Read Batman 5 - Batman Begins Online
Authors: Dennis O'Neil
Batman 5 - Batman Begins
BATMAN BEGINS
Bruce Wayne is dead. The young heir to the Wayne empire disappeared seven years ago. His vast fortune has been given away, and the crime wave that began with the brutal murder of his parents has turned Gotham City into a living hell. The last holdouts against corruption—the cops who can't be bought, the D.A.'s who can't be intimidated—are outnumbered and outgunned. They need help . . . fast.
A world away, in a dank Himalayan prison, a nameless, hardened man fights every day to survive. He has spent seven years scouring the globe, studying the criminal mind, looking for an answer to the ugly riddle of his childhood. but something has been looking for him, too. Here, in the darkest places of his own anger, Bruce Wayne will discover his destiny—and an ordinary man will become a legend.
Batman Begins
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2005 by DC Comics
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BATMAN and all related characters and elements are trademarks of DC Comics © 2005. All Rights Reserved.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-47946-4
Printed in the United States of America
Del Rey Books website address:
www.delreybooks.com
www.dccomics.com
Keyword: DC Comics on AOL
First edition: July, 2005
Contents
To Marifran and Larry . . . oh, and the Universe,
I’m always happy to acknowledge the Universe.
By now, the Batman saga is huge. Bruce Wayne and his crime-fighting alter ego have been appearing continuously for sixty-five years, in every medium. But we should remember that it all began with “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in
Detective Comics
#27, written by Bill Finger and with art by Bob Kane. I thank them both.
I’ve never met Christopher Nolan and David Goyer, who wrote the film script that became
Batman Begins,
and probably never will, but I’d like to state for the record that they did a nifty job and it was a pleasure collaborating with them.
Chris Cerasi is that increasingly rare kind of editor whose concern is only that the work be good. I appreciate his courtesy, astuteness, and encouragement.
It was nice, and surprising, to be again involved in a project with a fellow yeoman from the old Marvel days, Steve Saffel.
When I was writing Batman stories for comics, my primary editors were Julius Schwartz and Archie Goodwin. They were, each in his way, superb colleagues and wonderful friends. I miss them and will always be grateful to them.
D
ENNIS
O’N
EIL
Upper Nyack, New York
January 2005
BATMAN BEGINS
PART I
B R U C E W A Y N E
FROM THE JOURNALS OF RĀ’S AL GHŪL
I remain committed to my goal of saving humanity from itself, but my latest efforts are meeting with mixed results.
The Austrian madman is intoxicated with his successes in North Africa and thus he agreed with our suggestion that he invade Russia. It will be folly, and he will fail as the Frenchman before him failed. The war will end soon. Not this year, certainly, nor the next, but soon, and when it does, Hitler will suffer defeat.
Once, I thought he would be a useful tool. I was mistaken. His hatred is too narrow and narcissistic to accommodate a large vision.
In the meantime, we have managed to divert the energies of his munitions scientists into fruitless efforts. They will not succeed in making a nuclear bomb in the foreseeable future. In America, by way of contrast, our men in New Mexico report that progress on the Americans’ atomic weaponry goes well. I will be interested to see against which enemy the Allies will deploy it.
After the end of hostilities I will initiate a new kind of attack. I will use economics as a weapon and attempt to debilitate the despoilers with their own favorite instrument.
That is in the future. For the next several years we will remain in Switzerland. The Austrian is not likely to violate this nation’s neutrality, which means my retinue and I will remain in these mountains for the duration. We are undisturbed here and the place pleases me. It is clean and pure and when I breathe the chill, bracing air I am reminded of what a paradise the earth once was and will be again, and I am prompted to redouble my efforts.
Last night, the woman who is my current consort gave birth to a female. I am a methodical man and I keep records. Thus, I know that I have now sired four hundred and fourteen children, all of them except two female. The two who were male, Hector and Claudius, both died before their first birthdays.
It is a source of the greatest vexation to me that I have been unable to produce a healthy male child.
I am a man of rationality and science. I do not believe in curses. But at times I think I am cursed.
I must have a son.
L
ater, Bruce would come to understand the power of myth: how those ancient stories could deepen and amplify—and distort and falsify—human experience. It was to be one of many lessons he learned from Rā’s al Ghūl. But that was later. At the moment, though, he slouched in a desk chair in a midwestern classroom, staring out the window and wondering if the bald stick of a professor, who was wearing a tweed jacket even though it was July and this hundred-year-old university could not afford to air-condition its buildings, would ever finish his drone. On and on went the professor, about Jungian archetypes and monomyths and other stuff that Bruce considered absolutely nonessential to any conceivable life he might want to lead, if not plain stupid. Today’s topic, the prof had announced in a voice that even he had to know was somniferous, was loss of innocence as exemplified by the biblical Adam and Eve tale and the Buddhist legend of Siddhartha’s first exit from his father’s estate.
Ho hum,
Bruce thought. He had read the material the prof had assigned and several other books on the subject, too; all of which presented the material more cogently than the prof, and none of which interested him.
