Batman, as a comic book character, was created in 1939. That makes 2009 the 70th anniversary of his creation! It’s amazing that thousands of tales have been based upon Batman, with countless revisitations to his past, uncovering previously unmentioned fragments of his otherwise unrecorded virtual history. What’s more remarkable that most of these stories can be pieced together seamlessly to form a single coherent story of his life.
Endless tales can be written of his past, much more to say, on his ongoing imagined future. The same can be said of other superheroes, any fictitious character or even ourselves. It is as if there are infinite secret gaps in every person’s past, with missing experiences not yet fully articulated, with missing lessons not paid attention to. It reminds me of how the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree to recall his many past lives to fully realise the missed Dharma on the micro and macro levels. We too, must already have a bountiful of experiences to learn from, which we were not mindful of enough!