Batman

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The urban myth of **Batman**; a bat-like specter that swoops on the corrupt and protects the innocent in Gotham City, is a well known tale told amongst the criminal underworld that warns them never to trust the shadows. What they don't realize is that the urban myth is real. Although he has ho superhuman ablities, Batman is easily one of the world's smartest men and greatest fighters. His physical prowess, technical ingenuity, and tactical thinking make him an incredibly dangerous opponent.

Motivated by a tragedy from his past and having dedicated a vast span of his life to honing his physical and mental abilities to near-peak human potential, the Dark Knight is a deductive-minded vigilante who operates within the city of Gotham to eradicate crime and corruption and bring peace and justice back to the streets.

## Background

Bruce Wayne was born on May 18 and he is the son of billionaire philanthropists Thomas Wayne and Martha Wayne. Bruce led a blessed childhood until he witnessed his parents murders at the hands of a petty mugger during a mugging-gone-wrong. Blaming himself for their deaths and promising never to be as helpless again as he was on that night, Bruce swore an oath that he would avenge his parents' legacy and spend his remaining years ensuring that what happened to them would not happen to anybody else. Devoting himself to this goal, Bruce spent his childhood and teenage years accumulating the skills and abilities he would need to fight crime; leaving Gotham on a ten-year journey to accumulate further skills and experience.

Returning to Gotham, Bruce felt that he needed something more than simple skill and knowledge to give him an edge against the city's criminal element and gained inspiration from a bat; realizing that the animal's iconology and symbolism would give him the edge he needed in the minds of the "cowardly and superstitious" criminals he sought to fight. Modeling a persona around the Gothic archetype, Bruce designed himself a costume equipped with experimental technology and began accumulating various gadgets, vehicles and tools he would need within the underground caverns underneath the family manor.

Dubbed "the Bat-man" by the media, Bruce's tactics to oppose crime led him to become an urban legend within the city. However, while he could effectively confront criminals on the street, Bruce still needed allies to help break the corruption within the police and judicial systems. His first allies in this regard was assistant district attorney Harvey Dent and, while most of the Gotham City Police Department were en-mass to capture him, police lieutenant James Gordon. Together the trio worked to break the grip of the Gotham City Organized Crime Family (with Batman investigating, Gordon arresting and Dent persecuting), however, the stress of working within the confines of a system resistant to effective change soon took its toll and a public attack against Harvey by one of the crime families saw the district attorney succumb to vigilantism and schizophrenic insanity.

While the trinity was broken, Bruce still maintained a partnership with Gordon and soon became involved with the newly arisen Superhero community; meeting Superman (who had initially traveled to Gotham to apprehend the vigilant) and becoming a founding member of the Justice League of America after aiding in the repulsion of an alien invasion.

On a rare night out, Bruce attended a show at Haley's Circus and witnessed the deaths of the circus' husband and wife trapeze team; The Flying Graysons. Realizing that the duo had a son; Richard Grayson, Bruce realized the similarities between what had happened to them and what had happened to him with his parents and opted to take the young Grayson as his legal ward. Noting the boy's natural skills and underlying anger over the injustice of his parents' deaths, Bruce soon revealed his persona as the city's vigilante hero "Batman" and trained him to work as his sidekick and partner; Robin.

The "Dynamic Duo" were soon joined by other vigilantes like the first Batwoman and Batgirl, however, as the criminal element grew darker the team began to dissolve as the members sought to move on with their lives; a concept that Bruce was unable to follow. It was also at this point that Batman discovered the JLA's tendency to wipe or otherwise alter the minds of the super villains they fought. Unable to convince him that what they were doing was the only way to ensure the safety of the populace, the JLA was forced to wipe his memory of the incident.

When Richard Grayson attends college at Hudson University, Batman moves from his mansion into a penthouse apartment atop the Wayne Foundation building within Gotham in order to be closer to the city's crime. Batman spends the time mainly working solo, with the relationship between mentor and squire becoming even more strained until Batman felt that he could no longer rely on Robin being there to back him up due to his standing commitments to college and the Teen Titans and fired him.

Soon after losing one Robin, another young protégé presented itself in a young street orphan named Jason Todd, who was in the process of stealing the tires from the Batmobile. Eager to continue the partnership that seemed to have helped Grayson find direction and aided in his fight against Gotham's criminals, Bruce took Todd in as his new legal ward and trained him to become the new Robin.

During this, Batman had became frustrated over the Justice League's increasing adherence to international laws, especially if they interfered with their pursuit of freedom and justice. No longer willing to sit by, Batman quit the League and formed a new hero group called the Outsiders which would specialize in the black ops and espionage work that the JLA could not afford to become involved with due to their status as public icons.

While the group initially operated well under his leadership, they soon rebelled against his policy to keep their operations focused within Gotham and left to operate outside of his influence. Robin, too, soon began to exhibit a rebellious streak and demonstrated a dangerous tendency to disregard his orders and a willingness to kill the criminals they confront.

In a random attempt to psychologically break James Gordon much in the same way Harvey Dent was broken, the Joker invades his home and shoots his adoptive daughter, Barbara, in front of him before kidnapping him and exposing him to various tortures. While Batman managed to find and save Gordon before he succumbed, Barbara Gordon was left permanently crippled and thus no longer able to assist him as Batgirl.

The Joker soon became involved in another monstrous act when Todd left Bruce to pursue a mysterious lead on the identity of his mother and Jason's callous disregard for his mentor's warnings caused him to be captured, beaten and killed by the villain. Unable to avenge his ward or even apprehend the criminal, Batman's rage begins to show as he begins to exhibit an excessive and reckless approach to his crime-fighting. This behavior is noted by Tim Drake who had long ago deduced Batman and Robin's identities and had followed their exploits from the sidelines until now, when he attempts to get Grayson to return as Robin only to become the new Robin himself to curb Batman's self-destructive tendencies.

It was also around this time that Batman regained his memories of what the original JLA had done and began to lose trust in the superhero community; forming his own countermeasures against various community members should they go bad and began developing the Brother MK I surveillance satellite so that he could maintain a watch over them as well as aid him in tracking various suspects during missions.

Beginning to feel that he was losing his edge, Bruce begins using a new super steroid called Venom to enhance his abilities only to discover that the drug was making him dangerously irrational and stopped using it; subjecting himself to a painful detoxification process in order to do so.

After encountering a man named Jean-Paul Valley, who has been selected to serve a religious cult as their new assassin, known as "Azrael", Bruce takes an interest in him as a potential agent and offers his help in breaking the psychological programming the cult had subjected Jean-Paul to. Soon after, Batman becomes the target of a powerful mercenary known as Bane, whose obsessive mission to break the hero saw him break open Arkham Asylum to observe and study Batman as the hero contended with the various trials of recapturing the escaped villains without rest until the sheer magnitude of constant action without sleep made it easy for Bane to invade the manor and beat Batman down; breaking the hero's back before publicly throwing him to the city streets where Bruce is rescued by his family and the GCPD. Now confined to a wheelchair and no longer able to operate as Batman, Bruce asks Jean-Paul to take on the role with Robin tutelage. Soon after, Tim's father Jack Drake is kidnapped and Bruce leaves the country to find them, successfully saving them and regaining the use of his legs in the weeks that followed.

Returning to Gotham, Bruce discovers that, while he had defeated Bane, Jean-Paul had succumbed to his psychological programming to become a more vicious and mentally unstable Batman than Bruce had ever been. Forced to reclaim his mantle, Bruce sought the help of Lady Shiva to regain his fighting prowess before confronting Jean-Paul and relieving the man of the role as Batman.
Following an attempted invasion by White Martians, Batman once again becomes a member of the Justice League but is forced to return to Gotham after it is devastated by an earthquake and is disowned by the United States Government. Initially attempting to reclaim the city alone, he soon fails and requests the assistance of his extended family to unite the city and disrupt Lex Luthor's plans to own the city by stealing the settlement land ownerships.
Briefly buoyed by the renewed city and reformed family, Bruce is disappointed when James Gordon decides to retire from duty after narrowly surviving a murder attempt by a corrupt cop. Furthermore, Alfred also opts to leave Bruce's employ in an effort to stop "babying" him over his self-destructive behaviors.
It wasn't long before Bruce and his bodyguard, Sasha Bordeaux (who was forced upon him following Alfred's dismissal), are framed for a murder that they are unable to defend themselves against without revealing Bruce as the Batman. As such, Bruce escapes custody and decides that "Bruce Wayne" had become a pointless liability and opts to become Batman permanently. Eventually, he realizes that "Bruce Wayne"'s resources did indeed aid his mission and that he was wrong to think that he didn't benefit from the companies of his allies as they gathered together to prove his innocence by determining that the man behind the entire incident was Lex Luthor, who wanted revenge against Bruce Wayne for foiling his attempt at owning Gotham.
Following Gordon's retirement, Batman's relationship with the GCPD began to deteriorate due to the hero's refusal to accept the new commissioner, Michael Akins, as a partner and Akins' own refusal to accept the vigilante like his predecessor did.

When a city-wide gang war erupted after Stephanie Brown; a recently estranged member of the Bat Family, attempted to enact one of Batman's war game scenarios without his knowledge, the hero attempted to co-opt full control of the GCPD's police forces to quell the war before it tore apart the city. The move effectively alienated the commissioner, who believed the vigilante had no business giving the police orders to follow, and ordered a shoot-on-sight and shoot-to-kill order against Batman and his agents. Following a crisis when the super villain community had their wiped memories returned and Jean Loring murders Sue Dibny and Jack Drake in an attempt to get the Atom (Ray Palmer) to return to her, Bruce sends his remaining partners out of Gotham due to concern over their safety and attempts to start over with his original partnership with Grayson; however, unimpressed with his mentor's inability to move on, Grayson also leaves Gotham.

Now operating alone while trying to clean up the ramifications of the gang war, Bruce is confronted with not only Jason Todd's return from the grave as the Red Hood, but also the abduction of his Brother MK I satellite. As the satellite's existence comes to light, the JLA confront Bruce on its creation and suspect that he was behind the creation of the metahuman-killing OMACs as well.

Unable to regain control of the satellite, Bruce was visited by the Superman of Earth-2, who offered him partnership in recreating the Earth into a more wholesome world where heroes did not betray and abandon each other. Despite the past betrayals and abandonment, Bruce was unable to give up on the current Earth and decline the Superman's offer; instead reaching out to the remaining hero community to organize a stand against the OMAC army and gathering another team of heroes to launch an attack against Brother Eye itself.

Surviving the crisis, Bruce decided to follow Superman and Wonder Woman's lead and leave for a year-long hiatus; during which he embarked on a pilgrimage to destroy the disruptive paranoia he had developed over the years. Dick and Tim accompanied him on his trip and the trio repaired their damaged relationships. Believing the pilgrimage a success, Bruce returned to Gotham to continue his never-ending mission to free Gotham from crime, the corrupt, and the darkness that had nearly consumed him.