Superheroes, as our dream selves, would naturally also occupy dream homes.
So Wonder Woman grew up on an island paradise, engaged in happy athletic competition and research with her Amazon sisters, free from the predatory, warlike intrusions of men. And so the Black Panther is king of a hidden super-technological African society, free from the predatory, warlike intrusions of outside nations.
Tarzan inhabits a different kind of fantasy Africa, a primeval jungle where animals communicate in language and a man can swing through the trees as if flying, free of all responsibility to anyone but himself.
In the 1940s, Captain America even inhabited a dream nation, a perfect democratic republic that guaranteed liberty and justice for every one of its citizens, regardless of their race or sex.
And Batman, of course, lives in a luxurious mansion above a vast, secret, crepuscular cave full of splendid things — super vehicles, advanced laboratory equipment, and fantastic trophies that include a giant penny and an animatronic dinosaur.
“In the beginning, there was no need to fill in the legend, because there was no reason to suppose that Batman would become an enduring part of the landscape,” noted comics historian Pat Curley. “Comic heroes came and went. Captain America, the Human Torch, the (Alan Scott) Green Lantern, the (Jay Garrick) Flash, the Black Terror… all those characters were gone from the scene after about 1949. But when Batman did not join them in limbo, the writers and editors began filling in the legend for us.”
“In Detective Comics 205, Robin asks Batman about how he initially found the Bat-Cave … (A)lthough elements of the story have changed significantly (for example, Bruce did not buy Wayne Manor, but grew up in it), the idea that he discovered the Bat-Cave by falling into it has endured, being depicted in Dark Knight Returns and the Batman Begins movie.”
In addition to features starring Captain Compass, Mysto the crime-fighting stage magician, and the new “TV detective” Roy Raymond, Detective Comics 205 (March 1954) supplied readers with the origin of the Bat-Cave, as conceived by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff.
When a centuries-old piece of pottery reveals that the Bat-Cave was once the home of a “man with two identities,” Batman and Robin have Prof. Carter Nichols send them back in time to discover what’s behind this puzzle of historical parallelism. What they learn is that pioneer woodsman Jeremy Coe used the cave as a base to disguise himself as an Indian to spy on tribes who were attacking colonists.
The actual origin of the Bat-Cave wasn’t even in the comic books, as you may know, but in the 1943 Columbia movie serial about Batman.
Children were, of course, originally the primary audience for superhero comics, and one of the problems with being a child, from the child’s point of view, is that you must necessarily live in someone else’s home. So, escaping to a secret pied-à-terre has always been a compelling fantasy for young people.
Umberto Eco observed that Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and Batman’s Bat-Cave were essentially children’s hideouts writ large. These secret clubhouses include collections of interesting stuff (for relaxation, Superman builds robots and creates life-size models of his friends) and even the science fictional equivalent of an aquarium or ant farm (the bottled city of Kandor).
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