they did the, "what would happen if bruce wayne's parents never died?" story decades ago. they've done it again, and again, and again since then, but no one has ever done it half as fucking good as they did it in detective comics #500, and the hilarious thing is, it's not even the full issue, it's one story in an anniversary issue, and it is fundamentally the best batman story ever told. the singular best one. the whole gist is that phantom stranger appears to batman and is like hey, i found a universe where your parents didn't die, would you like the chance to save them? and batman of course says fuck yeah, carts in robin, and they go a-huntin, but the strange thing about this universe... is that it lacks, entirely, the concept of a hero. there's no greek heroes. there are no superheroes. you don't have achilles, perseus, or superman. there are no stories about heroes; it's a universe where "luke skywalker" a character concept is impossible to fathom.
and robin's the one who discovers that, and he's like, look, dude... you're this universe's last shot at a hero. if you stop your parents from dying, you'll never be batman, and there will never be a hero here, and in the narrow worldview of cape comics this is a Big Fuckin Deal, because then who is going to save all of those innocents? and naturally batman is like dude, fuck you, i'm gonna do it anyway. and then he goes and he saves his fuckin parents. but then you get:
he just becomes batman fucking anyway. because the whole fantasy of batman is that it is never wrong to save someone's life - even at the deep personal cost, this is fundamentally worth doing. batman's not bruce's Darker Side or this twisted alter ego that is a monument to his trauma and pain - it is the precise and exact opposite. it is the weaponization of something that terrified and scarred you (bats, violence, the night) and using it to help people, therefore this is the greatest batman story every fucking told, bar none.
and yet frank miller slaps his dick repeatedly on a typewriter and i'm supposed to think that's somehow better. but once you fucking know this is out there, people could just be writing about this goofy-yet-elegant character concept instead of trying repeatedly to beat the shit out of it and make it into something it isn't, once you fuckin know, you fuckin know forever. you have to spend the rest of your goddamn motherfucking life seeing batman stories that reach a mere fraction of, what, 10 pages published in the fucking 70s? you've had since the fucking 70s to do this shit better and you made it worse? what the fuck? you don't get it. i miss this highly specific version of batman, i don't miss that guy's batman, or that other guy's batman, or that other guy's batman, i miss this very one right here. i miss this fuckin guy
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