Who’s your favorite Batman?

Besides Pattinson versus West versus Keaton, what about Jim Gordon in a mech suit or The Dark Knight who says “HH!”?

By Erik Adams, Gwen Ihnat, William Hughes, Sam Barsanti, Matt Schimkowitz, Alex McLevy, Alison Foreman | March 5, 2022 | 6:00am

Film Features Batman

From left: Photo: Hulton Archive (Getty Images), Screenshot: Adventures Of Batman And Robin Cartoon Maker, Image: Greg Capullo/DC Comics, Image: Screenshot: Batman: Arkham City, Photo: Sunset Boulevard / Contributor (Getty Images) Graphic: Natalie Peeples

After singing the praises of various Caped Crusaders and Gotham rogues throughout Batman Week, the latest AVQ&A asks: Who’s your favorite Batman?

Jim Gordon

Much as I’d love to pick a stupid deep-cut like Captain Thug from , I’m not sure he even counts as “a Batman.” So, instead, I’ll go with that brief window in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s run when Jim Gordon was Batman and had a mech suit, because that was cool as shit. Capullo and Snyder always had an excellent read on the Dark Knight, and that extended to his supporting cast as well. It was super fun to see Gordon put on the cowl (and MECH SUIT!) and take on a ridiculous costumed villain that was all his own. [Sam Barsanti]

The Arkham games

Matt Reeves’ The Batman may promise a return of the “World’s Greatest Detective,” but real heads know he never went anywhere. He was alive and well in The Batman: Arkham video games. This series did a lot of things right. First and foremost, bringing in the cornerstones of , including Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Paul Dini. But the games, at their best, delivered the Batman of our dreams: physically monstrous, terrifyingly quick, and smart as hell. Endlessly replayable, the Arkham series, particularly Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, is a testament to how well Batman works in just about any context. There’s no question that this Batman rules Gotham. [Matt Schimkowitz]

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Grant Morrison’s Batman

I’m parodying myself here, but as an only somewhat lapsed Grant Morrison fanboy, I really can’t answer with anyone other than the smug, fundamentally unbeatable version of The Dark Knight from the writer’s run on the character in DC Comics from 2006 through 2013. Morrison’s Batman can best be summed up with just two letters, and a punctuation mark: “HH!” That’s the self-satisfied little grunt-laugh Morrison-Bats makes whenever he confirms that he really is just that much smarter and tougher than the rest of the world, its origin coming from one of Morrison’s earlier Justice League comics, when Bruce realizes a gadget he made was good enough to hide his heartbeat from Superman’s super-hearing. Morrison’s Batman is the flawed kind of perfect: The kind of guy so totally prepared that he keeps a back-up personality on hand in case his enemies ever manage to use his various psychological weaknesses against him. He’s a total dick. I love him. [William Hughes]

Michael Keaton

Now that all the cool kids have gotten in the deeper cuts, allow me to go the basic-ass route and point out that Batman will always be—has always been—Michael Keaton. It’s not just that I saw Tim Burton’s Batman at a formative age, where the director’s inventive blend of larger-than-life world-building and idiosyncratic (not to mention deeply personal) sensibility made it seem like Batman quite appropriately existed in a weirder, wilder reality than our own. And it’s not just that Keaton possessed the ideal blend of everyman “nerd next door” presence and ineffable stoicism that made Bruce Wayne just as important a part of the equation as his caped alter ego. And it certainly isn’t that he essentially took the live-action understanding of a character formerly seen as belonging to the world of Saturday-morning cartoons and made him live in a grandiose, indelible way. Wait, maybe it is all of that. [Alex McLevy]

Robert Pattinson

I was reluctant to claim Robert Pattinson as my favorite Dark Knight, if only because I’m wary of recency bias. But when you know, you know—and is my Batman, rain-streaked eyeliner and all. Pattinson portrays Bruce Wayne as a solipsistic sad boy who pursues justice for Gotham with an angst that’s at once searingly intense and mesmerically melodramatic. Think equal parts Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and Riverdale’s Jughead, with just a splash of Kurt Cobain for moody measure. Pattinson’s eboy-turned-batboy fantasy embodies the overwhelming burden of being “the new Batman” by playing up the superhero’s many emo eccentricities for both comedic and serious effect. The result is a self-aware if campy portrait that honors the many-sided mess Batman has always been, while making him feel more badass and more romantic than ever before. [Alison Foreman]

Adam West

Like McLevy said, I guess you never really get over the Batman you grew up with, and for me, that’s Adam West’s Bright Knight of the 1960s TV series and movie. Every day after school my little brother and I would absorb both halves of all those two-part reruns, hoping for an exemplary villain like Cesar Romero’s Joker or Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, breathlessly anticipating the “Zap! Pow!” fistfights that wrapped up each caper. You can have your grumpy R. Patz and C. Bale, but I have to ask: Remember when Batman was supposed to be, I don’t know… ? West’s Bruce Wayne was certainly dashing, but his fearlessness in embracing the cape and tights, as well as his committing-to-the-bit commanding vocals, makes his Batman the winner for me. I’d like to see any of those other guys dance the Batusi or whip out a can of shark-repellant Bat-spray with such aplomb. [Gwen Ihnat]

The Adventures Of Batman & Robin Cartoon Maker

According to the conventional wisdom, the Dark Knight’s digital exploits were a constant let down until the aforementioned Arkham series—but conventional wisdom is forgetting about a little CD-ROM called The Adventures Of Batman & Robin Cartoon Maker. A spin-off from the rebranded final run of Batman: The Animated Series, Cartoon Maker let the bat be whoever you wanted him to be. And if you were me, my brother, and our friends all hopped up on Mountain Dew and Space Ghost Coast To Coast, you wanted him to be a figure of absurdist comedy, a cowled puppet lip syncing to The Beatles, and the headlining talent of the Gotham-based variety show Baturday Night Live. In some respects, I’m glad we didn’t try to preserve these creations, because it’s slightly mortifying even typing about them. In others, I wish I could revisit our comedic re-conception of Batman, if only as evidence to prove that we were doing Sealab before Sealab was doing Sealab. [Erik Adams]