exception to the rule was regarding immortals (specifically, those who have extended their lifespan by unnatural means)—as seen with the Muertos in Detective Comics #395 by O’Neil and Neal Adams (1970), with Ubu in Detective Comics #438 by Archie Goodwin and Jim Aparo (1974), with Catman in Detective Comics #509 by Gerry Conway (1981), and multiple times with Ra’s al Ghul (in various issues throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, mostly by O’Neil). The idea here was likely that, since immortals could always come back to life, it was okay to use deadly force against (or in retaliation for) them. The second exception to the rule was in regard to vampires and/or the undead (as seen throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, most notably in Batman #235 by O’Neil, Detective Comics #455 by Bernie Wrightson and Elliot S Maggin, and The Brave and The Bold #195 by Barr). The logic was clear, reflecting the very same exception dating back to the early Golden Age—vampires and the undead were already dead (evil dead, actually!), so killing them again was an acceptable form of punishment. Interestingly, despite O’Neil’s edgier storytelling, he was always one of the more progressive-minded writers at DC, always keeping the no-kill rule in mind (despite the handful of ostensible fatal contradictions he contributed over the years).
Now let’s get to the million-dollar question at the heart of this article. What are the canonical instances of Batman killing—from material published from the mid 1940s up to the present day? Most folks think that it has happened very rarely (if ever), but there are actually a bunch of occurrences where Batman kills. As highlighted earlier, ComicTropes has an excellent video about all of Batman’s kills from the Golden Age to the Infinite Frontier Era, and the SuperHeroHype forums have a great discussion about this as well. Still, I’ll break it down for you with another easy-to-digest list below. To start, these are all the possible canonical Silver/Bronze Age (i.e. Earth-1) Bat-killings, all of which are via self-defense. Again, some—if not most—are debatable.
–“The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (1939 but canon in Silver/Bronze Age) – Batman punches a crook into a vat of chemicals. (1) –Batman #1 Part 2 (1940 but canon in Silver/Bronze Age) – Batman guns down a couple of Hugo Strange’s henchmen, hangs a Monster Man, and knocks a Monster Man off a building. (2, 3, 4, 5) –Batman #221 (1970) – Batman judo tosses an evil scientist into a pit holding a killer lamb. (6) –The Brave and The Bold #90 (1970) – Batman tosses a villain into the ocean, killing him. (7) –Batman #235 (1971) – Batman knocks a League of Assassins scientist into deadly chemicals. (8) –Superman and Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder Annual 1973 Part 2 – This is a UK annual story, so its canonicity is debatable. However, in the story, Batman kicks a henchman off a ravine and attacks Dr. Mabusa, which inadvertently causes Mabusa to shoot himself to death. (9, 10) –Superman and Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder Annual 1975 Part 6 – This is another UK annual story, so, again, its canonicity is debatable. In the story, Batman knocks Mad Dog Creggan off a stack of crates, causing him to fall to the ground below. Creggan dies of his wounds shortly thereafter. (11) –Batman #270 (1975) – Batman punches a crook into a statue, which crushes him to death. (12) –Batman #271 (1975) – Batman blows up about fifteen cultists. (13 to 27) –Batman #288 (1977) – Batman uses a henchman as a human shield as Penguin shoots at him. (28) –Batman #290 (1977) – Batman judo tosses Skull Duggar into an electrified power box. (29) –The Brave and The Bold #157 (1979) – Batman causes a kidnapper to crash his helicopter. (30) –The Brave and The Bold #159 (1980) – Batman tosses a League of Assassins henchman into Ra’s al Ghul’s crystal death wall. (31) –Batman #340 (1981) – Batman kills The Mole. While there’s no 100% confirmation here, we never see the Mole again (and Batman’s intent was to eradicate him). (32) –The Brave and The Bold #193 (1982) – Batman judo tosses Bloodclaw of the PLA off of a bridge. (33) In total, we have somewhere around thirty-three Earth-1 Bat-killings, all in self-defense. As stated, some instances are vague and open to interpretation, so this list merely comprises possible killings. While not included above, The Brave and The Bold #127 by Haney (1976) is notable because it shows Batman ignoring a distress call, which leads to a fatal helicopter crash. Many online sources regard this as a kill, but I lean the other way on this one. Detective Comics #517 by Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz (1982) is also notable for depicting Batman himself turning into a vampire and biting someone. Still, it’s unclear whether the victim dies (or whether this would be considered self-defense in the first place). Likewise, Batman Annual #9 Part 2 by Barr (1985) appears to contain a straight-up violation of Batman’s no-killing code, showing the Dark Knight directly inciting gang bloodshed. We should highlight that the latter is written by Barr, who—as mentioned above, along with Reed, Haney, and O’Neil—arguably penned the most extremely violent Batman comics once the Bronze Age started. Stories by Barr, Reed, Haney, and O’Neil in the 1970s and early 1980s certainly seem to depict Batman sometimes dishing out a level of viciousness that could potentially be fatal, but we have to assume Batman knows exactly what he’s doing, keeping folks maimed but alive. Again, we (the readers) have to suspend our disbelief a bit to ensure Batman doesn’t break the rules!
Once The Crisis on Infinite Earths ushered in the Modern Age in 1986, Batman’s anti-killing stance was still in full effect. Still, the lingering gritty effect of the Bronze Age continued to influence (or confuse) writers to some extent. In Batman #402 by Max Allan Collins and Jim Starlin (1986), Jason Todd oddly reminds readers that Batman has killed people before, to which Bruce replies, “[Only] in self-defense.” When Collins wrote this arc, it was right after Crisis on Infinite Earths, so he hadn’t been notified of the Modern Age status quo regarding Batman’s no-killing rule—hence this strange dialogue. When has Modern Age Batman killed in self-defense, you ask? Here’s my complete list of possible canonical instances in chronological order.
–Batman Confidential #50 (2011) – This is before Bruce becomes Batman, but it technically qualifies as the first time Bruce kills someone. While traveling through China, Bruce is forced to use an opponent as a human shield. (1) –“The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (1939 but canon in Modern Age) – Batman tosses a villain into a vat of chemicals. Although technically, we don’t actually know if he dies. (2) –Detective Comics #29 (1939, but canon in the Modern Age) – Batman tosses one of Dr. Death’s henchmen off a roof. (3) –Detective Comics #30 (1939 but canon in Modern Age) – Batman snaps the neck of one of Dr. Carl Kruger’s henchmen. (4) –Detective Comics #35 (1940 but canon in Modern Age) – Batman impales a henchman on a sword and knocks crime boss Sheldon Lenox out of a window. (5, 6) –“Infected” (1996) – Batman knocks a monster-serum-infected soldier into the reservoir. The soldier is definitely more beast than man at the time of his death, but this is still technically a kill. (7) –“Blink” (2002) – Facing a hail of gunfire and not seeing many options, Batman instinctively uses a henchman as a human shield. (8) –“Family” (1992) – Batman blows up at least two men with explosives. (We’ll keep it at two, since we only technically see two guys get blown up.) (9, 10) –“Colossus” (2002) – Batman causes Rubio Dolor to fall from the top of a tower. (11) –“Sanctum” (1993) – Batman kicks Lowther onto a railing spike, killing him. (12) –“The Saga of Ra’s al Ghul” (1971 but canon in Modern Age) – Batman knocks a League of Assassins scientist into chemicals, killing him. (13) He is also tricked into killing Dr. Mason Sterling’s re-animated brain, although this latter instance falls into the category of destruction of the undead, of which Batman is totally cool. After all, just as in previous continuity, Batman believes in killing vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural entities without regard as seen in The Brave and The Bold #195 by Barr 1983 but canon in Modern Age), Action Comics Annual #1 by John Byrne (1987), Detective Comics #814 by David Lapham (2006), Superman and Batman vs Vampires and Werewolves by Kevin VanHook (2008-2009), and other vampire stories in the 1990s and 2000s. –Year One: Batman – Ra’s al Ghul #2 (2005) – Batman causes an avalanche that buries two League of Assassins agents. He may double back to make sure they are alive, but that’s certainly not shown in the comic. (14, 15) –The Brave and The Bold #193 (1982 but canon in Modern Age) – Batman judo tosses one of the members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) off a bridge to his death. (16) –“Batman: Year Two” (1987) – Reaper falls to his death while fighting Batman. This is more of Batman not saving Reaper from falling, so it could really go either way, depending on your perspective. (17) Batman #402, where we get Jason’s pointed question about Batman killing in the past, occurs at roughly this point on the timeline. –Batman: Son of the Demon (1987) – Batman kills a couple of League of Assassins henchmen by causing a helicopter crash. He also kills Qayin by knocking him into an electrified power box. (18, 19, 20) –Detective Comics #590 (1988) – Batman knocks a terrorist through a window onto a spike wall below. He later runs over (and blows up) four more terrorists. (21, 22, 23, 24, 25) –Batman: The Cult (1988) – There’s a trippy scene where a drugged-up Batman seemingly goes on a killing spree, but this is merely a hallucination. (Yes, he’s on a raid with Deacon Blackfire’s cult, and they do kill a bunch of people, but there’s no indication that Batman actually offs anyone himself.) However, in this same arc, Batman blows up a building with a cultist standing atop its roof. Additionally, Batman more or less allows the cultists to kill Deacon Blackfire, although there’s an argument that nothing could be done to save Blackfire once the cultists were on top of him. (26, 27) –Detective Comics #572 (1987) – Batman uses a hood as a human shield. (28) –Batman #425 (1988) – In a junkyard, Batman kills a bad guy by causing a pile of cars to topple on top of him. (29) –Detective Comics #613 (1990) – In yet another junkyard, Batman kicks a couple of criminals into the back of a garbage truck, crushing them to death. (30, 31) –Batman: Bride of the Demon (1990) – Batman crashes an airplane into three League of Assassins technicians. (32, 33, 34) Not long afterward, the League of Assassins’ base explodes. Some internauts believe that Batman is responsible for the deaths of dozens of people in the base, but, based upon the way the narrative is delivered, there’s more than a strong argument to be made that the destruction of the base is not directly linked to the Dark Knight.
Bride of the Demon by Barr (1990) is the last time we ever see Batman kill anyone in any capacity, in any continuity (even in self-defense). Since eight of his Modern Age kills are highly debatable, this gives us a total of no less than twenty-six but no more than thirty-four possible instances where Batman kills. Again, many of the above scenarios are generally open to reader interpretation, meaning that, if one were so determined, one could regard even more Bat-kills as dubious, thus further lessening the number. Nevertheless, Batman’s killing is more or less a rarity (for someone who is constantly fighting for his life every day). We can ascertain that at least some folks in the DC home office, even as late as 2011, were leaning into the idea that Batman killed in self-defense in his formative years. Examples of this are: Devin Grayson’s Year One: Batman – Ra’s al Ghul #2 (written in 2005 but occurring partly in the early portion of the Modern Age timeline) and Marc Guggenheim’s Batman Confidential #50 (written in 2011 but partly taking place during Bruce’s training years abroad before becoming Batman). A rather special case is Batman #673 by Grant Morrison (2008), which famously has Batman psychologically nudge Joe Chill toward suicide. Whether or not we include this on our kill list is debatable as well. (I’ve opted not to, but it could easily be up there, depending on your perspective.) No matter the case, it’s clear that DC editorial, by 1990, mandated that Batman never kill again in contemporary continuity. From 1990 onward (even into later continuities!), there aren’t any canonical Bat-killings whatsoever (aside from those retroactively taking place in Batman’s early years or those perpetrated by alternate Batman Jean-Paul Valley in 1994). Story-wise, we can take this to simply mean that, by the end of Modern Age Year 13, Batman gets really good at making sure people around him stay alive.
In the latter part of the Modern Age, readers would see Batman push his no-killing code to its utmost limits regarding certain foes—notably Ra’s al Ghul and Joker (with Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s 2003 “Hush” arc being an example of this for both villains, and Starlin and Aparo’s 1988 “Death in the Family” being another example for Joker).
Part Four: Contemporary Comic Continuity, Ethics, and Hollywood
Overall, the Bat-bodycount (in comics) from 1939 to today comes in as follows: Around sixty to sixty-five kills for Golden Age Earth-2 Batman (nearly half of which are government-sanctioned kills during WWII), around thirty-three kills for Silver/Bronze Age Earth-1 Batman, somewhere in the range of twenty-six to thirty-four kills (probably on the lower end of the spectrum) for Modern Age Batman, zero kills for New 52 Batman, and zero kills for Rebirth/Infinite Frontier Batman. As you can see, the “Batman never kills” concept has become absolute gospel at DC Comics for decades.
Beyond writers and publishers grappling with the notion of Batman dishing out capital punishment, this has long been a topic of heated debate among fans, too. In fact, when I was on set filming Jozef K Richards’ lovely documentary Batman & Jesus(2017), the idea of Batman committing murder sparked a big argument among those involved with the project. On set that day (and in local comic shops and online forums yesterday, today, and tomorrow), some firmly believe that Batman should never kill, citing the act as a hypocritical violation of his oath to bring justice to evildoers in honor of his parents having been horribly gunned down. He’s a superhero—and superheroes just don’t kill. Others stand opposed, believing that killing should be a necessary (and equal) action against homicidal maniacs, especially for a vigilante already operating beyond the restrictions of the law. This is brilliantly articulated by Mark White in Batman and Ethics (2019), who says, “By choosing to act outside of nearly every single law (albeit sometimes sanctioned by the police) but cherrypicking no-killing as his one personal rule, Batman actually allows thousands of deaths to occur at the hands of his rivals.” As a continuity and superhero purist, I’ve always leaned into the “Batman should never kill” camp, but I do agree with White that Batman’s anti-killing stance directly contradicts his own ethical standpoint and obstructs his stated goals. Removing Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, and others from the equation would lead to an exponentially safer Gotham. Food for thought! Those on the “Batman should kill” team often refer to “realism” as a primary reason behind their viewpoint—citing that a violent crimefighter engaging in daily vigilantism against equally vicious opponents would likely result in collateral loss of human life. Obviously, Hollywood, which strives for filmic “realism,” has long been okay with a Batman-who-kills, as we’ve seen it happen in both Batman movie serials (1943 and 1949), Adam West’s Batman ’66, Tim Burton’s Batman films (1989 and 1992), Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995), Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (2005, 2008, and 2012), and Zack Snyder’s Batman-related films (2016 and 2017). While there’s no explicit Bat-killing in Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), there’s certainly enough harsh violence to presume collateral fatalities with Batman being at least partially responsible for causing them. Thus, Hollywood’s Bat-bloodlust continues.
Thankfully (depending on your perspective, of course), the Batman of the funnybooks has remained devout in his commitment to non-lethal action. In summary, Batman killed initially until 1940/1941, at which point the no-killing rule was initiated (with the only exceptions being instances of self-defense and wartime Nazi/Japan stuff). Post-WWII, there were no Bat-killings at all (not even in self-defense). It wasn’t until Bronze Age muddling (where authors were aware of the no-killing rule but struggled to deal with it due to the darker tones of the new line) that we wound up with a handful of Bat-killings (mostly in self-defense, at least one with a serious asterisk) sprinkled throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Once the Modern Age began, there was lingering confusion among creators that lasted until 1990. Still, after that, there would really be no more Bat-killings whatsoever (aside from those retroactively placed in Batman’s early years). To this very day, even into the current comics continuity, Batman still hasn’t killed anyone since! Thanks so much for reading. Please leave a comment below, and if you like what you’ve read, please consider donating to my Patreon. Last but not least, a special shout-out to Jasper Derklin for initiating this topic of discussion.
The retcon history of Batman and Catwoman discovering each other’s secret identities is rather complicated. Before I dive in, the great Brian Cronin has an excellent series of articles about this very topic, to which I’m incredibly indebted:
In the Golden Age, Catwoman uses a variety of false names, not revealing her true identity of Selina Kyle to Batman until Year Twelve—in Batman #62 Part 1 by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Lew Sayre Schwartz, and Charles Paris (1950).
Five in-story years later (Year Seventeen), thanks to a retcon that sees the Bat marry the Cat (thus further distinguishing the Golden Age Earth-2 from the Silver/Bronze Age Earth-1), Batman reveals his secret identity to Selina. This big moment occurs via flashback from The Brave and The Bold #197 by Alan Brennert and Joe Staton (1983).
Turning to the Silver/Bronze Age, we get a super-compressed version of the Golden Age in regard to Batman’s dealings with Catwoman. Her use of false names and Batman learning her secret identity all occurs in Year One! Batman #208 by E Nelson Bridwell (1969) is a clever story that re-contextualizes old material via the framing device of Ma Chilton talking about the history of Batman’s love life. Thus, instead of having the typical non-canon reprint issue, all the reprinted (prior continuity) material, including Batman #62 Part 1, is canonized in full.
Year Sixteen’s Batman #355 by Gerry Conway and Don Newton (1983) is the first issue that definitively reveals that Catwoman knows Batman’s secret identity. It’s possible she knows earlier than that, but in any case, she 100% knows by Year Sixteen. Not long afterward, Detective Comics #526 by Conway and Newton (1983) doubles down on this, emphasizing that Catwoman knows who Batman is under the cowl. However, DC editorial royally complicates the matter after that. In Year Nineteen’s Batman #389 by Doug Moench and Tom Mandrake (1985), Batman blindfolds Catwoman to bring through an alternate Batcave entrance. This scene that makes it seem like she doesn’t know who he is under the cowl. However, as Conway had already definitively shown in Batman #355 and Detective Comics #526, Catwoman already knows Batman’s secret identity—so the need for her to be blindfolded in Batman #389 makes no sense. An easy fanwank is that Batman simply doesn’t want her to know about one of the alternate entrances into the Batcave. However, in a rare attempt to cover their asses, DC editors actually publish a letter of explanation in Batman #393 by Moench and Paul Gulacy (1986) saying that Catwoman shouldn’t have been blindfolded since she already knows Batman’s secret identity. They actually own up to a continuity error! But then, in Batman #397 by Moench and Mandrake (1986), DC editors retract their statement in a second letter! Instead of letting things go and providing an easy out for the blindfold thing, they disavow all prior instances of Catwoman knowing Batman’s secret identity, even going so far as to say that she never knew—even in Batman #355 and Detective Comics #526! What?! That is a huge (and bogus) retcon. She definitely knew, and, if she doesn’t know by 1986, then she was friggin’ mind-wiped. Go with your headcanon on this one because it’s better than anything DC has to offer.
Believe or not, Batman’s knowledge of Catwoman’s secret identity (and vice versa) is just as complicated in the Modern Age. Due to vague hints in Frank Miller’s “Year One” (1986-1987), Mindy Newell’s Catwoman #3-4 (1989), and Denny O’Neil’s Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #1 (1989), it’s possible Batman knows Catwoman’s secret identity as early as Year One. (At the very least, he likely has a hunch who she is under the mask.) However, it’s not until Year Two that we can be more certain that he knows. Of course, the references to Batman learning Catwoman’s secret identity as early as Year Two on the Modern Age timeline—specifically in Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (1996-1997), Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #140 by Moench and Gulacy (2001), and The Batman Files by Matthew Manning (2011)—are, like the earlier references, also a bit vague, still merely hinting at Batman finding out. Because of this haziness, various arguments can be supported. Furthermore, over the course of the following seven in-story years, Batman’s interactions with Catwoman—and Bruce’s with Selina—are coy enough to keep things deliberately vague. For example, Batman: Dark Victory by Loeb and Sale (1999-2000) keep things so vague, you could read it either way. It’s actually downright perplexing. While we are at like 90% certainty that Batman knows Selina is Catwoman by Year Two, it’s not all the way until Year Nine—via flashback from Catwoman Vol. 3 #50 by Will Pfeifer (2006)—that we learn definitively that Batman knows Catwoman’s secret ID. But 90% certainty ain’t bad. Therefore, all signs point to Batman learning Catwoman’s secret ID in Year Two (if not earlier). This is your personal headcanon call, of course.
I should mention that, for decades, I had regarded Batman Confidential #17-21 by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire (2008) as an important arc in regard to Batman learning Catwoman’s secret ID, but upon a recent re-read, this simply isn’t the case. There’s a scene in issue #18 where a nude Batgirl fights a nude Catwoman, and the latter is referred to as Selina Kyle by multiple people at the Gotham Hedonist Society, but it’s unclear if it’s within Batgirl’s earshot or not. Either way, neither Batman nor Batgirl refer to her as Selina in this arc. Like the other stuff above, it’s kept vague. Although, as mentioned, I no longer think this arc has any particular bearing upon our Bat/Cat secret identity topic at hand.
The other way around—Catwoman learning Batman’s secret identity—has an even more complex history in the Modern Age. At the time of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot in 1986, the Catwoman status-quo was that she was a superhero that had learned Batman’s secret identity much akin to how she had in the Bronze Age. This is confirmed via reference in Detective Comics #569-570 by Mike W Barr and Alan Davis (1986). Notably, Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales (2004) would later retcon that Catwoman, in Year Nine, becomes a superhero due to a Zatanna mind-wipe, at which time the Dark Knight reveals his secret identity to her as a gesture of goodwill. Wanting to revert Catwoman back to her old ways, Barr (in Detective Comics #569-570), has Catwoman mind-wiped yet again (this time by Dr. Moon, and this time it turns her back into a super-villain). This mind-wipe also causes her to permanently forget Batman’s secret identity.
And this is the status quo for a while. In Batman #499 by Moench and Jim Aparo (1993), Bruce, Alfred, and Selina board a plane together. The dialogue between Alfred, Bruce, and Selina makes it sound like Alfred has no idea who Selina is and that Bruce has only met her once. Alfred says, “Good lord, who are you and how did you get—” and Selina cuts him off with, “My name is Selina Kyle, Mr. Wayne—we met at a charity function and I desperately need to reach Santa Prisca.” When Batman #499 originally came out in 1993, Bruce and Selina really had only interacted (out-of-costume) one or two times prior to this moment and definitely not romantically. When Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween was published in 1996-1997, it retconned things so that Bruce and Selina did have an intimate relationship outside of their Batman/Catwoman relationship, thus changing this Batman #499 sequence entirely.
It’s not until Year Nineteen’s “Hush”—specifically Batman #615—by Loeb and Jim Lee (2003) that Batman finally reveals his secret identity to Catwoman. Interestingly, DC Comics editors, in a halfhearted attempt to erase any head-scratching Catwoman continuity, tried to cover up their messy mind-wipes by labeling Detective Comics #569-570 as occurring on the alternate Earth-85 (in 2005’s The Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Compendium). Of course, Detective Comics #569-570 is dead smack dab in the middle of John Ostrander and Len Wein’s major “Legends” crossover arc, so its details are definitively canon.
In the end, continuity is as follows: Catwoman gets mind-wiped in Year Nine, becoming a superhero, at which time Batman reveals his secret identity to her. In Year Eleven, Catwoman is mind-wiped again, becoming a villain again and losing knowledge of Batman’s secret identity. In Year Nineteen, Batman reveals himself to Catwoman for the final time.
In the New 52, Batman first meets a fully-costumed Catwoman in the Year One story, Young Romance: A New 52 Valentine’s Day Special #1 by Ann Nocenti and Emanuela Lupacchino (2013). While there’s no indication as to whether or not Batman knows Catwoman’s secret identity in Young Romance, as referenced in Catwoman Vol. 4 #1 by Judd Winick and Guillem March (2011) (a tale that occurs five years later), it’s entirely possible that Batman knows right from the get-go. But, as before, it’s very vague. Catwoman’s inner dialogue in Catwoman Vol. 4 #1 even says, “I don’t think he knows who I am. Although he is the master detective. So, maybe.” In Year One, Young Romance is immediately chronologically followed-up by Batman/Superman #1-4 by Greg Pak and Jae Lee (2013). In Batman/Superman #2, Bruce travels to Earth-2 where he meets Earth-2 Batman and Earth-2 Catwoman, learning the secret identity of the latter—and therefore learning the secret identity of her primary Earth counterpart. However, by the arc’s end (in Batman/Superman #4), everyone’s memories of the event get erased. Therefore, Batman doesn’t actually learn Catwoman’s secret ID in this story. However, upon returning to Earth-0, Batman and Superman are left with a strange shared feeling. Again, this is very vague, demonstrated only by a confusing “huh” exclaimed by both men upon returning home. However, it’s not uncommon in the world of superhero comics for characters to retain fleeting dreamlike flashes of erased memories deep within their subconsciouses. As theorized by site contributor Hembro, this gut feeling might motivate Bruce to seek out Catwoman’s secret ID (and it might even help him to connect the dots). However, in the New 52, we never really know when Batman actually discovers Catwoman’s secret ID. Taking Hembro’s path, I’ve gone with Year One, but this is definitely a personal headcanon situation. As pointed out to me by site contributor Maab Zafar, the first definitive time we see Batman fully aware of Catwoman’s secret ID isn’t until Catwoman Vol. 4 #2 (2011) or possibly Catwoman Vol. 4 #3 (2011), both of which occur in Year 5.
Catwoman, on the other hand, doesn’t definitively learn Batman’s secret identity until fairly late—not until Year Eight (out of ten total years of the shortened timeline). While the New 52 version of “Hush” includes a Bat/Cat romance, the latter does not learn the former’s secret identity. Notably, there is the much-maligned “Gothtophia” crossover (written by multiple authors) where Catwoman learns it, but only while under a drug induced haze—and, by the story’s conclusion, she has no recollection of it whatsoever. Ultimately, the first reference of Selina learning Batman’s secret identity doesn’t come until a reference in Catwoman Vol. 4 #49 by Frank Tieri (2016). In this issue (again, in Year Eight), there’s no big reveal that is shown (she just all of a sudden knows it), meaning that the discovery occurs off panel.
This is the most straightforward of them all, as the discovery of each other’s secret identities are connected to the very same issue—Batman Vol. 3 Annual #2 by Tom King and Lee Weeks (2018). In regard to Batman discovering Catwoman’s secret identity, we are told (via reference in Batman Vol. 3 Annual #2 Part 1) that he has “known since the beginning,” meaning since Year One. Catwoman Vol. 5 #3 by Joëlle Jones and Fernando Blanco (2018) and Catwoman 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular Part 6 by Newell (2020) both nod toward some form of Catwoman #1-4 happening in the Rebirth/Infinite Frontier Era. These references also tell us that, during Year One, Selina slightly suspects Batman may be the same man she first encountered on the street in the East End (in the Rebirth/Infinite Frontier Era’s version of Miller’s “Year One”), but she still doesn’t know his true secret identity. Catwoman 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular Part 6 actually functions as a direct precursor to Batman Vol. 3 Annual #2 Part 1, which occurs in Year Three and leads with Catwoman having discovered Batman’s secret identity, after which she breaks into the Batcave. So it’s possible Catwoman might know Batman’s secret ID as early as Year One, but she definitively knows by Year Three. In this same Year Three story (Batman Vol. 3 Annual #2 Part 1), Batman and Catwoman kiss for the first time ever.
And what better way to end than with a kiss. That’s all folks!
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