The Murder of Bruce Wayne’s Parents It’s one of the most significant events in Batman’s history as a superhero, both in DC comics and in the movies that adapt them.
In Tim Burton’s first contribution (1989), the trigger puller is Jack Napier, Jack Nicholson’s Joker; to batman begins (2005) and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), the person in charge is called Joe Chill and he is played by Richard Brake and Damon Caro; and in Batman (2022), the mystery was solved with John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone but still persists for Matt Reeves’ sequels.
The origin of the black knight’s virtuous impulse is found in number thirty-three of Detective comicswritten by Bill Finger and Gardner Fox and drawn by Bob Kane (1939). Violence against his parents at the hands of an unidentified criminal led Bruce Wayne to swear to “avenge their deaths by spending the rest of his life fighting all criminals”.
But we had to wait for number forty-seven of Batmanwork of Finger and Kane (1948), to know the name of the murderer: the same Joe Chill approach of Christopher Nolan and that of Zack Snyder.
Variations on the death of Batman’s parents
As Thomas Bacon recounts in ScreenRant“Batman confronted an unrepentant Chill and unmasked him in an effort to scare him out of a life of crime. Ironically, when Chill turned to other criminals for help , they were furious that one of their own created Batman and took him down before he could share Batman’s secret identity.”
However, this mythical DC Comics moment, similar to that of Ben Parker’s murder for Spider-Man in Marvel publications, has been revisited on other occasions over the past decades to help certain nuances that enrich or even modify it sort of, sometimes taking advantage of the juicy possibilities of parallel universes and time travel.
We discovered in issue 235 of Detective comicsby Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff (1956), that Joe Chill was acting under orders from Lew Moxon, a Gotham mob boss who wanted revenge on Thomas Wayne for not fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath, when he asked him to treat him after being injured by the police, and handing him over to that, to the justice system and to a season in the shadows.
And, at number 208 of Batmandesigned by E. Nelson Bridwell and with images by Gil Kane (1968), we are introduced to Mrs. Chilton, who cares for young Bruce Wayne in the usual absence of his Uncle Philip, providing him with an education. And, years later, with his student-turned-man, he uncovers the crime of his son Joe, who had shortened his last name purely for criminal aesthetics.
Variations over the last decades
At Zero Hour: Crisis in Timewith screenplay and illustrations by Dan Jurgens (1994), Batman travels to an alternate reality where he died in place of his parents, and Joe Chill was not holding the gun. And, at number fifty batman/supermansigned by Michael Green and Mike Johnson (2008), Thomas Wayne learns from Jor-El of his future assassination and accepts it as necessary for Bruce’s successful heroism.
On the other hand, numbering forty-seven Batmanprepared by Tom King and Tony S. Daniel (2018), the superhero Booster Gold travels back in time to prevent the Waynes’ tragedy and, because of the ominous noise of their fight, ends up scaring them down the fateful aisle. And, in limited series The Three Jokersby Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok (2020), the nemesis has tripled attempts to turn Joe Chill into another Joker.
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