Adaptations

15

BATMAN

One life, many faces

Will Brooker

 

Having to date been adapted to cinema no fewer than nine times — in two 1940s serials, a 1960s feature, the current franchise of four films and two recent full-length animations — Batman has easily transcended the sphere of his pulp contemporaries like the Shadow, the Spectre, the Phantom and Dick Tracy, and entered the realm of the icon, sharing with Robin Hood, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes a cultural existence which has to a large extent been freed from its roots in an original text, circulating as common knowledge, common property. It is thanks to those films and the television series of the 1960s, not the comics, that everyone knows something of the Batman ‘mythos’ — his secret identity, the names ...