A duck?
That's what Joker asks, when Batman waits on a blackened night for a police van to pick up Joker.
Most of my stories are about people who have some childhood incident that causes them to be somewhat developmentally stunted.
I was going to hand-paint some panels of the series, so here's a color image of grass - a panel which i never used in the story.
Here's that:
In Batman Secrets, i tried to talk about the after effects of grief, without dwelling on Batman's parents being killed, which other writers had already handled much better than me.
My editor said you can't have Batman reveal his origin to the Joker. True. So what i tried to explore, was another simpler trauma that happened a few months after the murder, young Bruce was involved in a friend's accidental shooting of a duck. Since Bruce couldn't even begin to deal with such a profound loss, this duck accident amplified an otherwise ordinary incident, thus Batman sublimated his previous grief into a more acceptable form.
Batman does tells Joker a deeper, more personal truth than the details of his parents’ murder.
Batman just left out *who* the duck, reminded him of.
Thus batman had revealed his secret, he just left out the worst memories: the robber's gun, his mother, the pearls, streetlight, blood, etc.
