SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Detective Comics #994 by Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, David Baron and Rob Leigh, on sale now.

Everyone knows the gist of Batman’s origin; his parents were killed in front of him as a child, so he dedicated his life to eradicating all crime to make sure it never happened to anyone ever again. It’s the details where things get really interesting, with creators constantly coming up with different takes on what, exactly, makes Batman, well, Batman.

Whether it’s the campiness of Adam West and Burt Ward in Batman ‘66 or the grim realism of Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of films, Batman’s adaptability is one of the character’s greatest strengths. However, for a long time, there was one story that was considered so iconic and so perfect, that it went untouched for nearly thirty years; Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Richmond Lewis and Todd Klein’s “Batman: Year One.”

This reinvention of Batman’s first year as the Caped Crusader would go on to influence pretty much every Batman story for decades to come, until DC did the seemingly unthinkable and gave Batman a radically different first year in Gotham with Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s “Zero Year” storyline. Now, with Detective Comics marching towards its one thousandth issue and the new team of Tomasi and Mahnke aboard, it seems that Year One is once again canon, dethroning Zero Year, but there are some major ramifications if that’s the case.

Who He Is And How He Came To Be

Detective Comics #994 opens with an obvious homage to the start of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman #1. In the space of eight words, four panels and a double-page spread, Morrison and Quitely defined everything you’d ever need to know about The Man of Tomorrow -- doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple. It takes Tomasi and Mahnke an extra panel and considerably more words in their attempt to convey the same message for Batman, and it’s the last panel that we really want to pay attention to, as Bruce Wayne sits in front of a bust of his father with a bat perched atop it, and a bell in his hand.

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This scene from “Batman: Year One” is possibly one of the most iconic Batman moments of all time. Bruce Wayne, having struggled to find out how to watch over his city since returning to Gotham, returns beaten and bloody, on the edge of death, apologizing to the memory of his father for failing him. With the bell at his side, Bruce knows he can ring the instrument and Alfred will come, he’ll be patched up and have the chance to try again; or he can leave it, and die right there in the chair. Suddenly, a bat crashes through the window, landing on the bust of Thomas Wayne, and in that moment, Bruce knows what he must do. He utters the iconic line, “Yes father, I shall become a bat,” and rings the bell, signaling the birth of Batman.

NEXT PAGE: Detective Comics Overwrites Some of Batman's 'Zero Year'

Back To Zero

When it was announced that Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo would be retconning “Batman: Year One” in favor of their “Zero Year” storyline, it was considered blasphemous. “Batman: Year One” is a perfect story that didn’t need replacing, fans declared -- and that’s true. But Snyder and Capullo brought their own take to Batman, one that required its own beginning, and “Zero Year” was such a radical departure from what everyone knew from “Batman: Year One” that it actually worked really well. Snyder and Capullo showed a young Bruce Wayne go head-to-head with the Red Hood Gang, and his own Road To Damascus moment where he became Batman was definitely influenced by “Batman: Year One,” even if it wasn’t the same.

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Earlier in the story, Snyder and Capullo showed a flashback to a young Bruce Wayne who took some new technology of his father’s capable of mapping unknown terrain, and testing it out in the caves underneath Wayne Manor. He would fall into the hole and be swarmed with bats before being rescued by his father, and twenty years later, he discovered that mapping technology in his father’s study. Activating it, it projected a 3D hologram of what would become the Batcave, including a holographic swarm of bats which fly straight through Bruce’s body. The end result is the same: Bruce once again says, “Yes father, I shall become a bat,” but vitally, it removed one of the most important parts of Batman’s origin; The First Rule of Batman.

The First Rule of Batman

If we take it as gospel, as soon as Bruce Wayne said those fateful words — the vow to his father — whatever his did after that could be considered the first thing Batman ever did. Grant Morrison pointed out in his eight year run on the franchise that the first thing Batman did was ring the bell; he called for help. Despite his reputation as the lone Dark Knight, brooding in the shadows, Batman has never, for a second, been alone in his mission.

This comes back around to Tomasi and Mahnke’s debut, as in the fourth panel on the first page, Bruce Wayne is described as having a gaping hole in his soul following the death of his parents, another allusion to a Morrisonism from the same era, with Fourth World ramifications.

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The use of “the gaping hole” is evocative of “The Hole In All Things,” a phrase used by Morrison to describe Darkseid and the negative effects the God of All Evil has on reality. The return of the “Year One” origin over the “Zero Year” origin is important.

The key difference is the bell, a call for help. As Morrison established in “Return of Bruce Wayne,” that the harmonic frequency made by Bruce Wayne ringing the bell was the same harmonic frequency Superman used to defeat Darkseid in Final Crisis. It could just be that DC continuity has been slowly shifting to its pre-Flashpoint state following DC Rebirth, but the specific language and imagery used by Tomasi (who has an affinity for playing with Morrisonian concepts in his work) and Mahnke (who penciled the final issues of Final Crisis) seems deliberate. "Zero Year" is still canon, but now, so is "Year One's" most important moment.