From: Liquid Wind | #038
why would an IP's CREATORS be considered a less accurate authority on its characters than random people that came along 80 years later and started writing for it?
There's a common misconception that gun-toting The Shadow version of the Batman was always the creators intent. The fact of the matter is that this "original" version of Batman lasted about two years.
By 1940's Batman #4, in a story by co-creators Bill Finger and Bob Kane -- which is about as definitive as you can get -- Batman reminds Robin that "we never kill with weapons of any kind."
As crazy as it might sound, the Batman who killed in those early stories wasn't really Batman -- or at least, not Batman as he'd become, and certainly not Batman as we think of him today. Keep in mind that when these stories were told, Batman wasn't just a new character, he was a new character in an entirely new medium. The Golden Age is full of comics by people that were driven as much by the desire to create stories as they were by the sudden and extremely lucrative popularity that medium was enjoying after Superman became such a massive success. These were guys who were literally just making it up as they went along, and as a result, the stories and their internal continuity took a few years to settle down and become a coherent whole.
To give you an idea of just how mutable these stories were, consider this: The single most important thing about Batman as a character, the fact that his parents were murdered and his decision to become a vigilante to avenge their deaths, did not exist until six months after he was created. The murder, the vow, the bat crashing through the window, everything that we think of as the core of his character didn't appear until Detective Comics #33, and that's only the start of the idea of "Batman" becoming a cohesive, unique entity. Before that, he's definitely recognizable as a prototype, but he's not Batman just yet.
The first couple years he's just a Shadow rip-off:
he millionaire playboy alter-ego, the spooky presence, even the fact that he flies around in an autogyro and battles against mad scientists and Yellow Peril caricatures, those were all things lifted from the Shadow -- and so were the guns and the killing.
Batman just doesn't kill. That's it. That is one of the core concepts of WHO BATMAN IS.
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It will launch for $350 with some Wii Sports s***. I bet my life on it. Damn, that KoolAid guy is awesome - NGamer64