Let’s start here: There is no such thing as a “definitive Batman.”

You may have heard different. Perhaps you’re under the impression that the grumble & grimy Batman of the past twenty years is the “definitive Batman.” Or maybe you grew up in the fifties, and to you, Batman just ain’t Batman without some aliens and rainbow-colored costumes. You may belive the earliest Batman stories are the best and most important, or that Tom King’s modern run on the character is the greatest interpretation yet created by mankind.

There’s a good word, “interpretation.” This is a bold statement, but Batman might just be the most interpreted character in pop culture. That’s not to say he’s the one with the most comics, movies, TV series, childrens’ underpants, and so on. But when it comes to the sheer variety amongst the many depictions of this one guy who fights crime in a cape and tights–different and varied views of who the character is, how he operates, and why he does what he does–there may be no single modern character who has been conceptualized in so many divergent ways.

Which is good, because otherwise, I’d have no damn blog.

On a semi-regular basis, this space will be devoted to discussing Batman. Just Batman. Not superheroes in general, or DC universe superheroes, or even DC universe superheroes who live in Gotham City. JUST BATMAN.

And somewhere tangled above rests our essential thesis–rather than cherrypicking through this character’s history and deciding which versions of the Bat we prefer, only to discard the rest, we’re going to operate under the assumption that it’s ALL TRUE. It all happened, because it did. Maybe it’s not all there in the current fictional history of the intellectual property published in modern corporate superhero comics as “Batman,” but it’s all there in the culture–the comics, the movies, the TV shows, the childrens’ underpants. We can look at all of it, turn it over, see what makes it work, or not so much. (FULL DISCLOSURE: We will not be looking at the childrens’ underpants. At all.)

Are you excited yet? I am.

Batman has been MY FAVORITE since I was about four years old. At that age, I simply bought into the adventures of Adam West and Burt Ward as though every cliffhanger death trap had an actual prayer of dicing the Dynamic Duo to paper-thin bits. By the time I was old enough to really nurse a comics habit, Michael Keaton was in theaters slapping around Jack Nicholson. I stuck it out through Knightfall and Knightryder and Knightfever; up until a few months ago, I had every single color variant of Legends of the Dark Knight #1. (I kept the turqouise.)

More recently, I was there opening weekend for Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, totally jazzed that somehow, the movies had managed to make Batman awesome again. A variation on the greasy & grubby interpretation, to be sure, but still nuanced in its own ways…just like practically every separate take on the character.

This Batman, these Batmen, scattered across the pop detritus of my life…they all MEAN something, even if it’s dumb. Let’s crawl down to the Bat-Cave of the blogosphere, pop some punch cards into the Batputer, and see what we can deduce.