Harvey Bullock
58 years ago - Harvey Bullock is born in Gotham City
42 years ago - 16-year-old Harvey competes in the Junior Golden Gloves boxing competition.
40 years ago - 18-year-old Harvey becomes a professional boxer.
37 years ago - 21-year-old Harvey joins the GCPD when it becomes clear he won't be making it as a boxer.
34 years ago - 24-year-old Harvey is promoted to Detective in the GCPD, but is warned by his fellow officers that he needs to start playing ball within the corrupt system.
32 years ago - 26-year-old Harvey, disillusioned by the corruption of the GCPD, gives up and starts accepting bribes. He is soon promoted to Sergeant.
26 years ago - 32-year-old Harvey is promoted to Lieutenant in the GCPD by Commissioner Loeb, who starts to blackmail him and use him as an enforcer.
23 years ago - 35-year-old Harvey Bullock is knocked out by 32-year-old Slam Bradley who then leaves the GCPD, refuses to accept a bribe.
20 years ago - 38-year-old Harvey is assigned as James Gordon's new partner by Commissioner Loeb, tasked with disrupting his efforts to clean up the GCPD.
18 years ago - 40-year-old Harvey & James Gordon destroy Commissioner Loeb's blackmail evidence with Crispus Allen's help, loosening his hold over the GCPD. Bullock becomes Gordon's most trusted ally.
15 years ago - 43-year-old Harvey believes that the newly-arrived-in-Gotham Batman is a dangerous vigilante who needs to be stopped. When he discovers that his partner James Gordon has been working with Batman secretly, his trust is violated. Ultimately, while he does not trust Batman, he does trust Gordon, and begins to begrudgingly work with Batman despite constantly threatening to bring him in.
13 years ago - 45-year-old Harvey joins the new GCPD Commissioner James Gordon's new Major Crimes Division, becoming partners with Sarah Essen.
8 years ago - 50-year-old Harvey's partner Sarah Essen steps down from the GCPD Major Crimes Division as a detective and begins working with the mayor's office as a police liaison. He chooses to work alone.
6 years ago - 52-year-old Harvey works with Renee Montoya to catch the killer of her partner Crispus Allen, getting both their hands dirty but getting their man. They become partners in the GCPD Major Crimes Division.
3 years ago - 55-year-old Harvey Bullock is shot in the arm during the No-Man's Land earthquakes while working alongside Batman.
It is very easy to treat Officer Harvey Bullock as just a minor part of the larger Batman mythology; just a relatively trivial side character meant to make the world of Jim Gordon a little more colorful. It's probably a safe bet that he was even invented for that exact purpose. Somewhere along the way, however, he's managed to find a niche within the evolving story of Gotham, Gordon, and the GCPD that I actually believe is much more nuanced than any of us might have thought. Let me see if I can somehow get that idea across here.
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Harvey Bullock's Comic HistoryHarvey's first appearance is so tiny you could almost argue that it might not even count; Detective Comics #441 in 1974 included a few small panels of a trenchcoated & fedora-ed Lieutenant Bullock giving Batman some attitude and telling him that, even if Gordon put up with some 'costumed freak mixin into police business', HE didn't. The short story moves right past the exchange, and we don't see even the smallest mention of Bullock for almost a decade.
in 1983 Doug Moench started the first of several major runs as the writer of both Batman and Detective Comics. He quickly reintroduced the character of Harvey Bullock, who arrived in the Commissioner's office and announced that the Mayor had assigned him to Gordon, despite being let go by Gordon a decade earlier. He quickly became a major recurring character, deliberately undermining Gordon for the mayor by pretending to be a bumbling fool. |
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This version of Bullock never actually went anywhere, but as the decade went on other characters showed up in other Batman stories that started to influence how he was depicted. There was Detective Arnold Flass from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One , but perhaps much more importantly, there was Lieutenant Max Eckhardt from the '89 Burton film, who was obviously modeled on Bullock. These appearances all took the bumbling corruption of the original Bullock and made him a more important element in the narrative of Gotham... but then, of course, his whole story shifted thanks to the Animated Series.
Animated Bullock wasn't corrupt at all. He might have been a bit of a buffoon as his obvious dislike of Batman constantly set him up to be proven wrong, but at no point was his dedication to the job ever in question. He might have been a crass, curmudgeony blowhard, but no one could possibly argue that the Bullock of the Animated Series wasn't a good cop. Bullock's role in the comic quickly shifted to match his animated counterpart, and when Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka created their Eisner-winning Gotham Central series, Bullock was right in the middle of it, fully arrived as the hard-boiled, formerly corrupt borderline alcoholic Warhorse of the GCPD. |
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Our Harvey Bullock StoryAt his most basic level, Bullock's main job in any Batman story is to be the tough guy who doubts that Batman can be trusted, or that he can actually succeed at the task at hand. He's basically the complete opposite of Chief O'Hara from the Adam West series. This means he's constantly being proven wrong, and is sometimes even the butt of a given situation, but he can take it, because he's someone who takes his lumps and keeps on going. It took a while for the character to form into that role, but now that he exists, he's pretty vital to the overall concept.
For our purposes, we really do want to lean into the idea that Bullock and Gordon were actually officers together when they were younger, both wanting to do something about the corruption in Gotham, but while Gordon wound up leaving for Chicago when he got married, Bullock stayed put, and the corruption wore him down. By the time Gordon returned as a Lieutenant, Bullock had likewise become a Lieutenant in Gotham, but had done so by basically becoming an enforcer for Commissioner Loeb, who is blackmailing him. Watching Bullock slowly come to work with the ideallic Gordon is actually some great groundwork for their early story, and one can absolutely imagine the two of them as a pretty great partnership, with Gordon working as their moral core while Bullock is willing to get his hands dirty. |
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Once the relationship between Gordon and Bullock is established, it actually creates a really interesting new perspective on the way both Gordon and Bullock percieve Batman. Even before Gordon ever worked with Batman, he worked with Bullock. Bullock was a corrupt cop who came around thanks to Gordon's influence, and one can easily imagine how important it was in Gordon's crusade to clean up the Gotham Police to have a partner who was willing to do some dirty work.
How fascinating is it, then, that when Gordon starts working with an even more 'willing to do the dirty work' partner in Batman, Bullock often questioned the partnership? He trusts Gordon, so he will begrudgingly work with Batman, but he made no effort to hide the fact that he didn't trust him. Bullock might have been a dirty cop, but at the end of the day he was still a cop. Once he recovered his own self respect and dedication to doing the right thing, He actually became a sort of within-the-system reflection of Batman himself. He of course wasn't the one-man-army that Batman was, so it clearly took it's toll, but Bullock never once backed down. There is a lot about this character that gets overlooked when you think of him as just the big loudmouth of the GCPD. We're going to be moving some of the stories of Gotham Central around a little so that Bullock winds up as partners with Renee Montoya, where they can bend rules and break heads for all the right reasons. |
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