Bruce’s first death: the Death Cheaters
(Part of the Batfam Death Project)
Batman 1:72, 1952
Bruce’s first death happens all the way back in 1952, when Dick is probably somewhere around twelve to thirteen. Some other people who have died (flatlined) and come back to life have started a club, but now the members of this club have started being killed off! Bruce’s solution? Poison himself and then get resuscitated so he can join the club and investigate the murders from the inside!
Because of course that’s a proportionate response.
Poor Dick is the one who has to perform CPR on Bruce. (If he hadn’t been a trained vigilante and acrobat he probably would not have had the upper body strength for it. That doctor certainly doesn’t look as if he does.)
And Dick is absolutely terrified. Look at his little face! He could lose another parent here. He blames himself for ‘letting’ Bruce do this in the first place, as if he could have stopped him. And it’s clear he carries on the CPR long after the doctor had given up.
And he’s so relieved and exhausted when Bruce starts breathing again he nearly faints.
How could you do this to him, Bruce? To Dick, who is already traumatised by the loss of his first parents?
Bruce, by contrast, is fully confident this will work. He never has a moment’s doubt. I really don’t think he realises how much stress he’s putting Dick under. (Nor I think does Dick tell him how afraid he is, but then he really shouldn’t have to!)
Much much later, in Batman 2:39 (2015) Bruce is thinking about his own mortality and his lack of belief in it.
He has deliberately trained himself not to believe in his own mortality, and he did that first, before any of his other training. Which explains how he can poison himself to death so blithely and confidently assume that he will come back. And he has completely forgotten that even if he doesn’t believe in his own death, Dick has no such mental construction.
Yikes.
Now to be fair this is the New 52 when everyone’s backstories have changed. In actual comic time when Dick was Robin I’ve so far only been able to find one other actual death by the terms defined for this project (Batman: The Brave and the Bold 1:115, 1974), though there have been several more fake deaths and near deaths.
But that still means there is some world where Dick, whose parents died suddenly and violently in front of him, had to live with his new parent dying in front of him often enough that he could joke that it happened every weekend.
This is obviously a coping mechanism on Dick’s part – you can tell because he doesn’t mention anyone he might actually like to hear from, like his parents. It looks like Bruce still has no idea how hard it is on Dick.
But I do find it very interesting that a storyline written in 2015, in the New 52, makes characterisation sense of a story written in 1952.
The Batfam Death Project Masterpost
