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Editor's note: With Batman Begins now showing in theaters, we thought we'd take a closer look at the man Bruce Wayne—and what makes him tick. This chapter is abridged from H. Michael Brewer's book, Who Needs a Superhero?: Finding Virtue, Vice, and What's Holy in the Comics (BakerBooks). The book is available at Christianbook.com

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The well-dressed couple and their son emerge from the movie theater and amble into the autumn evening. They stroll away from the marquee lights, treading on their own elongated shadows. The crowds thin and the streets darken as the Wayne family chats about the movie they have just seen, The Mark of Zorro.

Young Bruce is particularly impressed by the adventures of the masked avenger. The boy strikes heroic poses with an imaginary sword and chatters on about the swashbuckling crusader, unaware that his own belief in justice is about to be tested in the crucible of suffering.

A hollow-eyed figure lunges from an unlit alley. The thug brandishes a gun and demands money. The moments that follow sear Bruce's memory forever, snapshots in a family album of horror.

A flash from the gun barrel. His father toppling to the dirty pavement. A second muzzle flare. His mother's collapse. The mugger fleeing. A broken necklace scattering pearls into the gutter.

Bruce is the only survivor of the assault. Physically, the boy is unharmed, but all sense of order and reason bleeds from Bruce's life as he kneels beside his slain parents. At that moment Bruce makes a decision that will shape his future. He refuses to accept this violation. He will never allow this loss to heal. He will spend his life avenging this brutal atrocity.

And so Batman was born.

Eighteen years passed before Bruce Wayne donned the grim cowl and cape of Gotham City's protector. Nevertheless, his destiny was chiseled in granite the night Thomas and Martha Wayne died. In the ensuing eighteen years, Bruce organized the extensive family business to operate without his direct involvement. He honed his body with weight training, Olympic-level gymnastics, and martial arts. He mastered criminology, forensics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, and a dozen more fields. Drawing on the family fortune, Bruce Wayne built an arsenal of high-tech weapons and equipped his hidden headquarters in the huge cavern beneath Wayne Manor.

When Bruce deemed himself ready to undertake his mission, he donned a bizarre costume designed to terrify criminals. Inspired partly by his childhood hero Zorro but also by the fluttering bats in the cave beneath his estate, Bruce Wayne draped himself in a long cape and a cowl with bat ears. The uniform is black and gray, camouflage for a hunter of the night. Is it merely coincidental that black is also the hue of despair, the color of mourning?

Most superheroes put on a mask to hide their real identity. Not so with this caped vigilante. Bruce Wayne is the mask; Batman is the true identity. To devote himself wholly to fighting crime, Bruce Wayne forsook childhood, adolescence, romance, and normal human desires. The millionaire maintains just enough social life to divert suspicion from his nighttime crusade. As a result, Bruce Wayne is a two-dimensional prop, merely a façade behind which lurks the true person: the grim, driven, relentless Batman.

Try to forget the corny Batman of the sixties television series, a campy character whose utility belt routinely produced collapsible ladders and shark repellant. Even forty years later, that SMASH-BANG-KAPOW parody remains an embarrassment to comic fans. As suggested by his origin story, the comic book Batman was a figure dark and fearsome. Sometimes meting out justice with a gun, he stalked the shadows in a never-ending quest to balance the scales for the murder of his parents. Perhaps pressured by parental watchdogs, comic book scripters soon had Batman abandon the gun and adopt a personal code against killing. Even so, this orphaned avenger remained dour and forbidding.

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