late night musings on Batman and personality splits

[ratcreature]

Okay, I should be sleeping at way past three in the morning, however instead I've been wondering about Batman, secret identities, and personality splits, and how I've seen the relation and balance between the different aspects of Bruce/Batman's persona handled in the comics dealing with this. I blame it on reading JLA v3 #50-54 earlier today

Comments

[liviapenn]

And I found the way Batman's split was handled interesting, because it was different from the "usual" way the personality parts "separate" in Batman storylines.

I actually really liked the way they handled it in that particular storyline. They didn't use the split that he *pretends* there is-- Bruce, happy but useless and ineffectual, vs. Bats, who's the brains and the brawn and the psychosis.

It's not Batman who embodies the psychosis in him; after all, he didn't create himself. *Bruce* created Batman. I like the idea they used in the fairy-tale storyline-- that Bruce without the Batman part of himself would be an uncontrolled psychopath-- because it helps explain to me why Alfred would ever *let* Bruce become Batman in the first place.

Re:

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I liked this different split too.

And what fairy-tale storyline do you mean? I haven't yet read a lot of JLA.

Re:

[liviapenn]

Oh-- I think I mean the same one you're talking about-- the one where they all get split into bits. Except the bad guys in that story are aliens, huh. I guess I always get it mixed up with the storyline that's right before that-- a wicked queen from a storybook wakes up, thinks Princess Diana is Snow White and goes after the League. I think they blend into one another in the trade. Can't find exact issue numbers now, but I'll try and dig it up after work.

Re:

[ratcreature]

You're right. I looked in an JLA issue guide and that fairy tale story (JLA #47-49) was directly before the identity split issues I read. I was just confused by the fairy tale comment, because in the issues I read there are the bad guy aliens and before that Doctor Destiny with dream control and hallucinations, but no fairy tales.