The Batman returns... and brings back memories of my childhood

With the newest Batman iteration about to hit cinemas, David Barnett looks back at his almost lifelong relationship with the Dark Knight

Dark, violent and morally ambiguous, yet we can’t get enough of the Caped Crusader (Shutterstock/DC Comics/The Independent )

My very first piece of published journalism was about Batman. I was 19 and I wrote something for the Preston Other Paper, an independent magazine in Lancashire, when I was training to be a reporter on what was then Preston Polytechnic’s nine-month National Council for the Training of Journalists course for non-graduates.

I wrote it ahead of the release of the 1989 movie of the same name directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger. I didn’t get paid for it, but I was too young to care and too delighted to have been allowed to write about something I never thought I’d ever get the opportunity to do.

It perhaps seems strange now, when everyone and their mum knows Doctor Strange and the Eternals and Hawkeye and the Guardians of the Galaxy, but in 1989 a movie about superheroes was, for a geek like me, a seemingly impossible dream come true.