Losing Batman
Kevin Conroy died in New York City on November 10th, 2022. He was 66 years old.
A prolific actor, he is most famous for being the definitive voice of Batman for nearly three decades, beginning in 1992 with BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. Like many people, this is the part of his body of work that I am most familiar with.
When I was watching those cartoons, I was still at that young age where you don’t distinguish between the actor and the character. When I saw episodes of Seinfeld on the TV over my parents’ shoulders, I would ask them “What’s Dennis Nedry doing here?”
Wayne Knight (left) as Newman in SEINFELD
Wayne Knight as Dennis Nedry in JURASSIC PARK
Similarly, it didn’t even occur to me that the voice coming from the TV screen was an actor’s - that simply was Batman. I didn’t see a series of creative choices and professional artistic experience; I just saw the character.
Batman as Batman, in…something Batman-related
I didn’t even learn Kevin Conroy’s name until a more literate friend, one who kept up with the comics and knew more about Batman than I ever will, shared it with me in college - almost like a piece of trivia. I had been loving Conroy’s performance, his artistry, for at least a decade before I could even conceive that he existed behind that mask and cape.
Kevin Conroy as Batman, in the recording booth working on 2017’s BATMAN AND HARLEY QUINN
In an obituary written for NPR, podcaster and critic Glen Weldon begins by praising Kevin Conroy’s approach to Batman, explaining it like this:
“Conroy understood something very fundamental about the character that no other actor to play Batman ever has: Batman isn’t a disguise. Batman is the real guy. It’s Bruce Wayne that’s the put-on — the pose, the performance, the face he shows to the world.”
This is something Conroy himself has said in interviews before - that the “Batman voice” is the character’s “comfortable voice, where he goes to live his life.”
Rather than straining to come up with an inhumanly terrifying voice for the mythological Batman, Conroy rendered him with something much closer to his own speaking voice, and instead made his normal register lighter and looser to add the notes of comfort and privilege that create Bruce Wayne’s voice.
This understanding of the character is reinforced by the way THE ANIMATED SERIES and its successors were written. In particular, I’m reminded of “Shriek”, an early episode of BATMAN BEYOND - a sequel series in which an elderly Bruce Wayne becomes the mentor for Terry McGinnis, the new Batman.
During the episode, Bruce begins hearing voices in his hospital room. “Bruce,” they whisper, “there’s something you must do.” They lead him to the window, goad him to open it, and tell him to jump. “Who are you?”, Bruce growls at the empty room around him. “I’m you,” the voice replies, “Who else could I be?” Bruce swings his arm at his unseen opponent. “You can’t be me!”
By the end of the episode, it’s revealed that the voices were coming from a tiny radio hidden on Bruce’s head by the episode’s villain. After Terry stops the villain, he asks the retired billionaire and ex-Caped-Crusader how he was so confident that the voices weren’t actually coming from inside his own mind.
“The voices kept calling me ‘Bruce’. In my mind, that’s not what I call myself.”
“What do you call yourself?”
“Oh yeah. I suppose you would.”
It’s a moment that’s the right level of badass for a cartoon superhero while still rooted in strong characterization, coming not just from the writing but from the performance.
Conroy’s most famous line during his generation-defining performance is indisputable - it’s also the most famous line in all Batman media:
“I am vengeance! I am the night! I am Batman!”
In a vacuum, the line conjures up the self-parodic image of the gritty, hyper-righteous, hyper-masculine voice of violence we often associate with the character these days. It seems to fit there right up alongside Christian Bale’s instantly-memorable roar of “Swear to me!” from his performance of the character in BATMAN BEGINS and all the indulgent ultraviolence of Frank Miller’s stint writing Batman comics like BATMAN: YEAR ONE and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.
Panels from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, written and penciled by Frank Miller
And yeah, there’s something compelling about that version of Batman. I certainly won’t pretend my tastes were much more sophisticated when I was 11 and watching Batman threaten goons in THE ANIMATED SERIES. Or, hell, even a decade after that - when I was playing BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM, listening to scared nameless thugs try feebly to project confidence as they waited for me to spring out from a vent to punt their skulls into a solid brick wall and pretend that isn’t lethal.
The idea of a boogeyman that specifically goes after boogeymen - of a guy who, on our behalf, terrifies the people that terrify us - is fun.
But that’s not the main thing that makes Conroy’s Batman great. It’s not his righteous anger.
It’s his anguish.
When Kevin Conroy’s Batman first says those iconic lines - “I am vengeance! I am the night!” - it isn’t to some anonymous lowlife he’s trying to intimidate. In the scene that those lines are from, during the 10th episode of the first season of THE ANIMATED SERIES (“Nothing to Fear”), he’s talking to a hallucination of his dead father. The lines immediately before “I am vengeance!” were “You’re not my father! I’m not a disgrace!”
The most Batmany thing that Batman ever said wasn’t trying to scare someone else, but to stand up to his own fears.
As much as his cleverness and grittiness, I think the defining feature of Conroy’s Batman is his hurt. Batman is a product of his trauma, in more than a just backstory sense. He is constantly carrying the worst day of his life around with him. And that’s the real tragedy behind the character - not that he lost his parents, but what the years and years of living isolated in that grief have done to him.
For my money, the most heartbreaking scene with Batman at his parents’ grave isn’t any of the countless times we’ve seen him solemnly leave flowers or grimly vow to avenge them - it’s the time he was doubled-over in the rain, pleading for the permission to be happy.
The scene comes from the 1993 film BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM, which is part of the same continuity as THE ANIMATED SERIES. In it, a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne is preparing to launch his one-man “war on crime” in keeping with the promise he made at his parents’ grave…when he falls in love.
Through this relationship, he gets an opportunity to live a different life, a warmer and healthier one. But he’s defined himself by his hurt for so long that he can’t bring himself to abandon it; it’s too big a part of him. The prospect of a better life is terrifying and disorienting. In the face of this identity crisis, he can’t even bring himself to return the calls of the woman he loves.
And so he visits his parents’ grave, uncertain and confused.
He is scared that finding a way through his grief means turning his back on his memory of his parents. He wants to uphold his promise (to their corpses), but he can’t deny how badly he’s realized that he wants something different than to dedicate his life to that promise.
”I know I made a promise, but I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t count on being happy.”
In this story, Bruce Wayne does choose happiness - but it is taken from him anyway. Without the woman he was going to build a new life with, he is left only with his pain and anger. He puts on the mask, and the very first person to be frightened by his new visage isn’t some deserving mobster - it’s Alfred, the only family Bruce has left, who stumbles backward muttering “My God” as he sees Bruce Wayne become Batman.
BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM (1993)
It’s a very different version of the moment then we saw in BATMAN: YEAR ONE, where Frank Miller had a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne get into a fight with some prostitutes and cops, crawl back to his manor wondering only how he can be better at righteous violence - and is answered by a bat crashing through a window and landing on a bust of his dead father. At this sight, Bruce is relieved. “Yes, father,” he smiles, swelling with inspiration, “I shall become a bat.”
BATMAN: YEAR ONE (1987)
Unlike in Miller’s vision, THE ANIMATED SERIES tells us that it is tragic that Bruce Wayne became Batman. It tells us that to become Batman, you don’t just have to suffer one bad day - you have to carry your hurt and pain with you, alone, for a lifetime.
And this is why Kevin Conroy has played him so well, although frustratingly few outlets discussing his death really dig into this fact.
See, that’s what bothers me about Glen Weldon’s obituary.
It isn’t that Weldon decided that an obituary for Kevin Conroy was the appropriate place to try some budget-comedy-club-level potshots at other actors’ performances of Batman, though that certainly didn’t help (“A bullfrog with laryngitis, over here” - really, man? Is this the place for your lukewarm “Christian Bale’s Batman voice sounds silly” routine?).
It’s this paragraph, near the end of the obituary, buried between parentheses - an aside, or something Weldon wasn’t confident enough to outright assert, or both -
“Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if maybe Conroy was so good at it because he was gay, and perhaps knew a little bit more about code-switching, was more practiced at it, than other actors to play Batman? Okay, it’s a stretch. But I’m just saying: It factors, maybe.”
This paragraph gets to me for one simple reason:
It’s not a stretch.
Not at all.
Kevin Conroy’s Batman is who he is, because Kevin Conroy is a gay man - one who suffered immense personal hardship, much of which was for being gay.
And we know this because Conroy himself shared it with us, just months before he died.
In DC Comics’ second annual “Pride Issue” collecting stories about queer characters and experiences, Kevin Conroy wrote a short autobiographical piece about his life leading up to his casting as Batman in THE ANIMATED SERIES.
In “Finding Batman”, Conroy chronicles a lifetime of struggle and search for identity and for stability.
When his parents were still around, he fought to hide his sexual orientation from his family. His mother then left Conroy and his brother to escape their alcoholic father, who died when Conroy was 15 - leaving little family to keep those secrets from.
Much of Conroy’s life is a story of being yanked back and forth between multiple different worlds, not really being allowed to call any of them home. As a struggling young actor in NYC, he took whatever survival jobs he could, and when theater jobs weren’t enough he flew across the country to chase other TV and film opportunities in LA - while still having to fly back to the East Coast regularly to check on his schizophrenic brother, who was being cared for in a house that Conroy was providing.
While he didn’t “deny who [he] was” in his private life, Conroy still had to try to contain that information. Despite its current reputation, the acting industry wasn’t kind to people who weren’t straight - especially when they were dying horrific deaths in the midst of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Conroy would spend one day comforting his dying friends, who were wasting away in the grip of dementia as the parade of symptoms neared its terminus, and then spend the next day being chewed out by a potential business partner who decided to ditch Conroy after finding out he was gay.
By the end of “Finding Batman”, Conroy has drawn many direct lines between his personal tragedies and the way they left him without any safe and stable authentic identity, and his rendition of Batman.
When he arrived at the audition for the role, he didn’t see it as a culmination, or a chance for catharsis - it was just another job he needed in order to be able to keep going. But the more introspective and conflicted version of the character that the other creators of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES was calling for clicked with Conroy.
Glen Weldon wrote “Is it maybe too much of a stretch to wonder if Conroy was so good at it because he was gay,” but five months before that obituary, Conroy already told us the answer, directly.
“I felt disoriented and lost as an actor whose identity was being yanked from him. Was I my public face or my private face? Had I made too many compromises?”
His own transformation into Batman was as resolute as Bruce Wayne’s. “Yes, I can relate,” concludes Conroy. “Yes, this is terrain I know well.” These experiences are how he found Batman.
When I finished reading the obituary Weldon wrote, my first thought was “How could you miss that??” How, in the process of writing the obituary for a beloved but famously tight-lipped performer, did you overlook the precious jewel that was this miniature autobiography - published to its own fanfare and acclaim just recently?
But this wasn’t just bewilderment at what felt like journalistic incompetence - it was anger.
And to be fair, this anger isn’t even really directed at Glen Weldon. I don’t know him, and I don’t want to assign moral weight to this subpar obituary. No, this is referred anger.
I myself didn’t find out that Kevin Conroy was gay until 2020.
This was, itself, 4 years after the New York Times “broke the news” indirectly in - of all things - an article bemusedly talking about how Conroy was being cast in the animated adaptation of BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE that was released in 2016.
That’s it. That’s how we learned.
I was stunned.
The years I was watching BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES were the years of my life when I was trying, with mixed success, to figure my own self out. I sometimes call this part of my journey “the internal closet”, because it took years for me to even call myself gay to myself, privately, in the darkened cells of my own mind under the covers at night, where no-one else could see me.
And part of the reason for that is because I didn’t even understand what being gay was. The only time I saw or heard of gay people in media was as the punchlines to jokes, to the extent that I literally didn’t even think that “gay” was a category of real human being - I just thought it was an abstract term for negative characteristics. I couldn’t imagine myself as gay because I didn’t know of any real gay people.
Except I did, didn’t I?
Kevin Conroy, the voice of one of my heroes that I watched every day after school and every Saturday morning, was gay.
Howard Ashman, the lyricist who was the driving force behind the “Disney Renaissance” of my childhood, was gay. He died of AIDS before BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was released. The film was dedicated to him. I learned this for the first time from a video essay I watched 20 years later.
Fuck, even when I was studying Oscar Wilde in school, I didn’t know that Wilde was gay until years after I came out myself, when my dad shared a rumor that “Earnest” was a slang term for “straight” in Victorian England (thus, “The Importance of Being Earnest”).
When I found out that Conroy was gay, I was struck by the acute feeling that something had been taken from me, a long time ago.
I spent chunks of my formative years having to learn what my own sexual orientation was the hard way, from people that hated and didn’t understand me, all while watching cartoons and movies and reading books that were made by people who were just like me - but I never knew that, because that fact was kept from me and everyone else, collectively and deliberately, by a society that would only acknowledge non-straight people with the words it spared to tell them that they weren’t getting that acting job (or, often, much worse).
So yeah, I’m mad.
I’m mad that in what’s supposed to be a eulogy of Kevin Conroy’s work, a writer for a major publication can’t work up more than “it’s a stretch” or “maybe” for such an intimate and important and known detail of Conroy’s most famous performance and life experience.
I’m mad that after Conroy finally moved past some of his hard-learned reticence to share his personal life, people who have taken it upon themselves to be the final criers of his talents and accomplishments can’t even find the story he told about them in his own words.
Mostly, I’m mad that stories like this may still be relegated to a stunning piece of “trivia” that the next generation of kids doesn’t find out about until later. Because we can apparently put soulful autobiographies in rainbow-plastered comic books, but we still can’t get NPR writers to read them.
Kevin Conroy’s Batman was a treasure - whether he was exploring the complexities of how trauma shapes our being, or simply slinging sardonic wisecracks at characters with names like “the Riddler” and “Harley Quinn”.
I am glad he found his way to the role, and we are all richer for him having shared what he found with us.
Similarly, his retelling of how his life as a gay man led him to what is still the definitive realization of the character for so many, is something truly precious. In sharing that, he created a space for a generation of people who thought they had none, right within the iconography of one of our culture’s most recognizable heroes.
“Finding Batman” is also, for many of us, the story of finding Kevin Conroy - of finding someone like us, and in doing so, finding at least some tiny sort of harbor and comfort, shielded from the rain by the cloak of a fictional hero, one who makes the dark a little more familiar and a little more welcoming through the simple act of being there with us in it.
That’s the Batman that I’ll always cherish. Kevin Conroy, who is gay, who is the night.
