Bruce Wayne

Bruce Wayne was the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, heir of the Wayne family fortune, and the creator of the superhero identity of Batman. As Batman, he patrolled Gotham City in a war on crime and participated in world-changing crises from 1939 to his death in 1954.

Childhood and Adolescence (1916-1934)

Bruce Wayne was born on February 19, 1916 into the Wayne family, one of the oldest and richest in Gotham City. His father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, was an esteemed physician and surgeon who inherited the industrial corporation Wayne Enterprises, and his mother, Martha Wayne (née Kane) was the heiress to the Kane Chemical fortune, a relative of newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane, and a famous socialite. Both were renowned for their philanthropic efforts, stemming from a deep-seated belief that the upper classes should use their wealth to improve the lives of the lower classes. Thomas and Martha loved and indulged their only child.

On June 26, 1924, the Wayne family caught an evening screening of the George Valentin swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro. Shortly after leaving the theater, a mugger, later identified as Joe Chill, leaped out of an alley and demanded Martha Wayne's pearl necklace. Chill shot Thomas when he tried to defend her, killing him instantly; he then shot Martha when she screamed for help, and she perished from blood loss exacerbated by a weak heart. Chill, himself a father, left Bruce alive and escaped. The child was then placed in the care of Alfred J. Pennyworth, the family butler.

In the days after the double murder, Bruce proved to be inconsolable. As a veteran of the Boxer Rebellion living in a time before treatment for psychological trauma became common, Pennyworth took a traditionalist view of Bruce's suffering and chose to let the child learn to live with his grief. One night, Bruce privately dedicated his life to fighting crime as a way of avenging his parents. To this end, he committed himself to intensive studying on a myriad of eclectic subjects, especially in the sciences, and developed an extraordinary intellect by the time he was a teenager. He also took up athletics and bodybuilding with similar excellent results. Pennyworth encouraged Bruce, and trained him in combat and medic skills, which he learned in his time as a Royal Marine, and in the art of acting, based on his brief stage career in London under the stage name Alfred Beagle. Due to his outstanding intellect, and with some help from his notable inheritance, Bruce was able to attend college at a younger age than normal and earned a Diploma of Law from Yale University's satellite campus in Gotham City in May 1934.

Travels and Training (1934-1939)

England

Bruce Wayne considered embarking on a career in law or law enforcement, but concluded that Gotham City's legal institutions and police force were both corrupted by mob influence. He came to believe that the only way one could exact justice without a fair justice system was to work outside it, and concluded that the best option for him was detective work. To this end, Wayne desired to find his boyhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, the "Great Detective" of Victorian England, and receive training in the use of deduction to settle unsolved crimes. Though the location of Holmes's home upon his retirement was then unknown, he still commissioned aerial adventurer Jock Lindsey to ferry him to London by biplane.

He first visited Holmes's former address of 221B Baker Street and questioned its current resident, self-proclaimed "King of Detectives" Harry Dickson. He directed Wayne to Queen Anne Street, where Holmes's former partner and biographer, Dr. John Watson, lived with his second wife. Watson refused to disclose Holmes's current address, even when offered monetary reward. Wayne later discovered from rereading one of Watson's last accounts that Holmes intended to keep bees in a town near Eastbourne. He left London for East Sussex and asked locals about honey suppliers in the area, which drew him to a remote beachside apiary.

Upon knocking, he was greeted by Mary Russell, Holmes's partner and later wife in an unpublicized second phase of his career. She stated that her husband was uninterested in receiving uninvited admirers, sparking an argument loud enough that Holmes himself, then eighty years old and supporting himself on two canes, hobbled to the door and demanded an apology from Wayne. Holmes proclaimed that Wayne was emotionally stunted and too entitled from his bourgeois upbringing, and suggested he should work in public defense, forge reciprocal relationships, and confront his own personal issues. He then told Wayne to never seek him again.

Wayne, devastated, spent several months cruising around London's upper society. He eventually found himself at an event hosted by athlete and aristocrat Peter Blakeney at his ancestral home. Wayne learned through conversation that Blakeney's great-great-grandfather Percy saved innocent aristocrats from execution during the Reign of Terror under the guise of "The Scarlet Pimpernel." Peter confirmed it, showing Wayne a portrait by George Romney of his ancestor, and related that Percy would feign stupidity in his daily life, to throw off suspicions about leading a double life, and pull complex gambits while obscuring his face with a mask. When Wayne asked why the man chose the flower as his symbol and left calling cards at the sights of his rescues, Blakeney quoted his ancestor as telling a cohort in his league, "To superstitious, half-educated people, the mysterious device ... would reduce many to a state of fear."

France

Wayne grew intrigued with the story of the masked vigilante and later discovered that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a precursor to an explosion of masked criminals and crimefighters in 1930s France. Wayne chartered a flight with Volée Airlines across the English Channel, the Channel Tunnel still six years away from completion, and lived for a brief time an estate in Paris's Faubourg Saint-Germain. Posing as an American student, he first sought Jerome Fandor (real name Charles Rambert), an expert on the costumed criminals and crime-fighters that attracted him to France in the first place, but could not find the notoriously paranoid journalist. More receptive was another journalist, Philipe Guérande, who worked with a masked vigilante in a campaign against the infamous apache gang "Les Vampires." Guérande admitted that even he knew little more about the vigilante, Judex, than was already known in the papers - other than that Judex once mentioned using a castle as a base of operations.

Setting this interest aside for the moment, he then decided to take advantage of living in the city (and even the same neighborhood) of his hero, 19th-century detective C. Auguste Dupin, and looked for someone to train him in the skills of detection. He sought Pierre Dupin, a descendant of the detective who lived in Faubourg Saint-Germain, but learned that he was studying medicine. He asked around for a professional investigator in Paris's seedier underbelly and learned of Henri Ducard, a manhunter who did freelance work for French police, crime bosses, and anyone who could afford his services. Wayne, uncertain about Ducard's seeming lack of morality but intrigued by his reputation as the best, approached the manhunter and offered a large cash sum for training.

Throughout the remainder of the summer and autumn, Ducard let his new patron - and his son Morgan, also in training - get involved in ongoing cases and track down anyone he ordered them to track down. Wayne impressed Ducard by mastering the skills of detection, deduction, and capturing targets with greater ease than the increasingly jealous Morgan. However, while he would eagerly and efficiently track suspects, they would argue about doing surveillance on random innocents as part of training, to which the mentor would remind the novice that he, Ducard, took jobs without caring what they were, and that Wayne could leave any time. Wayne continued his training until the following year, 1935, after Ducard let him take the lead in a case against an actual super-criminal. He was commissioned by a man named Leon Rude to use extralegal means to capture Tigris, and Wayne relished the challenge of tracking down a master of disguise. After months of rigorous investigation, including intimidating suspected accomplices and sorting through seemingly unimportant data, he found Tigris. However, his client asked that their enemy be murdered, claiming he was too dangerous to live. Wayne insisted that he could be arrested and tried in a court of justice, but Morgan Ducard took the initiative and murdered Tigris. Unable to tolerate their amorality any longer, Wayne parted ways with the Ducards.

To help himself get it together again, he focused on a new task. He pinpointed every location in which Judex was sighted between 1916 and 1917, and looked at the location of every castle close to Paris to see which one was most strategically located for him to reach these places. Wayne concluded that it had to be Le Chateau Rouge, orignally named Le Chateau Bleu by its first owner, the aristocrat Bluebeard, and renamed by locals when his homicidal record became known. When he ventured into the infamous closet concealing the passage where Bluebeard kept his wives' corpses, he unlocked a secret entrance and found a secret lair containing holding cells outfitted with an advanced dual-camera system, high-tech gadgets collecting dust, and a space that could fit a car. Wayne deduced that Judex was a rich man who used his wealth to fund a double life as a masked vigilante.

He found and shared this information with Philipe Guérande, who repaid the favor by convincing Jerome Fandor to speak with him. The reclusive journalist trusted his colleague and met with Wayne in secret to discuss the new breed of costumed crimefighters and criminals. He first described to Wayne his twisted and disturbing experiences with his archnemesis and the most notorious of all French super-criminals, Fantômas. Wanted for a litany of crimes including many counts of grand theft and murder, by 1935 he had baffled French authorities for more than thirty years. Fandor believed  Fandor also confidentially shared the story of a woman who masqueraded as a ghost haunting the Louvre in 1927. Once captured by the detective Chantecoq, she told him that she was searching for the Holy Grail, which she called "The Treasure of the Kings of France," and possessed clues showing it was located under the Cour Napoléon. Chantecoq insisted that this information not be published. Wayne was more intrigued by his description of the Nyctalope, a man with night vision, an artificial heart, and inhuman strength. He explained that the French government would hire him to fight enemies using his abilities. Wayne asked if he could see the hero in action and was disturbed when Fandor replied that according to on-location articles from colleague and family relation Raymond Rambert, he was recently seen putting down a local rebellion in the Morocco colony.

Fandor then mentioned that through his connections, he learned that other active persons on both sides of the law are taking up colorful guises around the world. When Wayne pressed him for answers, he described recent reports from Korea of a masked man taking action against the Japanese occupation. The story of Gaksital, or "Bridal Mask",  intrigued Wayne, and he soon left the Faubourg Saint-Germain estate to travel once more.

Korea

Wayne later booked a flight through the Indian international airline Ajira Airways  to Gyeongseog, now known as Seoul in South Korea.

(NOTE: This article is still under construction.)