Batman's Victorian ancestors ??

Were Batman's ancestors who would have been 30-ish in 1880~1890 ever named ??

I'm not bothered which movie time-line ensued, I just need the 'Victorian Connection'...

Please ??
 

JohnJacques

Banned
Personally, I think Jack the Ripper being Batman's ancestor would be amazing.

There was an Otherworlds Comic that had Bruce Wayne pairing up with Harry Houdini. The Batman character was a teddy Roosevelt analogue.
 

JohnJacques

Banned
Rule of thumb for good superhero stuff, Good people beget good people, bad people beget bad people.

But Batman isn't your average good guy/superhero. He's dark and he's a little neurotic.

I personally always imagined him as having a messed up pedigree- with a good contingent who went to the Arkham Asylum.
 
But Batman isn't your average good guy/superhero. He's dark and he's a little neurotic.

I personally always imagined him as having a messed up pedigree- with a good contingent who went to the Arkham Asylum.

Well yes, but he isn't the decendants of serial killers. In fact, Alfred said in Batman Begins that his great grandparents were apart of the Underground Railroad (Gotham is in New Jersay so it works). Batman has a lotta good, only his veneer is scary. Like Batman can't even bring himself to kill a villian, which is more than yuo can say about a lotta superheroes.

So like William Melvile, the dude I linked. He was a victorian version of a superhero.
 

Thande

Donor
Oddly enough, there was one story which suggested one of Bruce Wayne's colonial-era ancestors was an insane serial killer...
 

JohnJacques

Banned
Ha. Thande just supported my viewpoint, so.... I'm right.

Batman Begins is the Nolan-verse.... and there are plenty of reboots.

Anyways, I think that him having evil in his bloodline only makes him more interesting.... and throws out the "good breeding" that seems to abound in most hero fiction.
 
But not named...

D'uh, except for B's parents and paternal grand-father, I've only found one prior name, a Revolutionary-era Judge Wayne who helped found Gotham in NY/NJ area...

Beyond that, there seems little in 'main-stream' canon...

Fair enough, I'll name-drop Graysons into my tale.

{FX: Exits humming 'Cat & Canary' off-key... }
 
Ha. Thande just supported my viewpoint, so.... I'm right.

Batman Begins is the Nolan-verse.... and there are plenty of reboots.

Anyways, I think that him having evil in his bloodline only makes him more interesting.... and throws out the "good breeding" that seems to abound in most hero fiction.

Fine... But I still think that jack the ripper is too many levels of crazy for Batman. I dunno, Boers? Confederates? Fenians?
 
Based on some quick web searches, here is something that might be of interest:
The Waynes continued to prosper with the growing Gotham City. They continued to have their share of heroic military officers, among them Captain Forrester Wayne, who fought so bravely in the War of 1812 that he was offered command of the U.S.S. Constitution. He turned it down, having seen enough bloodshed during the war, and retired to civilian life. There he busied himself studying naval battles. He was a brilliant strategic thinker and, at the conclusion of his studies, wrote a small pamphlet entitled simply A Dissertation on Tactics that is still taught at Annapolis today. There was a General Horatio Wayne who fought in the Civil War, but subsequent generations took more pride in Caleb and Annabelle Wayne, a husband and wife whose daring work with the Underground Railroad spirited hundreds of runaway slaves to safety in Canada before the likes of Horatio ever thought about going to war for them. The country was changing, and leadership became more about industry and invention than war. In 1866, wanting to make a gesture after the Civil War and encourage the battered Southern economy, Bruce Andrew Wayne, an architect, purchased enormous quantities of Georgia pine, and put returning soldiers to work on a myriad of projects, including construction of the first Wayne Office Building in downtown Gotham, an observatory which is now the planetarium in Robinson Park, the Knickerbocker Keystone Club, and a renovation of Wayne Manor 3 . Other Waynes distinguished themselves in various ways: there was a cabinet minister, two diplomats, a director of the National Gallery, and a frontier scout –although the family doesn’t put much stock in those Waynes who ventured outside of Gotham to make their mark. Rather, they honored with portraits in the Great Hall ancestors like Lawrence Wayne, a gentleman inventor whose prolific catalog of gadgets and processes rivaled those of Edison’s. Yet he remains unknown because his parents thought fame unseemly, and so forced him to patent his inventions under assumed names. Lawrence was also good friends with another innovator, one Robert Fulton, and saw the potential in Fulton’s steam‐powered inventions while others, including the French British and US Governments, labeled them “Fulton’s folly.” Perfecting a design for a paddle‐wheeled steamboat, Wayne obtained for himself an absolute monopoly to operate as‐yet unheard of vessels called steamships in the waters surrounding Gotham. Wayne’s boat was christened The Flying Fox. She made her maiden voyage out of Gotham Harbor before a great crowd of onlookers. They’d come to gawk at the vessel, amazed that such a contraption with a 16‐foot paddlewheel would even stay upright in the water. They twittered with nervous anticipation once the craft set off, expecting a spectacular mid‐river explosion once it built up a full head of steam. Instead, they saw her slide smoothly out of her dock, move upriver against the tide at a brisk pace, and disappear on the horizon. 32‐hours later word arrived that The Flying Fox safely reached the state capital. Soon the boat was operating on a regular ferry service between the two cities.
 
Ha. Thande just supported my viewpoint, so.... I'm right.

Batman Begins is the Nolan-verse.... and there are plenty of reboots.

Anyways, I think that him having evil in his bloodline only makes him more interesting.... and throws out the "good breeding" that seems to abound in most hero fiction.

But the problem with Batman was that he was a product of "good breeding." His father was an the majority shareholder in Wayne Industries and a prominent philanthropist. However, since Wayne the elder was a doctor by trade, I'd think its safe to say that he came upon the shares by inheritance. So that puts the Waynes at least three generations back of respectability.

The background Mr. Bondoc brought up sounds good enough of a backstory.

You might be able to sneak in a killer into one of his many ancestors, but I doubt it would be a Wayne.
 
Thanks !!

Thanks, they're almost exactly what I was looking for !!

I'm sure I can marry Miss Brown's elegant cousin Honeychile into that clan...

( Their Pinkerton code names were 'Cat' and 'Canary' but, after wreaking bloody vengeance upon that appalling villain, 'The Pig Of Panama', they sought other amusement. While unsuspected Honeychile went up to Boston to find a Beau, nubile Josephine, her 'stalking horse', shipped out with swashbuckling Scientist-Adventurer, Dr Michael Stratton... ;-)
 
Gotham is in New Jersey? Huh, wonder what the skyline looks like from the NJTP (probably like what Chicago looks like from the Tri-State Tollway since we're talking about the Nolansverse films).
 
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