One reason Batman is such a popular superhero (and fictional character in general) is that he has incredible devotion to his life’s goal, or his mission. At the risk of seeming insensitive, given the tragic reason for his adopting that goal, many of us might be envious of Bruce Wayne’s single‐minded focus and belief in the purpose of his life. (I know I am!) What’s more, that mission is altruistic, oriented toward making other people’s lives better, and motivated by his own loss at a young age. We can of course argue that he goes too far in pursuing his mission, in that he sacrifices his own personal happiness and any chance at romantic love. Some would say that he doesn’t go far enough, in that there are certain steps, such as killing his enemies, that he will not take even to further his mission. Yet others say that, if he really wants to help people, dressing up as a giant bat and beating up bad guys isn’t the best way to go about it. Even though we may be critical of the mission itself or how he executes it—and we’ll talk about that in later chapters—many of us admire Batman’s devotion to it in general.
But what exactly is his mission? As with most things in the world of Batman—save for his famous, oft‐quoted saying about criminals being a “cowardly and superstitious lot”—there is no definitive, canonical statement about his mission. However, there are several recurring elements of his mission which, although related and overlapping to some extent, reflect different aspects of it and shed light on its complexity as well as his devotion to it.
The most immediate one, which gets to the heart of what he does more than why he does it, is his never‐ending war against crime in Gotham City and elsewhere: as the narration to one story reads, “it’s what his life is about.”1 As Batman once said, “I made a promise. To honor my parents. Someday to rid Gotham City of the crime that took their lives.”2 Simply put, Batman is driven not only to fight crime but to end it, despite the futility of this goal, which he admits: as the narration to an overview of his early life and motivation reads, “he knows he’s set himself an impossible goal. No man can ever eliminate crime. All he can do is try.”3 And this he does, in full awareness of this impossibility. “I’ve dedicated my life to eradicating crime,” he thought to himself while combatting gangs in Gotham’s Chinatown. “At best a hopeless cause. Sometimes all we can do is maintain the balance of power.”4
Furthermore, Batman does not limit himself to major crimes or the antics of his colorfully costumed foes. On his way to catch Kite Man—yes, Kite Man—Batman heard a burglar alarm coming from a jewelry shop and considers driving by, but then thought, “a crime is a crime is a crime! It’s isn’t my job to judge them—just to stop them!”5 Even these crimes must be confronted, even though he knows he can never deal with them all, even on a night of “casual crimes and momentary madnesses … the same thousand sins of any normal night, anonymous evil I can never stop.”6 We’ll come to the way Batman sets priorities later, but for now the point is that, in theory, he doesn’t exclude any crime, no matter how small, from his mission—even if, in practice, he finds he must prioritize them somehow.
Although avenging the deaths of his parents played a clear and important role in driving his mission to eradicate crime—“turning a boy of bright hope into a man of dark vengeance,” which we’ll unpack later—Batman does not endure a constant battle against crime in Gotham City simply to make up for not saving his parents as a young boy.7 Neither is fighting crime an end in itself; there is deeper purpose behind it, namely to help, protect, and save people, especially the residents of Gotham. Inspired by his father’s devotion to medicine, Batman goes to extraordinary lengths to save innocent lives. As he dove off a cliff to catch a vial of deadly Ebola virus, the narration reads: “Millions of lives are at stake. Maybe all humanity. He doesn’t hesitate for an instant.”8 He famously lets criminals escape if he needs to save a life. After doing just that, a person he saved asked, “But why did you bother? I thought you only cared about catching criminals!” to which Batman replied, “You’re not alone in thinking that! I wish you were!”9 And it is not only the lives of the innocent that he tries to save, but all lives, even those of the most heinous and evil. We see this in the numerous times he saves the Joker, even at the expense of the countless people the Crown Prince of Crime will surely kill later—a central moral dilemma in the Batman canon that we will talk about often in this book.