Ever since they met, the Boy has continued to elude Batman’s notice. Considering Batman’s resources and skills, this seems impossible.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from “House of Gotham: Chapter Eight” in Detective Comics #1054, on sale now.
Ever since they met, Batman has been concerned with the Boy’s fate. Despite this concern though, the Boy has managed to fall off of Batman’s radar on multiple occasions, something even the world’s most skilled people can’t seem to do. In “House of Gotham: Chapter Eight” from Detective Comics #1054 (by Matthew Rosenberg, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire, Rob Leigh), while recovering after Bane broke his back, Bruce Wayne admitted that the Boy was never far away from his thoughts after all these years. If true, then one central question remains: With all his resources and skills, why has this one child managed to elude Batman for so long?
The simplest answer is that it is a combination of bad luck and even worse timing. Every time the Boy and Batman have encountered one another, some kind of threat was occurring simultaneously that distracted Batman and gave the Boy the opportunity to slip away, once again falling into the cracks of Gotham City where Batman could not follow. Part of the blame lies with the Boy — as much as he is a victim of circumstance, he also actively tries to avoid Batman.
However, he is still a child. A child with no resources of his own, no formal training, and no real means of evading the Dark Knight’s gaze. Yet somehow he keeps slipping away from Batman. What’s made even worse is that whenever he does, he is never truly out of reach.
The first instance was an orphanage that Bruce Wayne was a patron of. Despite being attentive to the Boy, he seemingly slipped up when the id was “adopted” by the Penguin and made to work in the Iceberg Lounge. Batman keeps a constant watch on the Penguin and it’s been shown that he has extensive files not just on his villains, but their henchmen as well. If the Boy was in Penguin’s employ, then Batman should have known about it.
This wasn’t even the worst of his lack of oversight. The Boy was later relocated to Arkham Asylum for an unknown amount of time, a place that Batman visits frequently and has largely the run of the place. Yet in all that time he never once picked up that the Boy was there until after he escaped.
With all his skills and resources, this one child eluded him for years, reappearing and disappearing just as quickly. Batman has solved mysteries going back to the dawn of time and unearthed some of the greatest conspiracies in the world, but this was apparently beyond his considerable skills and resources.
There could be a number of explanations. Batman has a number of cases active at any given time, if he didn’t there wouldn’t be half as many comics about him. Those cases most likely took precedence over a mistake that he made years ago. It’s also conceivable that given the amount of time that passed and since nothing came up, Batman might have assumed the Boy was dead. Still, these feel like flimsy excuses for the World’s Greatest Detective. What is certain is that Batman has always been one step behind when it comes to this boy and that will come back to haunt him one day.
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