Julie Madison
37 years ago - Julie Madison is born in Gotham.
31 years ago - 6-year-old Julie's childhood friend Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered.
25 years ago - 12-year-old Julie sees Bruce Wayne off when he leaves to study abroad.
19 years ago - 18-year-old Julie begins college.
15 years ago - 22-year-old Julie's college graduation is attended by a newly returned Bruce Wayne. They begin dating.
14 years ago - 23-year-old Julie Madison accepts Bruce Wayne's proposal.
11 years ago - 26-year-old Julie Madison and Bruce Wayne end their engagement. She leaves Gotham for Los Angeles to pursue her acting career.
5 years ago - 32-year-old Julie Madison returns to Gotham to film the movie remake of The Terror, where her reunion with Bruce Wayne is interrupted by Basil Karlo terrorizing the set.
Generally speaking, you can track the overall development of love interests in comic book heroes by comparing them to Lois Lane. Notably, Lois started out as a far more glamorous movie-star-like character before she became the unflappable reporter we all recognize. This might have simply been a more common archetype in these very early years of comics before the end of the Great Depression, and Julie is clearly of that archetype. While Lois herself clearly evolved over time, Batman's love interests were instead just fully replaced, leaving characters like Julie as relics of their era.
Julie Madison's Comic HistoryJulie Madison's first appearance was in Detective Comics #31. This was only four issues after Batman's debut in #27, but it is still pretty telling that this new character managed four full issues before he had a love interest. Julie was introduced to us in Batman Versus the Vampire part 1 as Bruce's fiancée, as though he'd been engaged this whole time and it just hadn't come up. Truthfully, what was really happening here was that this vampire-based story was a really popular one at the time (Bela Lugosi's Dracula had only just happened less than a decade earlier) and part of that story is always going to include a beautiful woman placed in vaguely sexual peril. For her part, Julie's original design owes way more to Mina Harker than Lois Lane.
Julie didn't make a ton of appearances in these classic Batman stories. She tended to appear in stories with a more traditional horror angle like the Mad Monk or the original Clayface. She would eventually break their engagement, and dispapear into distant memory. An entirely new and unrelated version of Julie was introduced in the New 52, but the bulk of her appearances otherwise have all been references back to these classic Golden Age stories. |
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Our Julie Madison StoryBatman has had quite a few love interests in various media, but only a few of them really qualify as important enough to be included as canonically relevant. Julie Madison's actual appearances are pretty few, but just by virtue of how incredibly relevant those stories are, being so formative for Batman's history, she's elevated quite a bit.
The idea that Bruce was actually engaged to be married early in his career seems a little out of keeping with how we now understand that part of his life was structured, but it does make more sense when you consider that Bruce himself was still coming to understand just how his dual life was actually built. At that time, he probably fully thought that he could live fully separate, fully fufilled lives, that he could get married and live as a person while spending his nights secretly ziplining off skyscrapers. One imagines Alfred being particularly sarcastic during this time. We did add the idea that Julie and Bruce knew each other as kids. This is actually something introduced to Batman's story in the Nolan movies with the character Rachel Dawes, but that actually works really well if we apply it to Julie, letting her connect to Bruce right away upon his return to Gotham. It also makes perfect sense that Julie would eventually break their engagement when she is able to observe that there is SOMETHING going on with him that he is just refusing to share with her. |