There was a time when Batman’s adventures were a bit wilder, shall we say. The Golden Age of comics (then the Silver Age) gave us some colorful stories full of surprising characters and twists. The autoproclaimed Batman’s biggest fan was the embodiment of that.
Introduced in Detective Comics #267 (May 1959), in a story titled “Batman Meets Bat-Mite” by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff, Bat-Mite is to the Dark Knight what Mister Mxyzptlk is to Superman, to some extent.
Batman’s Biggest Fan, the Bat-Mite!
Bat-Mite is not an enemy of Batman, but he is a real nuisance. He is certainly a fan, one that goes a bit overboard. There’s no denying that he idolizes his favorite superhero—that’s why he dresses like him—but his « magical powers » are before anything else the origins of a lot of ridiculous situations that enrage Batman.
After popping up regularly on the pages of Detective Comics and World’s Finest Comics for five years, Bat-Mite went away with other members of the Bat-Family. With the Silver Age came a new editorial direction at DC Comics and the imp was put away.
During that era, the Dark Mite only appeared in a few issues, two of them being team-up stories with Mr. Mxyzptlk. The last one is on the meta kind as the imp went to DC Comics offices to try to get his own book. He didn’t get it and, after a one-page story in the milestone issue The Brave and the Bold #200, his Pre-Crisis adventures were finished.
By all accounts, Bat-Mite is silly like only an imp from the 5th dimension can be. But is he real?
Bat-Mite, a Hallucination or not?
During the Post-Crisis era of the DC Universe, Bat-Mite came back… in a way. In Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #38 (1992), the imp appeared, but not as we know it, as he was the hallucination of a drug addict named Bob Overdog.
Following that, for a while, Bate-Mite mostly appeared in Elseworlds stories and other non-canonical books like World’s Funnest and the Bizarro Comics anthology.
In Superman/Batman #25 (2006), the conclusion of a story about the Joker possessing 5th-dimensional powers gained from containing Mr. Mxyzptlk’s essence led to this essence being extracted and taking the form of Bat-Mite. Thus, reintroducing the character into the continuity.
The subsequent apparitions of the characters during that era, notably during Grant Morrison’s run on Batman, went back to Bat-Mite being more or less a hallucination. However, during the New 52 period, the Dark Mite at least finally got his own 6-issue miniseries!
Nowadays, Bat-Mite still pops up occasionally in comics for a cameo or a short story, being this funny little guy generating chaos wherever he goes.