Throughout much of Superman's comics career, he has been associated with Batman/Bruce Wayne. They were honorary members of the Justice Society, but their friendship seemed stronger than that between the other members and themselves. It actually started on the radio show, where Clark Kent was tipped off to show off at a certain pier, and rescued Robin.

Retroactive stories pushed their first meeting farter and farther back. In a story by Edmond Hamilton, they supposedly learned each other's identities on an ocean voyage. Other stories have them meeting as children, as Superboy and "The Flying Fox", or a recent Elseworlds story has Superboy meeting "Robin", a young Bruce Wayne.

That doesn't agree with my timetables, but there is no doubt that although Kane and Finger have young Robin asking for the autograph of "Superman's creator", Jerry Siegel, that in a later forties' Superman story, Siegel puts Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in a crowd. That Siegel, decades later, would have Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes enter the thousand-year-old Batcave, or have Lois remark that "Mental Man" might be Batman in disguise. (He wasn't.)

I think Clark's involvement with the Wayne family predates even Bruce's boyhood---in fact, predates Bruce.

In GLADIATOR, "Hugo Danner", after leaving college for a year and saving lives to make up for the football player he had unintentionally killed with his strength, is in a bar when news about World War I breaks out. An American with a lot of money is also at the bar, a young man, barely older than Hugo who talks "Hugo" into joining the French Foreign Legion with him so they can experience World War I together.

This individual's name is "Thomas Mathew Shayne", a "tall, lean man" "his clothes elegant and impeccable" who was "bored with the routine of his existence", "his face was very nearly inscrutible" with "pale-blue eyes", the son of wealthy parents. He said about his life,

"I'm one of those people who have too much money to be able to do anything I really care about, most of the time. The family keeps me in sight and control."

His father---a mustached New York city banker-- had disapprovingly seen him as a wastral, a young man devoted to frittering his life away. Instead, Shayne proved to be quite invaluable and brave, becoming a lieutenant in the French army, and he and Hugo became quite close...not close enough where Hugo revealed how special he was to Tom, but quite close.

When Tom Shayne died, "Hugo" went berserk.

"He remembered Shayne. He searched in the smoking, stinking muck. He found the shoulders and part of Shayne's head. He picked them up in his hands, disregarding the butchered ends of the raw gobbet. White electricity crackled in his head.

"He leaped to the parapet, shaking his fists. 'God damn you dirty son of bitches, I'll make you pay for this. You got him, got him, you bastards! I'll shove your filthy hides down the devil's throat and through his guts. Oh, Jesus!'"

"Hugo jumped among them. Bayonets rose. Hugo wrenched three knives from their wielders in one wild clutch. His hands went out, snatching and squeezing. That was all. No weapons, no defense. Just---hands. Whatever they caught they crushed flat, and heads fell into those dreadful fingers, sides, legs, arms, belllies. Bayonets slid from his tawny skin, taking his clothes. By and by, except for his shoes, he was naked. His fingers had made a hundred bunches of clotted pulp and then a thousand as he walked swiftly forward in that trench."

"No more formidable engine of desolation had been seen by man, no more titanic fury, no swifter and surer death."

After Tom's death, Hugo communicated with the Shaynes, calling Tom "aggressive,brillant, and more courageous than any other man I have ever known." Mr. Ralph Jordan Shayne, at least, was both proud and surprised at the manner of Tom's passing, and asked for Hugo's bank account number, so that he might, as an investor and banker, take charge of Hugo's financial affairs.

When Hugo visited after the War, Mr. Shayne had made him a millionaire---by investing in munitions, by profiting on the death of those like Tom and other men he fought beside. Unwilling to take advantage of that "blood money" he directed Mr. Shayne to deposit in his parents' account. (Matilda Danner/Martha Kent spent much of the money on missionaries.)

Now, doubtless Wylie used pseudonyms for all the characters in GLADIATOR. "Hugo Danner" itself is a pseudonym. (So is "Clark Kent", for that matter.) Well, the lesser characters of the novel were also given pseudonyms---but often their names were less disguised than the main character's. Hence Wylie's "Anna Blake" and Bill Finger/Jerry Siegel's "Lana Lang" (note the "ana" and "la" similairity) are the same.

Similarly, could the family Wylie called "Shayne" and the famly Finger and Kane called "Wayne" be the same?

Of course, Lt. Tom Shayne wasn't Dr. Thomas Wayne, who was Bruce's father....for one thing, Tom Shayne died in World War One. It was implied that Dr. Wayne was already a doctor---certainly he was already married, Bruce was born at the latest, in 1917---during World War I. I suggest he had already finished his internship and married rather late in life---and that Lt. Tom Shayne's father was Phillip Wayne, Dr. Thomas Wayne's older brother, who married early in life. (The physical description of Ralph Jordan Shayne, with his "white mustache" fits the one portrait we have of Phillip Wayne, as does his social and financial standing, and his New York City location....the earliest Batman stories were explicitedly laid in "New York City.") His full name may have been Phillip Ralph Jordan Wayne. Thomas Mathew Shayne/Wayne was named for his uncle, Dr. Thomas Wayne.

That would have made "Thomas Mathew Shayne" really Tom Wayne, and cousin to Bruce Wayne. Tom Shayne seemed to be barely in his mid-twenties, just slightly older than "Hugo". Obviously he wasn't the already-married Dr. Thomas Wayne.

Netheless, when in the foxholes, Tom Shayne/Wayne might have received photographs of the newly-born Bruce Wayne, and shared them with "Hugo".

In the years after Tom's death, Phillip Wayne's wife died, grief leading to a heart attack, perhaps, or maybe suicide...so that when Bruce Wayne was orphaned in 1924, Phillip Wayne was unmarried.

Hugo/Clark might have revisited Mr. Shayne in the decade between the end of GLADIATOR and the beginning of his adventures of Superman, and might have even met this brooding, obsessed boy, and perhaps witnessing the pain in Bruce's eyes reinforced Hugo/Clark's decision to fight crime and criminals.

Later, in the thirties, Bruce as a teenager might have visited Clark, and been astounded at how little Clark had aged. Earlier, in 1926 or 1927, it may have been Clark, the ex-circus strongman, who suggested that Bruce try to study under acrobats in a circus---which, if my theories are correct, led to Bruce's first affair and the birth of Dick Grayson.

Indeed, the Haly Circus at the time was touring Europe. The Haly Circus, of course, was the circus that the Flying Graysons worked for. Phillip Wayne allowed young Bruce to travel with Hugo/Clark...and Bruce had confessed to Clark his intention to learn the inds and outs of acrobatics. Clark and Bruce joined the Haly circus for the summer, when Phillip thought they were touring Europe--which they were, just in a more humble yet flashier guise than Phillip could have dreamed. Clark signed on as the strong man once again, resurrecting his role as "The Mighty Hogarth"---demonstrating as much of his strength as he dared to Mr. Haley, and agreeing to work just for room and board---on condition that the Graysons train young Bruce in acrobatics. Clark adopted a costume of blue tights with a red trimming. Young Bruce, initially, had bright red tights and a domino mask once he doffed a black cape...

Later, to startle the audience,he would adopt dark-grey tights with dark-blue trimming so that he would be invisible to the audience in the shadows---and then quickly strip down to his red tights, to suddenly "appear" out of nowhere. (We know from Kane's initial drawings that Bruce's first uniform had red tights and a small mask...)

Bruce learned, while at the circus, the freedom of movement that the acrobats' tights could give one. He knew he would never be able to perform such feats in normal clothing. He also learned much about how to fool the onlookers, by using dark costumes to blend into the shadows, and he learned much...about Clark.

With his keen observational skills, he soon concluded that Clark's feats were not quite...natural, as Coach Woodhull of Webster University had similarly concluded about Clark/Hugo back in his college days. That as much as he seemed to be holding himself back, that he could easily surpass the feats that he astounded audiences with.

He confronted Clark with his deductions one night, and Clark agreed to show Bruce the truth---if he could keep a secret.

"Don't worry," smiled the teenage Bruce. "If there's one thing I'm good at, it's keeping...secrets."

Clark showed Bruce his leaping and lifting abilities, and his toughness, and of his plans to put it to use helping others and fighting crime. Bruce especially agreed with the fighting crime, and confessed to Bruce his ambitions to devote his life to learning everything that could be of help in fighting criminals---hence his stint with the acrobats this summer, to give him an advantage in the city, where there were so many handholds and rooftops by which criminals could elude police.

John Grayson also used a cape in his act, to angle his falls towards the net. With enough room to fall in, a cape can angle a fall quite well. Unfortunately, one day early that summer his fall was too fast, and he collided too quickly, and suffered an accident. He recovered, but he was never able to complete his marital "duties" with young Mary Grayson again, to both of their disappointment.

Yet they were training the young, but tall for his age and good-looking Bruce Wayne. Unknown to either John Grayson or Clark, Mary and Bruce were drifting into an affair...

Clark was fascinated at the idea of a cape "angling" one's fall. He thought of his hundred-yard leaps, and how useful such a cape might be. He learned all he could from John Grayson about the subject...

He hadn't his super-senses yet, but he was no idiot, and he saw several clues that indicated that Mary might have been teaching Bruce-- more than mere acrobatics. Clark was no moralist on this score. Mary was newly married and just eighteen, not that much older than Bruce, and certainly Clark's earlier life as "Hugo Danner", as Phillip Wylie documented, had its share of affairs. Still, Clark had been entrusted by Phillip Wayne the welfare of Bruce, and he couldn't help but feel a little responsible. Still, they would be leaving---it was towards the end of the summer---and each other would be just fond memories.

With Clark's stint as "The Mighty Hogarth" both in 1912 or 1913 and around 1927, is it any wonder that, in Action #7, he was eager to help with the broken-down Jordan's circus? Is it any wonder that he adopted a costume close to his latter strongman costume, with an added cape?

Is it any wonder that Bruce, when he finally started to fight crime, adopted acrobatic tights as well as a costume that would help him blend in with the shadows?

When Bruce returned to his uncle's care, he was intrigued by Clark's plan to use his cape to "angle" his flight, and his long leaps. Inspired somewhat by Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings, and wondering if he could develop anything that would be of similar assistance to himself, he developed a bat-winged-like glider that a young teenager could use to glide over long distances. Yet Bruce was growing, and he knew such a glider could only work when he was still relatively young and light in weight. As he grew older, he abandoned the hidden cache where he had stored the bat-wing-glider, and also the disguise paraphenalia he used to practice for later life's undercover work.

There it would have stayed, except it was found by an ex-jockey called Earl Westfall. Westfall saw the batlike glider, and at a jockey's weight, he found he could maneuver it well. With the disguise paraphenalia he could do two things...he could make it appear that he was gradually growing fatter, so that no one would suspect him of being the bat-winged marauder, who would have to weigh a hundred pounds or less...

He also designed a fearsome mask, down to the slit nose and long ears, to suggest a cross between bat and man.

The reason? He had trained and bred a particular nasty strain of vampire bats. With the fear his appearance would cause, and unleashing those vampire bats at population centers, he would be able to blackmail other cities for millions of dollars.

It took him a few years to breed enough bats---then he emerged, with his batlike glider, and fearsome mask---as the Bat Man. Readers of the Spider's adventures know that in the November 1935 issue, DEATH REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE KING, that the Spider, Richard Wentworth fought and ultimately caused the death of Earl Westfall, the first Bat Man. (This battle probably took place in the summer of 1934, and wasn't published until the following year.)

Young Bruce was probably just starting college then, and doubtless felt guilty that his abandoned paraphenalia was the cause of so many deaths; it reinforced his resolve to fight crime...yet it wasn't until a bat flew in his window that he resolved to become the second Batman. (One wonders if the police at first thought the two Batmen were the same, that Westfall might have somehow survived, and thus were hunting the Batman for more than just taking the law into his own hands...until it was apparent that, despite his vigilante ways, Batman was generally on the side of justice. The first to realize this was the police official, James Gordon, who may have once been the pulp vigilante the Whisperer, himself.)

Many have said that Batman was obviously influenced by Superman. Right, although he was his own man. Many have cited Batman's acroBatic talents, although they have rarely commented that Batman's tights and costume are similar to an acrobat's.

Bruce must have mentioned something of his friendship of Clark Kent, and of the truth of the legendary Superman, to Dick Grayson---who was the son of Mary Grayson and Bruce Wayne, a product of Bruce's first affair. (When the Graysons died due to a racketeer's scheming, Bruce got himself appointed Dick's ward. Bruce and Dick were alike in dozens of ways, and Bruce's concern for Dick was quite paternal.) When Batman disappeared, young Dick Grayson (also known as Robin) went searching for Clark Kent, leaving a message at the newspaper he worked for.

Clark Kent found him, in costume, but it was Superman who revived him, and together they found Batman, frozen into a "living waxworks" dummy by a Nazi sympathizer. Siegel was interviewed by the radio show's writers when it first started, and Siegel mentioned that particular plot to them, which became the basis for the first meeting of Superman and Batman in any media...on the radio show. Of course, the radio show went on to fictionalize some parts of their friendship---that Batman didn't know that Clark Kent was really Superman. Nine-tenths of the radio show (which showed Superman arriving on Earth as an adult, not as a child) was fictional, but a few stories managed to have a small kernel of truth.

Actually, the meeting of the various super-heroes (including Superman and Batman) in the origin of the Justice Society predated this, but it was the first time Superman and Batman, not Bruce Wayne, had teamed up without others getting in the way.

Both Superman and Batman had their reasons for not becoming full-time members of the Justice Society, Batman not feeling he could add much to a group that already had several nonpowered vigilantes like the Sandman or the Atom, and being rather an obsessed loner by nature. Still, the few times Batman worked with the Justice Society, it was the same time that Superman did.

The later story of Superman and Batman first learning each other's identity on a cruise (written by Edmond Hamilton) seems to be mostly fictional. Certainly they knew of each other's abilities long before that.

When the later Justice League was formed, Batman did join that as an active member---at the time being the only non-superhuman, who thought he could add his expertise and skill to correct some of the uhhh, overreactions super-powers might bring. Superman also joined as an active member for his own reasons...but it's a mark of their friendship that when they joined a team, they both joined it together.

There is a school of thought that a few years into the Justice League's career, that the original Batman, Bruce Wayne, might have retired his cowl, and a successor (possibly Dick Grayson) filled in for his mentor.

No problem. Surely Clark noted the resemblence of Dick and Bruce, and realized he was the fruit of that long-ago affair. And the close friendship between Clark and Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson lay in the memory of his close friendship with Lt. Thomas Mathew "Shayne"---back in World War One....and his determination not to lose these relatives of his old friend.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

GLADIATOR, Philip Wylie.

Thanks for the many enlightening comments by Kai Jannson, the Batman expert, as far as I'm concerned.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.