Fanfic / Batman 1939

December, 1940

December, 1940. Bodies are disappearing from morgues. A couple lies murdered in the street. To solve the mystery, Batman must seek the help of the most frustrating thief he's ever crossed. But the conspiracy behind it may still be too powerful. Chased on the coldest night of the year, has the Dark Knight found a foe so above the law even he cannot deliver the offender to justice?

Batman 1939 is a series of Batman fanfiction stories written by Stewart M, set in the early 1940s. Against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Dark Knight works at home in Gotham to clean up his city. In doing so, he finds himself pitted against foes more powerful and influential than any he's ever faced before.

The name of the series comes from the year that Batman was originally released, which in this continuity constitutes the year of his debut fighting crime. Having only been in the game for roughly a year or so, the series focuses on the relatively early days of Batman's career, and his conflicts with more threatening enemies than Gotham's typical street-crime fare.

The first story, The Dangers of Being Cold, deals with the mystery summarized above; when a team of corpse thieves suddenly escalate to committing murder, the trail is found to lead back to a military base, and Batman is forced to seek outside help to solve the case.

The sequel, Swimming in the Styx, picks up shortly after the events of the previous adventure and focuses on Batman attempting to dismantle organized crime in Gotham while weathering the interference of the Federal government and Wonder Woman.

A third story, A Very Special Batman Christmas, takes place on Christmas Eve of 1941. It follows Bruce's efforts to stop the mysterious Yuletide Thief and attend a Christmas Eve gathering with Julie Madison.

The fourth and latest story, Three's Company, takes place in 1941 and stars the three characters of Batman, Catwoman and Zatanna.

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This work provides examples of:

• The '40s: Despite its name, Batman 1939 is set in this decade, amidst the world war between the Allied and Axis Powers. The main story of The Dangers of Being Cold has Batman investigate a US Army base while trying to investigate the true culprit(s) behind specific murders.
• Abnormal Ammo: Captain Steven Trevor is supplied by Slade Wilson with a two-shot derringer loaded with tungsten rounds. The implication is that he's to use it on Diana if she ever needs to be killed.
• Absence of Evidence: While investigating the remains of a building that had burned down for signs of arson, Batman is perplexed. He explains to Catwoman that there are none of the telltale signs that would indicate which room the fire originated in; it's as if a strong flame about six feet tall suddenly appeared out of thin air.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Underneath Gotham City is a labyrinth of sewers, passageways, and tunnels. Not even Batman has seen the entirety of it.
• Ace Pilot: Captain Steven Trevor calls himself the best flyboy America has. Der Wehrwulf is unworried by their plane being fired on because she's seen his memories and knows he really is that good.
• Adaptational Wimp: Technically. Even though most of the major characters are extremely competent, they are generally less powerful than their "canon" counterparts.
  • Batman, though still an incredibly skilled detective and combatant, is still in the early years of his crimefighting career. He can take on normal crooks easily, but fights with the likes of Wonder Woman and Slade Wilson end with him having serious injuries. Part of Swimming in the Styx examines Bruce's athletic abilities: although he is still incredibly fit and able, he has not broken any of his personal records in a long time and his body is already in decline.
  • Wonder Woman is an expert hunter and fighter with an array of skills, not to mention her superhuman strength, durability, and stamina; however, she can still be harmed by powerful weaponry (see Abnormal Ammo above).
  • According to the author, Lieutenant Slade Wilson lacks his comicbook counterpart's physical enhancements, which include low-level Super-Strength and Super-Toughness, as well as a low-level Healing Factor.
  • Zatanna Zatara only discovers her magical heritage during the events of Three's Company, so she has none of her spells or mystical abilities.
• Alone-with-Prisoner Ploy: Argentinian military personnel have captured Batman and Diana. The commanding officer tells everyone else to leave him alone with the prisoners. This is because he's actually Der Wehrwulf and wants to take over one of them instead.
• Ancient Tradition: The Brotherhood of the Shield, a group of honest Gotham City cops that has had many incarnations over the years. The current version was started by Sergeant Gordon and Detective Bullock.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The Mage Koschei's hat is able to move on its own.
• Animorphism: Of the Forced Transformation kind. The two magical henchmen are transformed into a snake and a pig, respectively.
• Anomalous Art: Praying mantises emerge from a painting to attack Faust.
• An Arm and a Leg: Faust loses an arm while fighting against the Genius Locus of Shadowcrest.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Barbatos, King of Bats, is a bat larger than an office building. With a Cockney British accent.
• Awful Wedded Life: The Wellingtons, members of the same social circle as Bruce Wayne, re portrayed as constantly bickering with and insulting each other, to the point that even when ostensibly visiting Bruce, they spend all their time sniping at each other.
• Beam-O-War: Faust and Sindella Zatara push respective blasts of lightning against each other during their fight. The midpoint shifts back and forth as they each increase their efforts.
• Black Boss Lady: Amanda Waller, which has to be one of the most astonishing achievements in the series given the fact that this is the early '40s. Multiple characters comment on this. A brief flash of her history in chapter 16 of The Dangers of Being Cold reveals that she was basically awarded a scholarship at the Israel Putnam Military Academy by a senator who was looking to distract the press from rumors that he was involved with bootleggers. Whilst at the academy, it's implied she attracted the attention of a retired brigadier general when she gave him a 13-page essay critiquing the Lanchester Square Law of Force Concentration and then was bold enough to argue her case against it in class, and that gave her the "in" she used to claw her way into her current position.
• Body Snatcher: A German spy has this power and uses it on various characters in Swimming in the Styx.
• Bold Inflation: Occasionally. Unlike the often random manner in which it's used in comic books, it usually (but not always) seems to be used here as a way to indicate emphasis or unusual voice tones.
• Bookcase Passage: A section of wall in Shadowcrest that includes a fireplace can be revolved to access a secret room.
• Brick Joke: Batman expresses passionate disdain for badminton. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of words later, one of Bruce Wayne's socialite acquaintances calls him to invite him over for badminton and mentions her husband just got a new net.
• Can't Live Without You: Faust ties his life to Giovanni's so that killing him will kill Giovanni.
• Celebrity Impersonator: In their first meeting, Amanda Waller suspects Batman to be a variant on this, using the Gotham myth of the Bat Man as cover for a foreign nation-state's espionage operation.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: As in the Lynda Carter TV show, Wonder Woman can outfit herself in her costume in a matter of moments by spinning.
• Chase Scene: In Three's Company Catwoman is chased by security guards.
• The City Narrows: The Narrows, appropriately enough. The entire district is about fifty feet below sea level, due to it being part of a land reclamation project in the Gotham Bay. The entire district is cramped, filthy, mostly lawless, and the creaking of the Gotham Dike (the only thing preventing the residents from a sudden watery death) can always be heard.
• The Confidant:
  • The captain of the merchant ship smuggling Diana out of Argentina lends an ear and advice to Diana, and promises to keep quiet about the superhuman abilities he saw her use. Overlaps with Secret Keeper.
  • Batman lets Zatanna vent her problems to him, offers a bit of advice, and promises not to tell anyone she visited him. Overlaps with Secret Keeper.
• The Corruption: Faust starts corrupting Shadowcrest's magic to gain control of the house.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: A restaurant in Columbia hides a gambling and cockfighting operation run by a don referred to only as Abuela.
• Crazy-Prepared: Bruce has contingency plans for hundreds of scenarios, no matter how unlikely they may be, including someone trying to de-orbit the Moon. He has motor vehicles stashed around Gotham City for emergency use. He has 40 encrypted phrases stored by a double-blind service that can be issued to any of fourteen P.O. boxes, and a key in the Batcave allows Alfred to decode their meanings based on the encrypted message and which P.O. box it went to. A side story depicts his elaborate staging of his takedown of a counterfeiting operation to make him seem superhuman, building up the Batman mythos.
• Crystal Ball: The windows of Shadowcrest's observatory can be used as mystic view-portals to survey the rest of the house or communicate with someone in another realm.
• Culture Clash: Batman and Wonder Woman disagree about the morality of using lethal force.
• David Versus Goliath: Batman and Wonder Woman. Batman is thoroughly outclassed in more ways than one once the two of them enter into combat, and it's only the combination of his mastery of stealth, his range of equipment, and Diana underestimating him that make it a decent fight.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Slade Wilson was a squadmate of Steven Trevor before he died. The man currently using that name took up the dead soldier's identity.
• Debt Detester: Wonder Woman owes Batman reparation for breaking her word to him and is eager to do him some sort of favor to make them even.
• Destination Ruse: Shadowcrest leads the group toward knowledge of a sleep spell to knock Faust unconscious without killing him, but only Catwoman has the acrobatic skill to reach it. Once she's on her own he reveals to her there's no sleep spell: Faust must be killed, he's leading Catwoman to a way to do it, and once there she'll have to kill someone else to make the spell work.
• Destroy the Evidence: Arturo Bertinelli attempts to do this with the evidence of his crimes that Batman presents him with. After waiting for him to exert the effort to do so, Batman informs him that they were copies.
• Determinator: Batman keeps fighting in both stories despite injuries that would incapacitate most human beings.
• Disposable Vagrant: The mindset of the conspirators during The Dangers of Being Cold. Who would ever notice or care if any such people went missing?
• Dramatic Irony: When Batman says he only knew Zatanna for a season, Catwoman tells him, "This may surprise you, but sometimes a few moments from your childhood can shape the rest of your life." Unknown to Catwoman but known to Batman and the audience, this idea applies poignantly to Batman.
• Entendre Failure: While trapped in a handstand, Catwoman evades a searchlight by doing a split to hide her legs behind a barrier. Once she's safe Batman praises her acrobatics. She sensuously tells him she's very flexible. He agrees and calls her maneuver very innovative.
• Everything Talks: The Mage Koschei's hat is able to talk.
• Evil Weapon: Implied. Shadowcrest's armory includes a scythe that whispers promises to the holder and makes them want to use it.
• Exact Words: Shadowcrest agrees not to obstruct Faust or his lackeys with any force under its control, knowing Batman and Catwoman are coming in and are not under its control.
• Facial Dialogue: Batman and Catwoman hold entire (implausibly detailed) conversations using their facial expressions and body language in several instances when they need or want to stay quiet. Lampshaded by Shadowcrest multiple times when it gets impatient with their "twitching at each other."
• Fake Static: Batman pulls this over a radio transmission during The Dangers of Being Cold to try and get information from another unit.
• Fantastic Flora: A magical plant serves as a life support apparatus.
• Flashback:
  • A few scenes in Three's Company are flashbacks to Bruce's time as a student of Giovanni Zatara.
  • Batman flashes back to a moment in his globe-hopping martial arts training during a fight.
• Flashback Cut: The story briefly flashes back to a time when Marco Bertinelli and Harvey Bullock worked together, highlighting the difference to the present where they're opposed.
• Flashback Nightmare: Bruce has them so frequently that he dreads going to sleep, and has only a handful of methods by which he can avoid them.
• Flight: Lord Faust can fly using magic.
• Forced Transformation: Faust transforms Batman into a tree. Sindella transforms the magical henchmen into animals.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Most noticeably in Batman's second fight with Lt. Wilson, where the former's right hand has multiple fractures and a sprained wrist.
• Geas: Invoked by Batman. He tricks one of the henchmen opposing them into hitting Zatanna, breaking the agreement between Faust and Shadowcrest and allowing the latter to remove the henchman.
• Genius Loci: The Shadowcrest estate has a spiritual Steward that Giovanni Zatara created in his image. It tells the heroes to call it Shadowcrest because it is as one with the house. It can manipulate the space and objects within the house, and can sense it's control being usurped.
• Guile Hero: Batman sometimes uses his wits to outsmart or manipulate his opponents rather than rely on violence alone. A side story follows him putting together an elaborate show to make a team of counterfeiters think he's invincible, to grow the Batman mythos so it will strike fear in the hearts of criminals. In Swimming in the Styx he manipulates a body-snatching villain into cooperating with the heroes by tricking her into thinking that he's poisoned her real body and is holding back the antidote.
• Hall of Mirrors: Faust chases Zatanna through a maze of mirrors and is confounded by them until he resorts to blasting them all.
• Heal It With Fire: Batman cauterizes his wound to stop the bleeding.
• Healing Factor: Faust slowly regenerates his arm after losing it.
• Heroic Willpower: Batman forces a Body Snatcher to give up on taking over him through a combination of this and sheer mental trauma.
• Identification by Dental Records: Subverted. Given the date of the setting, even a US Government federal task force are unable to get anything from a couple of fake teeth.

• Impersonating an Officer: Two villains disguise their clothes and car as police uniforms and a police car to trick Zatanna into helping them.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • In the opening scene a disguised Batman throws a wadded up paper backward over his shoulder and perfectly lands it in Selina's drink.
  • Deadshot was recruited by Amanda Waller for his incredible marksmanship. He repeatedly hits extremely precise targets on his opponents from hundreds to over 1000 yards away.
• Improvised Armour: During the second encounter between Batman and Lieutenant Wilson, Batman holds up sheet metal in order to close distance and disarm the latter of his firearm.
• Informed Self-Diagnosis: Part of Batman's post-operation routine whenever he returns to the Batcave is to perform a verbal breakdown of whatever injuries he sustained to Alfred, using the considerable amount of medical knowlege he studied as part of his preparations to become a vigilante to diagnose what might be wrong with him and how he may need treatment. The one after the Fort Morrison affair is particularly long.
• Ironic Echo Cut:
  • Maven Lewis tells Selina Kyle they've learned that when Batman needs help, Selina is the first one on his list. Then the story cuts to Alfred asking Bruce why he chose the ninth person on his list. A scene later Maven rhetorically asks if Selina thinks he's a millionaire, then the story cuts to Bruce asking Alfred, "So you're worried she thinks I'm a millionaire?"
  • When debating about the intruders, Amanda Waller says that regardless of how smart or crazy he really is, Batman at least thinks he knows what he's doing. The story cuts to Batman musing that he has no idea what he's doing.
• Kill on Sight: An open bounty is put out on James Gordon.
• Leonine Contract: The spirit of Shadowcrest agrees not to obstruct Faust's efforts to destroy the property in exchange for Faust's promise to undo his bond to Giovanni and to let Giovanni and Zatanna leave unharmed.
• Lineage Comes from the Father: Subverted. Zatanna's dad was a regular human. Zatanna's status as a Homo Magi, which grants her inherent powers, and the extradimensional sanctum of Shadowcrest with its massive treasury of arcane grimoires and artifacts, both come from her mother.
• Literal Split Personality: Zatanna's mother underwent a ritual to separate herself into a person with all her goodness and a person with all her evil. Only the evil one survived.
• Limb-Sensation Fascination: Downplayed. Batman is captivated by his new skin's sensitivity and his consequent ability to feel Catwoman's hand on his.
• Locked in a Freezer: Batman and Catwoman find themselves locked in the Hazard Containment vault. Batman finally forces the door open by weakening it with acid and then punching through the steel.
• The Mafia: The Four Families of Gotham - the Falcones, the Maronis, the Nobilios, and the Bertinellis.
• Mage Species: Homo Magi are a Human Subspecies who have the ability to create magic. Not work magic, which anybody can do if they can find a source of magical information/power and figure out how to use it without killing themselves horribly, but create magic.
• Magical Library: The library at Shadowcrest is a huge repository of mystical knowledge. Untamed areas are liable to aggress on intruders despite the house spirit's interference.
• Magically-Binding Contract: Spells in this setting purportedly all come from contracting with supernatural beings.
• Magicians Are Wizards: Zigzagged. Not all mages are magicians, or viceversa, but Giovana Zatara was a stage magician who learned real magic from his Homo Magi wife, and his daughter Zatanna Zatara is a Homo Magi who has trained to be a magician all her life.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: A Body Snatcher drinks enough wine to incapacitate the host body so the owner can't escape and to make the woman's death look like an accident, then starts a fire in the next room to kill her.
• Master of Disguise: Bruce, being able to disguise himself as an elderly Italian mobster to get information from Arturo's wife.
• Master of Unlocking: In Dangers of Being Cold Catwoman is sought out and hired for her expert lock-picking skill. In Three's Company both she and Zatanna are shown as highly skilled with lockpicks. Zatanna sometimes suspects she's the best in the country. Catwoman considers herself the best in the hemisphere.
• Merry Christmasin Gotham: A Very Special Batman Christmas is Lighter and Softer than the rest of the main series. Whereas the others are full of murder, espionage, and government conspiracies, this one follows Batman investigating an annual spree of retail theft. Some passages are written in the cadence of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
• Mistaken for Spies: Batman and Catwoman, by Amanda Waller and her men. In the latter's defence, it was a very reasonable guess.
• Money, Dear Boy: Zatanna doesn't like to do the Ethnic Magician routine, and is privately upset when she sees people who really are of that ethnicity leave her shows in disgust, but sometimes forced to do so by the people who book her act because it is more profitable to give her that "exotic edge", and she isn't famous or wealthy enough that she can turn down work just because she dislikes te routine. She does note that an Old Shame of hers was the time she played a Jewish mystic named Esther, and ended up being asked to dinner by a group of real Orthodox Jews who were fooled by the act.
• Multilayer Façade: Batman wears another cowl glued to his scalp under his regular cowl.
• Mythology Gag:
  • After Catwoman sees Batman's beige Ford hardtop in The Dangers of Being Cold, they have this exchange:
    Catwoman: I thought you'd at least drive something a little, I don't know...
    Batman: What?
    Catwoman: Fierce. Iconic.
  • Shortly after, Catwoman finds some of Batman's contingency plans hidden within the car. One of them is titled "Mind-controlled Flightless Birds Fire Rockets at Major Civic Buildings".
  • Selina Kyle and her friend live in the Newmar-Harlow Building, which was built by a man named Benedict Kitt. The building is within jogging distance of Pfeiffer's Wharf.
  • Fort Morrison.
  • One of the files that Batman and Catwoman look through in Fort Morrison mentions Peña Dura. Some giant German soldiers seen later on are confirmed subjects of the program.
• Naïve Newcomer: Although Diana has spent a little time in Man's World at the time of Swimming in the Styx and is familiar with Washington, D.C. and some bits of American culture thanks to Captain Steve Trevor, many things still surprise her. Dishonesty and politics are strange to her. She routinely misses subtext and takes figures of speech literally, to mild comedic effect. She initially assumes that any woman who has risen to a position of high authority in Man's World—e.g., Amanda Waller—must be so incredibly virtuous that her superiority as a woman could not be denied.
• Necessarily Evil: Amanda Waller claims her actions are this, on account of the threat posed by the Axis Powers and socialism.
• Nightmare Sequence: After her fight with Batman in Swimming in the Styx, Diana dreams about hunting game in a forest, only for it to morph into a nightmare wherein she's being attacked by a giant bat.
• Noodle Incident: Selina's friend Maven insists that Ottowa never happened.
• Not Quite Flight: A pair of magic sunglasses cause the wearer to fall in the direction they're looking. Batman improvises flight by wearing these and adjusting where he looks.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Wonder Woman casually picks up and tests out a Zweihander with a single-handed grip at an antiques store. The shopkeeper is a little unnerved.
• Portal Door: A door hidden in a closet in Giovanni Zatara's apartment is a portal to Shadowcrest.
• Properly Paranoid: Amanda Waller, in her investigative review to her superiors, notes that the Bat Man's hair is probably black based on the small amount of stubble she was able to see, but that she wouldn't put it past him to dye it as a precaution.
• The Quiet One: Don Nobilo rarely speaks, and only once do we see him say more than two words at a time.
• Ransacked Room: The subtle variant. Diana and Steve Trevor's rooms are searched by Waller's agents while in a meeting with a politician and Amanda herself. They find Diana's weapons and her trophies from her fight with Batman, helping them to try to track down Gotham's vigilante.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Magic, and in particular the Emergent Sea, doesn't always follow the laws of physics. The Emergent Sea is a space that wraps around on itself so that crossing the "boundary" puts a body at the opposite end. Its water doesn't have the surface tension that would make a high-speed impact fatal. A pair of prank glasses are known to make someone fall in the direction they're looking when they put on the glasses, even if that direction is "up," which has allegedly led to some mage children's deaths.
• Recruiting the Criminal: Batman is reluctantly forced to hire Catwoman to help him infiltrate the Fort Morrison military base.
• Roadside Surgery: Batman requisitions chemistry materials and reagents and surgical instruments from Shadowcrest to home-brew Ringer's solution for a blood donor and perform abdominal surgery.
• Running Gag:
  • In Three's Company women in different scenes are each reading a paperback book with a brawny cowboy on the cover, and the same book appears in a secret vault of books.
  • Multiple people use a telepathic radio as a Lie Detector; the radio starts on a long-winded, alliterative rant synopsizing the situation until a character either aggressively or politely makes it get to the point of giving the desired information.
• Secret-Keeper: Giovanni Zatara hints discreetly to Batman that he knows his identity and will keep it secret.
• Self-Destructing Security: The hidden compartment within the glove compartment of Bruce's Ford coupe is booby-trapped to incinerate the contents if a button isn't pressed within a certain amount of time after opening it.
• Shout-Out: Many throughout the series.
  • One of Gotham's districts is the Innsmouth Commercial District and the Army has a file detailing strange events taking place at what might be the same location.
  • There is another Army file, which mentions "The storage of antiquities from the excavations of Dr. H.W. Jones, Jr."
  • Another file is titled "The Alien".
    Catwoman: Maybe it's a bird.
    Batman: Or a plane.
  • The description of the outside/front yard of the Shadowcrest estate is a reference to Darkest Dungeon.
• Stern Teacher: Batman confronts a boys' gang who go too far picking fights with other gangs and concludes they just truly love fighting. Wanting them to do well in life, he agrees to teach them boxing in exchange for them staying on the straight-and-narrow. His demeanor while teaching them is stern-but-fair.
• Stumbling in the New Form: Batman has to relearn his motor control after his injuries new and old are undone by "resetting" his body, replacing it with a new, unharmed version.
• Summoning Ritual: Faust performs a ritual to summon Barbatos, King of Bats.
• Surveillance as the Plot Demands: From the observatory Faust can scry almost every other room in the house.
• Telepathy: A mystical radio can tune in to a station that reads the minds of its listeners.

• Transflormation: Batman is transformed into a tree temporarily by Faust.
• The Trees Have Faces: Batman still has a face on his trunk while he's transformed into a tree.
• Tricked to Death: A police officer sends Arturo Bertinelli a shiv and a note telling him friends will help him escape at a stop in his prison transfer. At the stop he stabs his guard to death and is immediately thereafter killed by a squad of retaliating police.
• Trojan Prisoner: In order to escape from an Argentinian military base, a character posing as an officer has the heroes tie themselves up and claims they are her captives.
• Truth in Television: Operation Underworld was a real thing and the American government really did collaborate with organized crime during World War II.
• Try and Follow: Batman escapes Diana's pursuit by taking an escape route at the bottom of a pool of rotting offal and other discarded animal parts.
• Underside Ride:
  • Batman sometimes rides the undersides of train cars to get around. He even has hammocks installed under a few.
  • Diana hangs on to the landing gears of several planes in succession in order to get back to the U.S. from South America.
• Weapon Specialization: As an Amazon, Diana's usual armaments are swords, spears and (especially) bows. Though she's still incredibly skilled and a supernatural physical powerhouse, her knowledge of unarmed martial arts is much less comprehensive.
• Worthy Opponent: Lt. Slade Wilson comes away from his fights with Batman very impressed with Batman's skills, noting that it's been quite some time since anyone gave him such a challenge. Batman returns the sentiment. Wonder Woman comes to view Batman in the same light — and even to be somewhat scared of him — as the single most formidable human she's encountered since leaving Themyscira.