Who is your favorite cartoon character?
My all-time favorite cartoon character has to be Batman.
I remember watching Tom & Jerry cartoons as a little kid, and their race for just some over-the-top, slapstick humor was great, but the one character I’ve kept coming back to in animated form throughout the course of my life has always been Batman.
I’ve written about it on numerous occasions—I even have some of those entries embedded below—but I’ve been drawn to the superhero genre, and Batman has always been my favorite superhero.
As a little kid, I thought Batman was extra cool because he had a sidekick. Robin was always there with him. How many other superheroes have a sidekick who just follows them around and fights crime right by their side? And then, of course, there’s all the gadgets.
But as I got older, I started to read Batman comics and actually understand the history of the character. When you’re a little kid, it’s OK to use a program such as Super Friends as an entry point into the Batman mythos. Yes, the show was very safe and nonviolent, and the stories were very lighthearted, but it got you into that world.
As I got older and understood the comics more, I grasped the character’s mythos on a deeper level. The older you get, the more you realize that the world can be a dark, violent place. And I think that’s a huge part of the appeal: he dresses up in a bat suit to scare the holy hell out of the bad guys, using fear and turning it back against the criminal underworld. Sometimes you need to know that the good guys can go right up to that proverbial cliff, stare down into the abyss, and get right on the verge of being really, really nasty to fight back against the bad stuff in the world.
Yet, for as dark as the character is, it’s his strict code that truly defines him and separates him from shoot-them-up, mass-murdering vigilantes like the Punisher. There are two things he has declared he will never, ever do. First, he refuses to kill—because it’s pretty hard to argue that killing is wrong when you’re a killer yourself. Thankfully, that rule has been carried through most interpretations of the character over the decades. Second, he will never use a gun. His parents were killed by a man with a gun, and he swore he would never make another person a victim of gun violence. That code, particularly that anti-gun stance, is something that I’ve actually carried with me into my own adulthood.
At the same time, his absolute determination and tenacity are a double-edged sword. In the comics, it’s often pointed out that his mission will never truly end because he can never bring his parents back. Even if he claims that’s not why he’s doing it, part of him is always trying to make amends for that night in some way. He takes it way too far—and looking at it now, the inclusion of Robin feels more and more ridiculous. The guy is waging a one-man war on crime and he just recruits a kid to help him? Let alone multiple kids over the years.
Of course, some might say that a guy takes it just a little bit too far, and they’re probably not wrong either.
But that’s what’s so amazing about Batman. I’ve said before that he’s very much the Hamlet of the comic book genre, and he truly is. I feel like every artist wants to draw Batman and every writer wants to take a crack at one of his stories. Few characters are as multifaceted as Batman, making it very difficult to find one particular story or animated series that really encapsulates the whole character. However, Batman: The Animated Series probably comes closest of all.
Batman as a character is undoubtedly going to outlive us all. In fact, I would argue that he is—even more than Mickey Mouse—the greatest character to come out of American popular culture in the 20th century.
Batman: Caped Crusader is streaming on Prime Video.
Be sure to out my review of the latest Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode, “Orders of Magnitude,” over on the blog!
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
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The article “Batman forever and ever and ever” first appeared in Rebuilding Rob

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