Father of the Dark Knight

A lot of people who follow comic books suggest that Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was instrumental in bringing some depth, grit and menace to one of the most driven costumed vigilantes of them all, the Batman. There's some truth to that, but in reality Miller shaped his version of the Caped Crusader from the clay Denny O'Neill gave him.

The televised Batman show with Adam West was pure camp and is one of the images of the hero that sticks in the popular mind, but that vision simply exaggerated a lot of the portrayal of the character through much of the 1960s. When O'Neill began writing the Batman titles in 1970 he stripped away some of the more ludicrous trappings of the Silver Age and brought attention to the way Bruce Wayne was driven to his vigilantism by the murder of his parents.

He also reemphasized the detective aspect of Batman's work. Combined with the detailed expressiveness of Neal Adams' art, O'Neill's Batman formed an early bridge between comic book silliness and more realistic visions of the longjohn law enforcement brigade that have dominated the past decades. Yes, there's no escaping the reality that a man dressing as a bat to fight crime is silly, but O'Neill created stories where, assuming that silliness as real, the rest of the world looked more than a little like our own.

He would take that further when writing Green Lantern and Green Arrow as the "Hard-Traveling Heroes." Again working with Adams, O'Neill dug deeper into the real world through the costumed crimefighter set, even making Arrow's sidekick Speedy a heroin addict.

Not all of the long-term impacts of O'Neill's changes have been positive. He began the transformation of the Joker from a crook with a deadly clown fetish to a lunatic obsessed with Batman and paved the way for later writers to create the narrative dead end that makes a lot of modern Batman-Joker stories gruesome brutality on endless repeat. He created the character Azrael, who would be the replacement Batman during the overlong "Knightfall" saga and way too much a creature of the "grim 'n' gritty" era of the 1990s. But the overall impact of O'Neill as a writer and later editor for DC Comics played a huge role in bringing the real-world sensibilities to them that had enabled rival Marvel Comics to make so much great material and moved its narrative sensibilities into the modern era as well.

O'Neill passed away Thursday at the age of 81.