10 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Batman For Everyone

10. Batman Was Nearly Cancelled In The 1960s

Given the enduring popularity of the character, and the many spin-offs today, the revelation that Batman was almost no more after a poor run of sales in the early 1960s might come as something of a shock, but Bob Kane confirmed that by 1964 DC was indeed planning on killing the character off altogether.

Common debate questions this, suggesting that the "killing" would probably have been impermanent, or Batman would simply have been relegated to a supporting character in the JLA series, but without the subsequent appointment of editor Julius Schwartz, it's likely nonetheless that we wouldn't have seen Batman's over-riding success for the next almost sixty years.

Schwartz came in in '64 and completely reinvented the character, cutting away dead wood and tightening the focus with a new look Batman who debuted in Detective Comics #327 (May 1964) and was targeted as a more contemporary iteration of the character (in a similar vein to what Nolan did fifty years later.)

Under Schwartz, the detective elements of the character were brought back to prominence, and so crucially, was the character's darker aspects, under the stewardship of writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams. Basically, without Schwartz and the complete reinvention of the Batman property, we would never have had the modern Batman.