Already used up

Batman has been a pulp detective, a children's hero with a teenage partner, a camp comedian on 1960s television, a gothic avenger, an aging vigilante in Frank Miller's 1986 comic, and the hero of many films in between. Each is recognizably Batman. Few fictional characters survive that range of treatment, and the usual explanation, that he is dark, human and rich, describes his appeal rather than his durability.

The better explanation is structural, and it is stranger than a list of good ingredients. Batman can be retold endlessly because the one irreversible thing in his life happened before the first story, and because a rule prevents anything irreversible from happening after it. His past is complete and his future is blocked. Neither feature was designed. Both were added by editors in the character's first year.

The structural problem was named, about a different hero, by Umberto Eco. In "The Myth of Superman" he observed that to act, for any character in a story, is to be used up: each decision is inscribed in his past, weighs on his future and moves him a step toward death. A hero sold in an endless series cannot afford that, so Superman's writers kept his chronology hazy and told the stories readers wanted, such as his marriage to Lois Lane, as "imaginary" tales that did not count. Eco contrasted this with the hero of classical myth, who was "inconsumable" precisely because he had already been "consumed" in some exemplary action.¹

Batman is the second kind. His exemplary action is a loss: as a boy he watches his parents shot by a mugger and swears to spend his life warring on criminals. That origin was not in his first appearance in Detective Comics in 1939. It was added in a two-page story that November.² Once it existed, it supplied what Superman lacked. The event that defines Batman is finished and cannot be undone, so no story can complete it, and every story can return to it without using him up. The parents stay dead; the mission they caused stays unfinished.

The second feature, the blocked future, came the next year and was a matter of editorial nerves. In Batman #1, in 1940, the Joker was written to die, stabbed through the heart. The writer, Bill Finger, wanted him dead because he thought recurring villains would make Batman look inept. The editor, Whitney Ellsworth, overruled him, and a hastily drawn panel was added showing the Joker still alive. He appeared in nine of the first twelve issues.³ In 1940, shortly after Robin was introduced, Ellsworth decided that Batman's violent, lethal methods would be a bad influence, and DC set a strict code prohibiting him from killing.⁴

Together those decisions make the loop. A hero who will not kill cannot end a villain, and villains who cannot be ended return. Finger saw the cost exactly. A hero who never finally defeats his enemies risks looking inept, and Batman's stories have carried that risk ever since, in villain after villain who is caught, locked up and back within a few issues. The structure buys an inexhaustible series by giving up the possibility of victory.

Everything outside the loop is left loose, and that is what makes the range possible. The media scholars Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio wrote in 1991 that the fixed and canonized events of Batman's life had, until recently, been "few in number".² The writer and editor Dennis O'Neil recalled that the Batman produced under one editor and the Batman produced under another at the same time, "apart from the costume... bore very little resemblance to each other."⁴ The 1966 television series played him as camp, and the comics followed until it ended; in the 1970s O'Neil and Neal Adams took him back to darkness.⁴ None of these broke the character, because none touched the completed past or the blocked future. They changed only what the structure had never fixed.

The general lesson is narrower than "constraints breed creativity". A serial story needs very few fixed parts, but they have to be of a particular kind: an origin that is already over, so that nothing can resolve it, and a rule that stops the present from producing an ending. Batman has both. Most of what is called his essence, the city, the gadgets, the brooding, the sidekicks, can change, and has.