Michael Keaton reprising his role for an alternate reality Batman?

I’m listening.

Lewis G. Wilson. Robert Lowery. Adam West. Michael Keaton. Val Kilmer. George Clooney. Christian Bale. Ben Affleck. Robert Pattinson. Kevin Conroy. That’s quite the list.

I’ve become jaded when it comes to the DCU. I will not even pretend to not be. I wasn’t excited about Robert Pattenson, not because of him, but because I just can’t be bothered with another “Not My Batman”. This might be blasphemy, but Affleck was probably my favorite live action actor to don the cowl, but what the writers and directors and noface suits did to him … ugh.

I would probably feel bad for these guys, they had no chance. My Batman has and will probably always be the Animated Series Batman voiced by Kevin Conroy. To me, he is Batman. When I heard he was going to be jumping out of the 2D world and into a live action role, I wasn’t excited. Conroy, the animated Conroy, that’s my Batman.

But does me having a favorite Batman make the others any less of Batman? It’s not like the Doctor. They are all the same person. You can’t have 11 without 10, 10 without 9 and they are all going to end up as 12 and 13.

But with Batman, he’s not a different incarnation of the previous version. And it would suck if he were. They are all so different. If these characters were supposed to be the same person, it’s like living with someone as psychotic as the Joker, or more aptly, Two-Face. To watch the Nolan’s Dark Knight, you have to ignore that anyone as campy as Adam West played the roll or it just doesn’t work.

Unless it’s an Elseworlds Batman.

I can remember my first introduction to an Elseworlds Batman. It was an episode of Batman the Animated Series called Legends of the Dark Knight. It was a beautiful homage to a few different Alternate Universe versions of the Caped Crusader and the art was amazing!

The best part of the episode was not too longer after I stumbled upon a couple of the comic lines that featured some of those Batman versions. I knew that the different titles that I collected, Batman, Detective Comics, The Dark Knight, Shadow of the Bat, Gotham Knights, Chronicles, weren’t set in the same universes but every so often these very separate universes collided for a story line, like my absolute favorite, No Man’s Land. But other than that, the events that happened in one didn’t affect the events in another.

So why didn’t I ever view the live action Batmans as such? Because the DCU never thought of them that way. Never treated them that way. It was always, forget what came before.

So when I hear that the DCU might be accepting all of these iterations and embracing the whole Elsworlds? I’m all for it!