Batman is known as the World’s Greatest Detective, but his deductive skills weren’t always focused on cleaning up the streets of Gotham. Believe it or not, before he ever donned the cowl, a young Bruce Wayne almost worked for the US government as an FBI agent.
Released in 1989, Secret Origins of the World's Greatest Super-Heroes is a comic that provides a more in-depth look at the origin stories of various DC superheroes. The issue's first story, titled “The Man Who Falls” by Dennis O'Neil focuses on the Caped Crusader himself. The story chronicles not only the death of Batman’s parents, but also the following years, during which the orphaned billionaire struggled to figure out how best to spend his time - and his money. Academia didn’t suit him, so the now 20-year-old Bruce decided to focus his efforts someplace where he felt could make more of a difference - the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But while Bruce seemed like a natural fit for the FBI, the FBI wasn’t a natural fit for him.
When Bruce applied to the FBI program, he evidently aced all of his entry exams besides marksmanship - a clever foreshadowing of the no-guns rule he would later adopt as Batman. Despite his poor marksmanship and lack of an academic degree, Bruce Wayne’s money and overall intelligence made him a prime candidate. The FBI agreed to waive some of their requirements and accepted Bruce into their training program, but it would only be a for a short time. Bruce soon grew tired of the office’s regulations and the mundane work they had him doing analyzing reports, as opposed to making a difference out in the field. After only six weeks, Bruce left the FBI and continued his search for purpose.
On paper, Batman would seem like the most effective FBI agent of all time, but it actually makes sense that Bruce didn’t fit in. In fact, it was his time in the FBI that “confirmed a suspicion he’d long had: he could not operate within a system." Indeed, Batman’s whole existence is predicated on playing by his own rules. As Jim Gordon says in The Dark Knight Rises, “there’s a point far out there where the structures fail you and the rules aren’t weapons anymore; they’re shackles, letting the bad guy get ahead.” In order to combat the kind of evil that pervades Gotham, Batman can’t afford to be hindered by the rules of an institution like the FBI.
Batman teams up with other heroes often enough to prove that he can work as part of a team. The difference is Batman isn’t beholden to other heroes in the way an agent is to their superiors at FBI. At the end of the day, Batman simply needs to be his own boss.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/35eltgU
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment