One of the things that younger readers don't seem to understand is that DC Comics didn't really have what is today understood as "continuity."

Stan Lee brought that concept to the forefront as his Marvel titles began to inter-relate and cross over early in the 60's. Give the Man his due. He more or less invented "continuity" as it applies these days in the comics industry.

Yes, any two pictures seen in a row create a "continuity." One can say that by virtue of being serialized, "continuity" has always played a role in the adventures of our super-heroes, but in so doing, one would be bending the facts to deliberately confuse our modern use of the term with the extremely vague. non-specific variety employed way back when.

What older comics employed were "premises," and these could and did change, sometimes with alarming results. The premise of the Sandman strip changed from his being a shadowy, cloaked figure who used sleep as a psychological and practical weapon in his battle against crime to becoming a brash, acrobatic daredevil with a laughing sidekick ala' many other Simon and Kirby strips. Modern retellings of this change don't tell the whole story. "Continuity" (mostly from Stan's protege Roy Thomas) tells us the Sandman changed costumes. A most accurate & comprehensive understanding of what took place tells us that the strip's entire premise changed. As did Dr. Fate's when he went from being a sorceror in a face-covering helmet who battled supernatural foes inspired by mythology and Lovecraft to a more standard, smiling crime-buster who employed magic spells while wearing a half-helmet. "Continuity" went back and tried to "fill in the gaps" of that change later, but at the time, "continuity" was no issue whatsoever. The editors decided to go in a different direction and changed the premise of the strip. They felt no more beholden to last month's issue and the story therein than they felt to one published two years prior, or five years.

If the stories matched from month to month, that was in service to the premise in place at the time. There was no concern at the time with having everything ever published with the character tie in with every other piece he's ever appeared in. That's fanboy thinking. The professionals creating the stories only cared about making imaginative, exciting stories. They didn't reinvent the wheel each and every month, no. But when they did, the old wheel was thrown away, never to be seen again.

Modern readers can not get their heads around this.

Soon after Superman and Batman debuted, the higher-ups at National and All-American looked at their sales figures and readership, and made a drastic and sudden change in the books they were publishing. Comics were being read almost exclusively by kids. Super-heroes, who had any number of extraordinary advantages to their credit, were no longer to carry guns and wantonly kill the criminals they found themselves up against. For one thing, it's weak and cowardly for Kryptonians to slaughter those who have little or no defense against them. For another, it doesn't make for exciting or innovative reading for the "hero" to gun down the bad guy every single damn time you read the book. The editors at the time had more respect for what they were doing than that.

Comic book detectives still carried guns. Soldiers and police officers did as well. The publishers were not embarking on an anti-gun policy across the board, but for Super-Heroes who had strong appeal to the youngest readers, a more socially responsible tack was taken.

The Batman who swore he would never carry a gun is not the same character who used one in the earliest days of his strip. It's the same feature all right. The same name. But the premise was changed, and there was no looking backwards at the time. Batman was not lying when he said he didn't believe in guns. He was not a hypocrite. The Batman being written this month was telling the truth. He never used one.

If your older brother had an older comic which showed the Batman opening fire on a vampire or shooting from the cockpit of his autogyro, fine, you two had something you could argue about that day. You're both fans. Arguing about this sort of stuff is what fans do.

For the creators and the character himself though, there was no "continuity" in place to link him to those earlier stories. Good thing, too, since editors routinely recycled stories and it wouldn't really do for Batman to constantly remark, "Strange. Events tonight are playing out almost exactly as they did five years ago..."

This "Yeah, right, Batman" bit from Nathan is just more fanboy nonsense being superimposed over stories never meant to connect with one another in the first place. Once word came down from above that super-heroes do not carry guns and do not kill, the editors and creators played by those rules from thereon in, and those standards held the industry in good stead for decades. Heroes were heroes because they held higher standards than we unfortunate mortals can afford to allow ourselves. If you've got a host of Kryptonian super-powers or a cave full of technological miracles, you've got options the rest of us don't have, and with that comes the responsibility to stand for something better.

And they did, back when being a hero meant something. Which brings us to many of the later examples that turn up in Nathan's wildly non-contextual slideshow: After decades of characters not killing their foes, despite the number of murders those villains had commited, came the third generation of comic creators. The first were the originals, who created everything in the 30's through the 60's and were largely gone from the industry by the early 70's, with just a few stalwarts in place past that. Then can generation two, the Roy Thomases, Steve Engleharts, Marty Paskos, John Byrnes, etc. Frank Miller was of that era, but his ongoing outrage at having been mugged one evening made him the one who set the pace for generation three. Why couldn't these heroes kill these god-d*mned, no-good sons-of-b#tches who hound us all our lives, kill our loved ones, and fill society with fear? Why can't the Punisher be a good guy, like everyone else? The only answer Miller could conceive was that the super-heroes were impotent, spiritually and effectively impotent. In his final regular issue on Daredevil, DD's gun has no bullets. DD has no balls. Like all the rest of them. Bullseye's going to heal and kill again, for no other reason than that DD is a pantywaist.

Miller's Dark Knight, published outside the Comics Code and the mainstream definition of who and what Batman is and stands for, is no such weak sister. He may not come at you with a railgun, but use one in the open and you can bet he'll take it from you, kill you with it, and open up on your buddies as well. Other modern creators began to see the "wisdom" in this point of view. Why can't we just shoot these f*ckers? Alan Grant seemed to favor a Batman with no such qualms. Mike Barr wanted to do a Batman whose rage at working alongside his parents' killer drove him to pick up the gun that killed them. When push came to shove though in Year Two, once again, the good guy was an impotent milksop. The Reaper did to Joe Chill what Batman himself was too much of a morally conflicted, whimpering pup to accomplish.

"See how cool comics can be once we kick the training wheels off?" the modern creator seemed to ask. And the readers, now with hardly a kid anywhere in sight, seemed to join in the bloodthirsty cheering. Yeah, boy-howdy! The bad guy's are gonna get it now... The old-guard editors are gone. Sales are in the sewers anyway. It's not like anyone's going to see what happens in the books, except the last diehard fans, and they're on our side, anyways, right? Violence junkies, every last one of them! Let's do it! Guns for everyone! Give the pacifist a sword and let her break some necks!

And hey, it's all in keeping with the original creators' vision, see? Lookit all dese out-of-context panels that PROVE IT! Except... What the original creators wanted to do was sell their stories. When the only model they had to follow were the pulps, written for adults and not so much for kids, they wrote lots of pulp-style violence. When the publishers said, "No. Write them for kids," that's what the original creators did. It had nothing to do with "original vision" or "artistic integrity." It had to do with writing the stories the publisher would publish. I've never read anything from Siegel, Kane, or any of the others saying that they wish the editors had let them kill more bad guys, since that IS what they invented the characters to do. They invented the characters to sell books and looked to the pulps for ways to do that. Had books of nursery rhymes been the going item on the magazine shelves prior to Superman's debut, it's a fairly safe bet the Golden Age would've had a lot more sing-song doggerel built into at the outset.

Superman and Batman didn't kill at the start of their careers because THEY WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO. They killed because that's what the other characters on the stands ahead of them were doing. Once word came down to try for something better, the creators gave us that, and THOSE are the versions that sold the highest numbers and made comics a viable sales prospect for decades afterwards. THOSE are the characters upon which our love of comics is based. Once the industry lost sight of those early moral precepts, the idea of itself as an example to youngsters, and instead began insisting upon an ever-more-rigorous adherence to "continuity", and violence rather than action, readership plummeted and the few remaining hands on deck were left to foul up the joint to their hearts content. Neal Adams could finally give us the ultra-violent, twisted Batman with guns that he thought the character should've been, given the ultra-violent twisted streets he patrols. Finally, Batman could get the hell shot out of him, the way a nutcase like him would in real life...

So, that accounts for the guns at the opposite ends of Nathan's slideshow timeline. For those in the middle, Schwartz' first "New Look" Batman story had the character use a gun. Schwartz later admitted it was a mistake and apologized for it. Hey, mistakes happen. Again, continuity was only just coming into fashion at the time, and the Batman who decried the use of guns afterwards wasn't tied to this story by anyone except the fans. He didn't lie. Mistakes simply weren't carried forward, and no one at the time felt obliged to go back and "fix" them so they COULD fit into a continuity. Batman occasionally used guns to surprise those who knew he avoided them. He might use one for a bit of fancy trick-shooting in a poorly written story. One example which I'm surprised isn't shown here was a Haney/Aparo Brave & Bold story in which Batman declared it the "hour of the gun," and ran a gauntlet of kidnappers, firing a machine gun only he and Commisioner Gordon knew was filled with blanks.

The use of the cover from the first chapter of the "Bat-Murderer" storyline is a particularly egregious out-of-context example of Batman "using a gun" since in the story (spoilers) 

INVISO TEXT (Click or highlight to reveal): it is a robot gun programmed to aim and fire itself at Talia and thereby condemn the strongly anti-gun Batman for her "murder."

(End Spoilers)

To sum up, the Batman who matters the most throughout his history is the one who didn't carry or use a gun. The earliest incarnation is a rough sketch and the later examples are born of editorial pandering to artistic self-indulgence and navel-gazing. As the ongoing plummet in sales is still in effect, editors will doubtlessly continue to feel they have nothing to lose by "experimenting" with "hard, edgy" killer versions of Batman "that readers have never seen before!" Yawn...

But thanks for trying to peg Batman as a bloodthirsty, flip-flopping hypocrite with no convictions, Nathan! It's always a pleasure to come across one of these "oh-so-knowing" posts... I'm sure it's supposed to funny.

The version I "like the best" actually includes the "hour of the gun" scene, Paul, so no, not exactly. I should clarify, though, that the type of post I describe here as "oh-so-knowing" isn't specific to Nathan, but rather those of this nature that "prove" using out-of-context panels that Wonder Woman has always killed people with swords, or that Supergirl is a sexual deviant because her odd list of boyfriends. I've grown tired of the display of panels to prove that what the character says is at odds with what we in the informed, intensely meta-contextual audience instead KNOW to be true.

I believe I may have gone a bit overboard in my response to this use of the device due to my intense general dislike of it elsewhere.

From the film "The Spanish Prisoner," "I did get on my high horse, didn't I?"

However, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree, Paul, on those Alan Davis shots looking "right" especially since anyone who reads that story they both refer to knows that Batman wimps out on the murderous intention a better writer would never have had him conceive in the first place.

Sorry, Nathan. I did go overboard. Nothing personal was intended, however what I wrote reads.

Joe Hollon on another thread mentions listening for his inner Thumper on the subject of saying something nice. Usually I try to listen to mine. I don't know where he got to this evening. Again, my apologies.

The "Batman used to carry a gun" story is one I have heard since I was a kid.  It's right up there with the "Yep, I remember when funny books wuz a nickle."  Which to my knowlege they never were, but anyway, I have never seen any of the very early stories of The Batman when he used a gun and actually killed criminals. 

One of the interesting things about comics, at least until the 90's, was that they tried things, some stuck, some didn't.  The things that didn't work were discarded and never spoken of again...until the 90's  The things that stuck added to the mythos, and in the end you had characters that no one on their own could have sat down and dreamed up.  It was evolutionary.  Refined.  Something better.