Batman: The Knight - A 10 issue mini series will explore Bruce Wayne "lost" years

The period of Bruce Wayne’s life between the murder of his parents and his hitting the streets of Gotham dressed as a large flying rodent is, aside from a scant few stories, largely unexplored. In the two-page first telling of Batman’s origin in Detective Comics #33, it ranks just two panels, in which it’s said Bruce becomes “a master scientist” and that he “trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats.” Of all of the aspects of Batman’s origin, this period is arguably the one most up for interpretation. Enter writer Chip Zdarsky, artists Carmine Di Giandomenico & Ivan Plascencia (forrmerly of the Flash!)   , and letterer Pat Brosseau’s Batman: The Knight, a new imagining of those years of Bruce Wayne’s life that after one issue looks poised to become a pivotal entry in the Batman mythos.

The Bruce Wayne of The Knight’s first issue is a teenager, a student at Gotham Academy. The structure of the issue is immediately engaging, jumping around in time with most of the story told in flashback, with a framework of Bruce in a therapy session with a familiar psychologist who I’ve always found to be a fascinating and underutilized foil for Batman. It’s a structure that echoes something Bruce tells a girlfriend at one point, that he lives in both the past and the future simultaneously. Batman has always been a character driven by the tragedy of his past, and working toward a future where no child will ever have to suffer the way he did, so it’s interesting to see that aspect of the character laid out so plainly and so cleverly as a storytelling technique.

Zdarsky’s script also captures, perhaps more than any other story has, the volatile anger of young Bruce. He feels like a time bomb that could go off at any moment, far from the measured calculation of the Batman readers know now. Along with that, though, we get maybe the scariest Bruce Wayne we’ve ever seen. There’s one moment in particular, a conversation between Bruce and Alfred, that gave me pause in a great way. It’s easy to see how Bruce’s life could have gone in a very different direction, which adds an interesting sense of uncertainty to a story that we ostensibly already know the ending to.

It’s in the relationship between Bruce and Alfred where the issue truly comes alive. It’s clear from the start that, without Alfred in his life, young Bruce Wayne would never have developed into the man we know now. The absence of Alfred in the current Batbooks gives his appearances and his interactions with his young charge in this issue even more weight. Hopefully that relationship will continue to play a central role in this series, even as Bruce begins his globetrotting studies.


I’ve talked a lot about story and characters, but it can’t be overstated how fantastic Italian artist Carmine Di Giandomenico with Ivan Plascencia’s artwork on this book is. Best known for their bright, highly-kinetic work on The Flash, the pair bring an entirely different feel to The Knight. Batman’s world is one of heavy shadows, but for an adolescent Bruce Wayne Di Giandomenico and Plascencia find a middle ground, with darkness hovering over Bruce’s therapy session and a few of the flashbacks broken up by naturally-lit Gotham Academy scenes between Bruce and his classmates and friends. The storytelling feels appropriately grounded and straightforward, which allows the characters and the events of the issue to take center stage without distraction. I’ll be curious to see how the storytelling shifts as Bruce’s travels lead him into more action-packed situations.
This review was taken from:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/dc-round-up-zdarsky-di-giandomenco-fill-in-bruce-waynes-lost-years-with-batman-the-knight-1/

My question is whether this will truly become a part of Batman's backstory for years and years to come or whether it will just be ignored / forgotten by other writers and editors even before the collected edition is released. After all, Chip Zdarsky has written how many major Batman stories in the past?

Well, he should have wrote something for the Bats Black & White anthology revamp published last year (not really a Major story, for sure) but I did not buy it, I'll have to search news about it...