The Heroic Age of Batman Villains
This is a list of Heroic Age Batman Villains. It covers Batman's enemies from 1987-2000, or from Year One to the end of No Man's Land. The sources used were Batman, Detective Comics, LDK, Shadow of the Bat and a slew of miniseries and one-shots. The Heroic Age is not something I've heard used for this period but I wanted to use Hesoid's ages for the comic book periods. I've heard others refer to the period after the Bronze Age as the Modern Age but obviously there will come a day when that won't apply (also it's been well over 25 years, and most of the other ages are closer to 15 years). I've also heard it called the Dark Ages,which seems a little pejorative and is not accurate given that the term Dark Age is used from a historic perspective, while the terms Golden Age and Silver Age are used in mythology. So it was either Hesiod's 5 ages or Ovid's 4, and I went with Hesiod.
Originally I decided to create a list of all Batman's villains but I wanted to do a numbered list and the site limits those to 100 characters. So I've decided to break them up by the ages. The list is chronological, based on when Batman first encounters the character as a villain. The focus is on Bat-villains, so if the character is from someone else's rogues gallery (like Weather Wizard) they won't make it in but if the character is a general villain (like Solomon Grundy) they will. I also don't include villains that Batman only encounters when he's part of a team.
I've tried to focus on the characters that are villains rather than just criminals but I've yet to come up with a perfect formula to explain why I exclude someone like Ma Gunn or Carmine "the Roman" Falcon, but include Deacon Blackfire or Mr Zsasz.
This is very much still in progress.
