Behind the masks

''Who is this guy?" someone always yells as the scalloped cape flutters away in every Batman movie.

It's a decent question.

Beneath his Spider-Man costume, Peter Parker remains the shy scholar bitten by the irradiated arachnid. When he's not zooming through the sky as Superman, Clark Kent has stayed the mild-mannered journalist who just happens to have alien powers. But Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, from his 1939 introduction in Detective Comics to Joel Schumacher's blockbusters and busts, are a bit harder to pin down.

The problem, or maybe the plus, is that Batman has incorporated nuances from each and every telling of his tale, and along the way the character's mood and battles have reflected the times. The character -- one of the most popular in the comics universe -- has also changed from generation to generation, trend to trend, director to director, and actor to actor.

There was the stoic weirdness of Michael Keaton, the psychedelic camp of Adam West, and the woodenness of Val Kilmer. Even Batman's first film appearance, a pulpy 15-chapter movie serial made four years after the character's comic-book debut, played Batman as more detective than superhero.

But throughout it all, Batman's true persona -- dark, lonely, and half a neuron away from maniacal vengeful violence -- has remained hidden.

Fans like Bill Ramey noticed. Ramey, 39, a Texas high school football coach and self-avowed Batman fan, is the creator and maintainer of batman-on-film.com. Ramey created the website to help put quiet pressure on Warner Bros., the owner of the movie franchise, to give Batman's true story its due.

''The character has never been done justice," Ramey said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles hotel last week while waiting to attend the end result of his quest, director Christopher Nolan's dark and beguiling ''Batman Begins," which opens Wednesday.

Nolan's film wipes the slate clean and retells the hero's journey, this time concentrating on the character's motivation, morals, and fears. As before, a young Wayne sees his philanthropist parents brutally killed, but rather than immediately donning the batsuit and perching atop gargoyles, Nolan's Batman -- played handsomely by Christian Bale (''Velvet Goldmine," ''American Psycho") -- retreats, ashamed at being unable to avenge his parents' deaths.

Imprisoned and eventually freed by the mysterious Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), Wayne is sent on a quest to conquer his fears and fight evil. One thing leads to another, and he returns to Gotham to don mask and cape. And as usual, but for the lack of a billion dollars and a powerful mix of revenge and altruism, he could be you or me -- the one superhero with no super powers.

Nolan was wise to go back to the character's roots, because the final two films, 1995's ''Batman Forever" and 1997's laughable ''Batman & Robin," were about as far from creator Bob Kane's original vision as one could get. Both were directed by Schumacher, who put Batman -- played first by Kilmer and then George Clooney -- in a truly fetishistic body suit and played up the homoerotic subtext in his life with Robin. After the last film flopped, Clooney was quoted as saying, ''I think we might have killed the franchise."

David Sterritt wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that the film ''invested so much capital in razzle-dazzle special effects that it hardly matters whose head is under the pointy-eared helmet."

For most characters, such travails would have drained his or her lifeblood. But to Dan DiDio, vice president and executive editor of DC Comics, that's not the case with Batman.

''I believe this character is a diamond," said DiDio. ''It would take more than one movie and one bad comic to destroy such a recognizable figure."

A darker hero
Batman's origins as a comic-book hero were more dark than light. Kane said he drew on ''The Mark of Zorro," the radio show ''The Shadow," and a 1930s movie called ''The Bat Whispers," which centered on a killer with a cape who displays a bat insignia before pouncing.

As Paul Levitz, publisher of DC Comics, wrote in Kane's 1998 obituary in The New York Times, while ''Superman is an optimist's myth," Batman is for those who think ''the world is a tough place."

Ian Coleman, 40, a buyer at Harvard Square's Million Year Picnic, one of the country's premier comics shops, said Batman's changing personalities are reflections of our darker moods and our strong need to make right from wrong.

''Batman at his best has been a reflection of the fantasy vigilante that a lot of us have in us," said Coleman. ''It's that feeling you get after you see something horrific. And just for a second, you say to yourself, 'Man, if I found this guy, I'd beat the [expletive] out of him.' "

Batman's changing personality is also a reflection of our changing times, according to Greg Garrett, author of the recently published ''Holy Superheroes: Exploring Faith and Spirituality in Comic Books."

''Since Batman deals with so many of our core values and issues, whenever there's a paradigm shift in the culture, works of popular culture like Batman are always going to reflect those shifts," he said by telephone from his home in Austin, Texas.

In 1939, Batman was a G-man, fighting crime at home. Once America got involved in World War II, he quickly turned into patriotic propaganda machine, battling Dr. Daka, his evil Japanese nemesis, in the 1943 movie serials. By the 1950s the space race was heating up, and Batman's enemies became robots and space aliens.

In the 1960s, the ABC television network brought the comic-book Batman to America's living rooms but played up the camp aspects with skewed camera angles and goofy graphics. The show was viewed largely by the same sort of kids who read Mad Magazine, which thrived on parody.

''What that show was saying is, 'We don't take this superhero stuff seriously anymore, so let's have a laugh about it,' " Garrett said.

With the show airing twice a week, the comic fell to record-low readership. But along came writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams, who created some of the most influential Batman comics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using a realism unseen in the story before, and being read by teens coping with Vietnam, drug use, and Watergate, the pair brought Batman back with truly human characteristics and story lines that explored his earthbound, angst-ridden roots.

Then in 1986 came the seismic shift: an angry and ultraviolent Batman was introduced in Frank Miller's ''The Dark Knight Returns," a now-legendary series of graphic novels.

''We don't go a week without selling at least one copy of that book," said Coleman. '' 'Dark Knight Returns' was really twisted. [Batman] has retired for years and years and comes back. He still has the intention of wiping out evil, but this time he really doesn't pull his punches. Being a nice guy and leaving these people alive didn't really work the last time, and he's not going to make that mistake again."

''There is no 'BIFF!' and 'POW!' with that Batman," said Garrett, adding that the Dark Knight comics heavily influenced the work of Nolan and Tim Burton, who directed ''Batman" and ''Batman Returns." ''You wouldn't want to see the word balloons for the sounds they are making in these fights."

Today's 'Batman'
While ''Batman Begins" intentionally strips the story of Batman down to its essence, like its predecessors it reflects the times in which it was created -- in this case, our own. It features the use of weaponized psychotropics (dirty bombs) and corruption run amok (Tyco/Enron). More than ever, it seems, we need Batman to help us see the world in which we live.

In an interview by phone from Los Angeles, director Nolan said that he looked at the entire history of the character while making the movie. He found that Batman has always been ''a bit of a conduit for the audience's own aspirations and fears."

''We've tried not to be conscious of reflecting today's world, but I think it's only natural we would wind up reflecting people's anxieties today."

One example, Nolan said, is the extremism of one particular enemy in the film. ''Everything he says is logical from his perspective, but the ends to achieve those means are terrifying." As for Batman himself, Nolan admits that in the end ''there has to be a certain elusiveness to the character."

For Mark S. Reinhart, 40, author of ''The Batman Filmography," there is only one Batman -- the one in our heads.

''Because Batman is a fictional character, all of us have our perceptions of how he should be," he said, ''and none of us is more right than anyone else. There are a million different Batmans, and there is no right or wrong in terms of how you look at the character."

Bale's Caped Crusader may have summed it up best in the cataclysmic finale of ''Batman Begins," when he is asked -- once again -- who he is behind that mask.

''It's not who I am underneath," he says before slipping away, ''but what I do that defines me."

Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com.