December 13th, 2023: This is PARTIALLY true! The yellow oval was added to the bat symbol to make it trademarkable, but it was more for licensing and branding reasons than other vigilante reasons. This has been justified in the comics in a lot of fun ways - making it a target to the heavily-armoured chest is one Frank Miller did, but your friend and mine CHIP ZDARSKY recently tied that yellow oval into the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, who AS WE ALL KNOW is an emergency-backup personality that dresses in bright colours and is bonkers, which itself was inspired by the original Batman of Zur-En-Arrh who appeared in a 1958 story and who was, of course, an alien, but maybe also just a dream. And of course the backup personality NAME comes from when Bruce and his family left the movie theatre after seeing a Zorro film (and seconds before his parents were shot and killed after a mugger stepped out of the shadows) and his father said "the sad thing is they'd probably throw someone like Zorro in Arkham [Asylum]" and those last three words ("Zorro in Arkham") got corrupted in Bruce's freshly-traumatized memory to "Zur-En-Arrh", which honestly is a deeply satisfying and very clever way to retcon three nonsense syllables from the 50s. I don't even know why I bothered explaining that; it's so straightforward!!

One year ago today: anti-social media, similar but distinct from antisocial media, similar but distinct from auntie's social media

– Ryan