Superhero comics are a funny thing. They’ve been around forever—in Batman’s case, over eighty years . The book the Dark Knight debuted in, Detective Comics, has long since passed the thousand-issue mark. Now, a thousand installments of anything is a pretty astronomical number, but a thousand issues of a comic… That’s a truly intimidating amount of story. And it’s all, essentially, starring one character. One guy, a thousand or more stories. Eighty years.
Crazy, right?
It’s not really a secret that comic series are able to reach such absurd numbers by getting a little creative with things like time. Batman as a character may be in his eighth decade, but in the fiction, Bruce Wayne has barely aged a day. And he never will, really, unless he has to for one adventure or another (here’s looking at you, Dark Knight Returns and Batman Beyond ). Birthdays may pass, he may enter and exit relationships and new Robins may join the quickly growing pantheon. He may even die at some point—naturally or unnaturally—but even that will eventually be undone, one way or another. Sooner or later, Batman will be back to the same spry crimefighter we know and love. Batman will always be Batman. That much you can count on.
