In the 2005 Christopher Nolan movie Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul is first mentioned as a rumor, a whisper . . . a Keyser Söze kind of figure who evolves from phantom to falsehood, from mentor to enemy. That Ra’s spoke of himself as a phantom in the guise of his own employee, Henri Ducard, just adds another delicious layer of subterfuge to the guy.

This evolution from rumor to something more tangible and deadly in Batman Begins parallels Ra’s’s evolution in the Batman comics of the 1970s. The first whiff of Ra’s al Ghul we got in the Batman mythos was through his daughter, Talia. The lovely Ms. al Ghul made her debut in the May 1971 issue of Detective Comics (#411) in a story called “Into the Den of the Death Dealers!” written by Denny O’Neil, who was at the time re-inventing Batman by amputating the overly popish and ridiculous trappings that had smothered the character in the wake of the 1960s ABC TV show in a way that would prove similar to Nolan’s reboot of the movie franchise after Joel Schumacher’s 1997 horribly be-nippled Batsuit atrocity, Batman & Robin.

Talia yanked Batman on a globetrotting adventure, hauling him out of Gotham, with its gigantically oversized prop advertisements,¹ and into what’s described in the comic as an unnamed “tiny Asian nation tucked . . . between two Super-Powers” with gigantically oversized mountain ranges.

Prior to O’Neil’s tenure, Batman was more likely to leave the planet than he was  …