8 Creators Who Secretly Defined Your Favourite Heroes

6. Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, Steve Englehart Et Al. - Batman

Batman Joker Dennis O'Neil Neal Adams Five Way Revenge
DC Comics

No one needs reminding that Batman's history is a bit of a weird one. The Silver Age saw the character depart from the dark world of Gotham and engage in sci-fi hijinks. It was a perfectly acceptable and entertaining version of the character, but one wouldn't argue that it was definitive, no matter how much we all love Adam West and Burt Ward matching wits with Frank Gorshin's Riddler.

With Batman, the classic narrative is that the Caped Crusader didn't shake his Silver Age funk until Frank Miller came around and beat it out of the character with works like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, but that's not true. The actual truth is that the World's Greatest Detective was experiencing a quiet revolution in the seventies, courtesy of writers Dennis O'Neil and Steve Englehart, as well as artists Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers.

As he was with Green Arrow and later with the Question in the eighties, O'Neil proved instrumental in conjuring a version of Batman that could be called definitive. He introduced the character of Ra's al Ghul, reinstated the Joker as a homicidal maniac in Five Way Revenge, and returned the Dark Knight to his former glory as a dark spectre of vigilante justice - or as a "hairy chested love god", as Grant Morrison likes to call him.

O'Neil and Adams' seminal stint on the character would be followed up by one equally as important, with Englehart reinforcing the new status-quo in Strange Apparitions alongside Rogers. It's where the modern image of the character was born - a whole decade before most tend to think it was.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.