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Having seen his parents gunned down before his eyes, wee Bruce Wayne makes the following vow by candlelight: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” This oath is ridiculous on its face, so laughably grandiose and melodramatic that only a kid could make it. Which is exactly its power. That oath is a choice. An act of will. A deliberate reaction to a shattering injustice. More crucially, it is an act of self-rescue. It’s these twenty-four words, after all, that give his life purpose and launch him into an existence entirely devoted to protecting others from the fate that befell him. This is why, for all the character’s vaunted darkness, he is now and has always been a creature not of rage but of hope. He believes himself to be an agent of change; he is the living embodiment of the simple, implacably optimistic notion Never again.
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