5. Bruce Wayne Is Rendered Effectively Immortal Through Bad Storytelling
The JSA and its characters, along with basically all but two superheroes (Ill let you guess which two) saw sales dwindle to the point of companywide cancellation. DC wasnt yet committed to the superhero genre, so when sales dried up they moved onto whatever would sell namely Westerns, Horror and books that were geared towards girls that by todays standards would be marginally unacceptable. Batman and Superman held on and also spawned books like Worlds Finest where they would team to together making it abundantly clear they existed in the same world together. Enter the mid 1950s and the reemergence of the superhero in a big way. DC decided to play it as safe as possible and instead of introducing brand new characters, they simply repackaged their old characters with new looks and new identities with no apparent connection to the characters that they were based on. The biggest transition of course was Green Lantern, who went from being a magical warrior on earth to an interstellar space cop. The trouble was that they rejoined the DC universe that Batman and Superman had been carrying all this time which was likely the first time the question was begged, How old is friggin Bruce Wayne? The first argument I can make on this issue is that if DC was thinking about what they were getting themselves into, they would have replaced Bruce Wayne as Batman prior to reintroducing their older characters. Doing this would have made the appearance of a new Flash, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow far more seamless. It also would have put the company in a better position to address the issues the fans would soon have. Instead they stood pat, and allowed a gaping hole in their continuity to simply go untreated. In all fairness to DC, their next decision was a pretty good idea, but they didnt explore the possibilities to any degree and instead let the initial issue go unchecked. Fans started writing in to DC asking about the fates of the original Flash and other classic characters. Many of you know that DCs response marked the beginning of the multiverse, a controversial decision in its own right, but it also managed to obscure a more dangerous issue that would plague all of comics. When the multiverse was established, in short, the idea that the original DC roster of superheroes existed on a different version of the earth than the more modern/contemporary counterparts, including Superman and Batman! The problem was that Superman and Batman were never cancelled, they didnt have original counterparts, they had always been there. So in order for the multiverse idea to work across the company their predecessors had to be created retroactively. Superman had undergone a considerable cosmetic change, so the creation of the original wasnt that hard, but Batman was another story entirely, which lead DC to make a choice that could have fixed comics entirely. The original Batman was dead. On Earth 2 (ironically where the original characters lived) Batman had died and an older Dick Grayson continued on with the daughter of Bruce Wane and Selena Kyle (Catwoman), a hero named The Huntress (Helena Wayne, sound familiar?). This should have been a comic book master stroke, because along with other aspects of the Batman continuity (namely a future version of Batman named Brane Taylor who was featured in the 40s and 50s), the ground work was set for the idea that Bruce Wayne and Batman were mutually exclusive. The stage was set for Batman to become an iconic symbol in its own right, a mantle that could be passed from hero to hero. This would have allowed the comic universe itself to move forward and reach new heights, with a new hero behind the cowl to breathe new life into the story when necessary, instead the opposite happened. Bruce Wayne would hang on to the mantle indefinitely.