Batman is counted among comics’ most formidable heroes, something made all the more impressive by the fact that he’s a regular human. Batman has no superpowers and has to worry about all manner of ailments and injuries. This has all gotten more acute as Batman has gotten older. Aging in comics is a tricky subject; these characters have been around for decades, yet they can never age too much. Batman first appeared over 80 years ago, but it’s generally accepted that he’s only been Batman for a decade, a decade and a half at the most. Conservatively, Batman is somewhere between 35 and 40 years old, putting him right at the end of the best physical years of a man’s life.
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Aging is a concern for Batman in-universe and it’s one that has come to the fore in the latest issues of Detective Comics. As part of DC’s All-In publishing initiative, the book has gotten a new creative team — Tom Taylor and Mikel Janin — and follows Batman as he investigates the deaths of several young criminals. Detective Comics #1090 made some big changes to Batman’s origin, and it also introduced Bruce Wayne to Scarlett, a woman who runs a clinic that is working on an anti-aging drug. Detective Comics #1091 sees him begin taking the medicine, all to keep his fighting edge. Batman has made use of chemicals to give him an upper hand in this war on crime before, and it often backfires on him. Will this be one of those occasions?
Batman Could Use the Boost But There Is Definitely Something Fishy Going On
Batman’s advancing age and physical condition have played a big role in this new arc of Detective Comics. Batman has injured his knee, slowing him down somewhat, and issue #1091 begins with Batman having a nightmare about being an old man and fighting the Joker. After a conversation with Superman about the anti-aging drug, he decides to take it, leading him to Scarlett’s Theromise Health. He avoids the full physical because of his multiple scars and badly healed Batman injuries, but is still given the first dose of the drug. Later, he goes out as Batman and feels a hundred times better while fighting some of the Penguin’s goons, a marked improvement from how he had been feeling up to that point.
However, there’s something about the whole situation that rings false. Scarlett admits that she has multiple motives for doing what she’s doing and immediately begins describing billionaires in the most negative terms, focusing on their greed and resource squandering, and asks what would happen if they had more time on the Earth. Bruce speculates that they may decide to change their ways and help make things better, but the way Scarlett speaks about the wealthy is something of a red flag. This may be a ploy to give the wealthiest people a drug that will do them harm, or somehow allow Scarlett control over them. On top of that, Batman finds that his knee injury, which Scarlett told him not to worry about anymore as she dosed him with the drug, isn’t completely healed. This could point to the drug not being as efficient as advertised, but it could show how Scarlett plans to control the people she gives the drug to — that they’ll need higher and higher doses that they can only get from her.
Few Heroes Could Use a Fountain of Youth Like Batman But It Is Almost Certainly too Good to Be True
Batman and aging are familiar subjects. Several major Batman stories have revolved around that — Frank Miller’s Dark Knight trilogy all involve an older Bruce Wayne fighting crime and a big part of Batman Beyond is that Bruce Wayne got too old to be Batman. Now, obviously, aging is only going to affect Batman if the creators allow it to. However, Batman is one of the few characters where creators can have a conversation about what age would mean to a superhero, ergo what readers are getting from the current run of Detective Comics. If there’s any hero who could use an anti-aging drug, it is Batman.
Stories like this don’t just work out, so there will definitely be a twist somewhere down the line. Scarlett suddenly showing up with an anti-aging drug — at the same time a mysterious masked somebody appears at the end of issue #1091 — is just too much coincidence. She’s admitted to having several motives and her attitude towards wealthy people, while factual, points to someone who may have more going on than it seems.
This sort of thing never works out well for Batman, it remains to be seen how bad it’s going to get.
