LogFAQs > #944058313

SpeedDemon20 posted...

Is there an official "canon" for Bruce's life?

Yes and no.

There technically is, but DC resets the continuity of its universe every 10 years or so (and have done since the 1980s), so whether or not any specific story "counts" depends on when it was written and whether or not it still "counts". Things that used to be canon may not be canon today, things that are canon today may not be canon tomorrow.

And that's before you get into alternate universe shenanigans. DCU Batman isn't the same as DCAU Batman, who isn't the same as 1960s TV Batman, who isn't the same as Telltale Games Batman, and none of them are exactly the same as comic book Batman.

What makes it worse is that you get writers like Grant Morrison, whose attitude has always been "I don't give a shit about canon, so I'm just telling whatever story I feel like telling, and I don't care if it doesn't match up with previous canon at all, nor do I care whether or not it creates problems for writers who come after me. Also, I firmly consider anything I write to be holy writ that should be canon forever, and will throw a childish tantrum if a future writer ever dismisses or retcons my stories the way I did to the writers who came before me." So he'll completely ignore anything he doesn't like, making continuity even harder to parse out.

So generally speaking, whether or not the people writing the comics TODAY assume a certain event did or didn't happen (and when) is sort of nebulous. Because no one in comics really cares about that sort of thing anymore, and editors stopped doing their jobs somewhere in the 1990s.

Not that any of this really matters anyway, because both Marvel and DC tend to operate on the premise these days that the comics are pointless garbage, and they exist solely to brainstorm new ideas for the movies, so you can retcon or retrofit as much as you want. Which is why most of the comic characters undergo sudden 180-degree personality changes or backstory shifts just to make them more like the movie versions whenever a movie comes out and is really popular. Like Pepper Potts reappearing in the comics after being gone for more than 30 years solely because the Iron Man film was successful.
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