Gotham: Black Knight

A prince of the American city becomes a masked night-vigilante with a sudden wonder about a new alliance with a female 'heroine' as villainy dawns.

A toast to the dark vigilante Batman (DC Comics), a real messenger of American...detention! Enjoy, 

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Bruce Wayne had grown up as the prince-heir of the entire Wayne Estate fortune and was a bright and happy child, but when his parents were gunned down in front of his eyes in a Gotham City alley one dark night after an early retreat from a city opera show, Bruce decided he'd forsake his idealistic heart for a more brooding form of human vigilance. After graduating from Princeton, Bruce traveled to Nepal and meditated on creation/destruction in the snowy Himalayas and taught himself hand-to-hand combat and ninja-vigilante tactics for modern urban crime control. He then returned to Wayne Manor and went back under the care of his loving family butler Alfred Pennyworth who'd raised him singly after the murder of his beloved parents.

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ALFRED: Perhaps being manager of Wayne Industries will give you direction and peace!

BRUCE: Good; but I'm contemplating a more radical action-set now too, dear Alfred.

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Bruce built an elaborate 'bat-cave' in the giant basement of Wayne Manor in which he'd use computer-monitoring systems with detectors spread out over Gotham City, to supervise forms of vandalism and mob crimes and criminally-insane terrorism and devise ways to be the modern city's 'dark knight' of vigilantism. Bruce fashioned himself a special bat-like flying vigilante costume and re-engineered a special Lamborghini estate car into a tank-like weapons-enhanced stealth-city vehicle called the bat-mobile. He then started calling himself the Batman. As this under-known 'super-hero' of Gotham City, Bruce Wayne (Batman) would serve as the city's ultimate ninja-priest.

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ALFRED: I was hoping for a more sane form of adult passion.

BRUCE: Well, maybe I'll find a nice woman to marry by some form of miracle.

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Bruce managed Wayne Industries as the adult socialite-prince businessman of Gotham City but let his right-hand man Lucius Fox handle all the administrative matters for him while he managed the city's darker elements by night...as Batman. Bruce/Batman took the night-sky every day of the week after midnight, patrolling the city streets in the bat-mobile and wielding rope-guns and tranquilizer-darts to climb up walls and take down vandals, hitmen, thugs, and roaming madmen/women who're thirsty for blood and crime. He'd managed to apprehend and deliver over 15 bad criminals to the Gotham City Police Department (GCPD) station-footsteps within the span of just 4 months.

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ALFRED: Gotham ain't as bad as it might look to a brooding vigilante!

BRUCE: I hope you're right about that, Alfred my friend.

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There were darker skies ahead for Gotham City. There were two new criminally-insane 'super-villains' rising to prominence ominously. Meanwhile, socialite-businessman Bruce was now courting a lovely romance with the Wayne Industries secretary Selina Kyle who seemed rather overly-curious about capitalism-dealings in the city and asked questions about things like terrorism-financing 'blood-diamonds' in the modern era. There were simultaneous surfacing news-stories of a mysterious female vigilante in the city seeming to be wearing a 'cat' costume, so the press called her Catwoman. Bruce was suspicious secretly that his new girlfriend Selina Kyle was actually Catwoman. Meanwhile, Selina harbored secret ideas that Bruce, her new socialite-beau...was actually the Batman!

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ALFRED: Perhaps marriage is in order, sir.

BRUCE: I have to deal with these two new very bad guys first, Al.

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These two very bad guys in Gotham City called themselves Penguin and Scarecrow. One was a misshapen crime-master who dwelt in the city sewers and wore an eerie penguin costume and ordered minions to plant explosives in shopping plazas and under cop-cars. The other 'dude' was Scarecrow, an overground masked maniac who wielded homemade fear toxins which when administered into the eyes as a thrown powder produced hallucinations of frightening visuals. Penguin/Scarecrow comprised the criminally-insane 'face' of Gotham, and Batman (Bruce Wayne) wondered if he'd ally himself with the diagonal 'Catwoman' (who actually was indeed Selina Kyle!) for an inventive new form of urban democracy. What's the destiny of Gotham City for this 'black knight' of depression?

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)