DC DARK: Batman

by Dan Bivens

What if, in some darker Reality in the DC Universe, Batman had come to be as a true masked vigilante, instead of a costumed someone helping to uphold Justice in Gotham City. A truer terror in Cape and Cowl. How would this play out?

1. Chapter 1

DC DARK: BATMAN

by: Dan Bivens

Chapter 1

Bang! Bang! Bang!

"Dad! Mom! Noooooooooo!"

Bruce Wayne, once again, awoke in a cold flop sweat in the middle of maddening night. A night, like all the nights that continuously tortured the billionaire son of a gunned down, in cold blood, Thomas and Martha Wayne before the boy Bruce.

So tortuously long did the boy Bruce cry himself to sleep, only to relive that frightening night an unending number of times...until, finally, as a young man, he had had enough. Especially so since, by the time Bruce Wayne was in his late-teens, Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne butler and surrogate father for Bruce during an unendurably traumatic youth, had died suddenly of a massive heart attack.

Thus forcing Bruce Wayne...in this far darker Reality!...to become much more self-sufficient a lot sooner than many might think he could or should have been.

For Bruce's brooding deepened and his desire for exacting some semblance of vigilante vengeance and justice against Gotham City criminals burned not brighter but hotter than might have happened had he still had the guidance and, yes, fatherly-like love of Alfred a little longer.

Using not only his vast fortune, but his bountiful high-tech connections via the world-wide Wayne Enterprises, Bruce Wayne would not only travel the globe learning martial arts style single-against-several combat methods. Bruce would also, clandestinely of course, acquire an incredible one-of-a-kind array of anti-criminal instrumentality, including an unequivocally unique car, all to be housed solely in a colossal beneath-the-mansion cave.

Not to mention the secretive creation of a blue-gray, bullet-proof padded, identity-hiding, cowled-and-caped costume reflecting the fact he had come to call his vigilante alter-ego Batman. As well as arming himself with deleteriously designed Ninja-style Bat-belt contained items with which to war against crime and criminals.

However, in this decidedly darker Reality, the Batman would lean much more toward the exacting of terrible revenge than bringing bad men, and women, to truer justice.

The Batman, in this heartless Here-and-Now, would devolve into more murderer than deputized dispenser of street-side righteousness.

A true terror-delivering vigilante.

Starting with a super-villain calling himself: the Joker.

A Dark Comic in mad makeup who was heading up a small army of vile and evil career criminals more than willing to kill countless innocents in their devilish desire to steal...and, through the twisted vision of their weird leader...destroy wantonly and pitilessly.

"Haaaaa, hahahahahahahahaha!" cackled Joker, hair of green framing a face of white with ridiculously wide grin, while wearing a purplish suit as insane in style as its wild-eyed wearer was in intent. "That's it, boys, grab everything you can carry in those Joker-ized tote bags and see to it that these good citizens quivering at our collective feet get what all 'good citizens' get. A quick and bloody death! Hahahahahaha, hoo, hoo, hoooooo!"

"With pleasure, boss," snarled a skinhead-turned-heartless hoodlum faithfully following this crazed Clown Prince of Crime. Pulling a chrome-plated .357 Smith-and-Wesson and aiming it at one, then another, of the cowering cowards, in this ex-skinhead's perverted view of victims. "With pleasure."

Bam!

"Nooo--!"

END OF CHAPTER 1