Batman's secret identity is the most closely
guarded secret in the DC Universe.
No one must ever know well, except Alfred,
of course.
And all the Robins.
And Batgirl.
And Superman, and the Justice League, and
probably Commissioner Gordon.
No villains, though except for Ra's al-Gul,
and Talia, and Catwoman, Hush, Dr. Hurt well,
you get the idea.
Beyond them, however, no one must ever know,
which is why Bruce Wayne has gone to some
pretty strange extremes in order to keep people
from figuring out how he spends his nights.
Here are some truly bizarre ways that Batman
has kept his identity a secret.
The Bodyguard
Gotham City is a pretty dangerous town, and
if you're one of its high-profile billionaires,
you're bound to wind up as a target sooner
or later.
That’s why the Wayne Industries board of
directors decided to hire a bodyguard for
their CEO.
Sasha Bordeaux made her first appearance in
Detective Comics #751, taking the job of working
as a bodyguard for the last person in the
world who actually needed one.
At first, Bruce played up his disguise as
a flaky socialite in an attempt to make Sasha
so frustrated that she'd quit, but once she
discovered his secret identity, everything
changed.
Since she was still dedicated to protecting
him, she insisted on joining him on his missions
as Batman, and he decided to train her as
a sidekick with a mask and costume of her
own.
Despite the fact that she performed pretty
admirably in the role, her tenure ended disastrously
when Bruce Wayne was framed for murder and
she was arrested as an accessory.
She was seemingly killed in prison, and then
wound up as a cybernetic super-spy working
for an intelligence agency called Checkmate.
You know you've got a weird résumé when
"Batman's bodyguard" isn't the strangest thing
on it.
Batman Incorporated
The thing about Batman's secret identity is
that it's not actually that hard to figure
out, since everyone already knows that he
drives around Gotham City in a rocket-powered
super-car.
Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to
connect it to the local billionaire whose
parents were murdered in front of him as a
child.
In 2010, however, Bruce Wayne used all of
those obvious connections to his advantage.
Rather than revealing himself as Batman, he
instead announced that he’d been the one
financing the Caped Crusader, using his vast
personal fortune to provide Gotham's resident
vigilante with all the grappling hooks, Batarangs,
and Batmobiles he needs.
And technically, that’s true, even if it
leaves out one pretty important detail.
Evil Twin
After Batman appeared to die in the pages
of Final Crisis, Dick Grayson took over the
role, but that left the question of what to
do about Batman and Bruce Wayne dying at the
same time.
Fortunately, they had Dr. Tommy Elliot, better
known as the supervillain Hush.
See, Elliot was so obsessed with his childhood
friend Bruce Wayne that he ended up performing
plastic surgery on his own face in order to
turn himself into Wayne's exact double.
With Batman Gone, he was running around pretending
to be Bruce Wayne, depleting the Wayne fortune
as fast as he could.
To solve the problem, Batman's allies decided
to let him keep up the ruse, recruiting a
massive roster of other superheroes posed
as employees and assistants to keep him in
line long enough for the real Batman to return
from a trip through the time stream.
King Batman the First
Okay, this is when things start to get weird.
Back in the '50s, Batman and Robin found themselves
transported through a random time warp to
the planet Plaxius, where Batman was unmasked
when he accidentally became king.
Initially, Batman figured that there was no
harm in revealing his identity to an alien
world, but the criminal he and Robin had been
chasing when they got hit with the time warp
was also there, and more than willing to spill
the beans when he got back to Earth.
While this entire problem could be avoided
by just leaving the criminal back on Plaxius
to face interdimensional space justice, that's
a little too far from due process, even for
Batman.
Instead, Batman and Robin decided that the
best way to protect their identities was to
jump right back into another random time warp,
which fortunately wiped everyone's memory
of the entire story.
Funny how that works
Bat-Ventriloquism
Batman has done a lot of weird things to protect
his secret, but the climax of “The Conquest
of Batman's Identity” might be the wildest
of all.
It starts when detective novelist J.J.
Jason tries to find a bit of inspiration by
solving the most challenging mystery he can
think of: figuring out who's behind Batman’s
mask.
He studies footprints, analyzes a piece of
Batman’s cape, and even gathers up a soil
sample from the Batcave to conclusively proves
that Batman is Bruce Wayne.
When he confronts Bruce about it, though,
the result isn't what he expects.
It's not what anyone expects.
Like several other stories like this, Batman
relies on a stand-in wearing his costume to
throw people off the track.
Superman's done it a few times, for instance,
and Robin has a special costume with built-in
stilts just for such an occasion.
Even Alfred did it once, although for obvious
reasons, that usually only works from a distance.
This time, though, his stand-in Batman is
blind and deaf, and "speaks" to Jason via
Batman using ventriloquism.
The fake Batman also completely unnamed, and
is never, ever mentioned again.
Literally Nothing
At the the climax of 2002’s Hush it's revealed
that Tommy Elliot wasn’t working alone.
Instead, the real foe behind a complicated
plot that involved almost every major Batman
villain was the Riddler, who had finally figured
out Batman's secret identity.
Considering that the Riddler is one of Batman's
more enduring foes, this seems like a pretty
big deal.
In that same issue, however, Batman convinces
him not to tell anyone, arguing that riddles
are worthless if everyone knows the answer.
Of course, that conveniently ignores the fact
that it's also pretty worthless to solve a
riddle when nobody else knows you've done
it, but eventually, it all worked out.
Before too long, the Riddler completely forgot
Batman’s identity, thanks to a sharp blow
to the head and a bout of amnesia.
Which might be Batman's true super power - the
unstoppable power of coincidence.
