Batman is, bar none, the most iconic fictional character of the last century. Google "Batman" and you will find over 51 million entries — only Superman can compete with those figures. James Bond, Spider-Man, and Mickey Mouse don't even come close. While current searches give The Man of Steel a slight edge over the Dark Knight, this can easily be attributed to the PR surrounding the release of the movie Superman Returns earlier this year. And while I am in no way dismissing the cultural significance of Superman or Mickey Mouse, I contend that that the Batman appeals to us on a much more visceral level.

Bruce Wayne is a man obsessed with bringing all evildoers to justice, all borne out of seeing his parents murdered before his eyes. We all know that set-up — it's embedded in the pop culture psyche in no uncertain terms. Simple on the surface, it appeals to our primal sense of justice.  We all want to see evil punished, and therein lies the cathartic nature of Batman. Through him, we know that justice will prevail regardless of the odds.

The character of Batman has been with us for 67 years now, introduced to the world in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics. To put that in a historical perspective, that was 11 U.S. Presidents ago, Germany had not yet invaded Poland, and America was clawing its way out of the Great Depression. Oh yeah, and comic books, a new media format back then, cost all of 10 cents. In a world at the precipice of turmoil, the shadow of a bat meting out justice offered a darker, but more realistic hero than a god-like alien from Krypton. Batman was somebody a kid could relate to — a hero, who, in theory, he could grow up to become.

Batman was, and I think still is (although I could be wrong), the only superhero who had no superpowers.  He wasn't an alien deriving his powers from the sun, he wasn't given a ring with unlimited potentials, he didn't take an accidental chemical bath, he wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider, he wasn't a mutant — Bruce Wayne worked his ass off to become Batman. And that's what made him more real than any of the others.

Batman is in many ways the lineal descendant of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro and, of course, the Shadow, with one glaring exception — Bruce Wayne was motivated by a grief that ate at his soul. He had to release the pain of his loss, the fears that gnawed his psyche by projecting them into the evils that had been inflicted in him by his trauma. That sort of distress would leave anybody two routes in their lifepath: either a quest to heal, or a quest to destroy the pain. Batman has walked a precarious line between the two extremes throughout his various incarnations through the years. Leave out the downright silly stories of the fifties, and two distinct personalities emerge: Batman, the Caped Crusader, and the Batman, the Dark Knight.