Bruce Wayne was born to the wealthy doctor Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha, who were themselves members of the prestigious Wayne and Kane families of Gotham City, respectively.

When he was three, Bruce's mother Martha was expecting a second child to be named Thomas Wayne, Jr. However, because of her intent to found a school for the underprivileged in Gotham, she was targeted by the manipulative Court of Owls, who arranged for her to get into a car accident. She and Bruce survived, but the accident forced Martha into premature labour, and the baby was lost. While on vacation to forget about these events, the Wayne Family butler, Jarvis Pennyworth was killed by one of the Court of Owls' Talons. A letter he'd written to his son Alfred, warning him away from the beleaguered Wayne family, was never delivered. As such, Alfred - who had been an actor at the Globe Theatre at the time and a military medic before that, travelled to Gotham City to take up his father's place, serving the Waynes as butler.

As he grew older, his family's reputation made Bruce restless, and he began sneaking out of school to visit Gotham City, where he wouldn't be so easily recognized. On one such outing, when he was ten years old, he was picked up by Officer Jim Gordon and his partner on their patrol. En route back to the station, Bruce witnessed Jim accepting a trenchcoat as a bribe from a tailor - though neither realized it was a bribe at the time - but Bruce would remember it as an indicator of Jim's character. After his parents came to retrieve him, the Waynes went to see The Grey Ghost at the Monarch Theater. After the film, a mugger named Joe Chill attempted to rob them at gunpoint, and panicked, shooting both Thomas and Martha dead.

Following his parents deaths, Bruce attempted to commit suicide with a razor blade. However, just before he went through with it, he realized that this wasn't what his parents would want, and it was at that moment Bruce vowed to spend the rest of his life warring on crime.

After their deaths, Bruce became obsessed with the search for meaning in their loss. He thought perhaps the mythical Court of Owls was responsible, but he never found anything to prove it.

In his youth, Bruce attended Gotham Academy. It was there that he dated Julie Madison, but his psychological issues with his parents death ultimately led to the end of their relationship. One day, he was asked by a professor to answer a problem involving a projectile being fired at a target. This triggered Bruce to answer the question by burning the answer in fire on the professors front yard. Bruce was later expelled from Gotham Academy and began attending Roxbury Fielding Academy.

Troubled by grief, Bruce found that he couldn't function the way he was, so he hired a homeless to pretend to be Alfred to approve of the paper work so that Bruce could erase his memory with electroshock therapy, but chose not to go through with it, and to use his pain as a motivator. At the age of 18, he used his relationship with Erin McKillen - a daughter of the Irish mob, and with whom he attended Roxbury Academy - to locate Joe Chill, and learned that he had simply needed the money, and there was no deeper meaning to his parents' deaths.

Fueled by the loss of his parents, Bruce began training in martial arts and sword-fighting. After he learned the truth about Joe Chill, Bruce began travelling the world, learning the arts of stunt-driving, invention, and intimidation. At the age of 19, he learned how to race cars in life-or-death situations from Brazilian criminal, Don Miguel. He was trained in stealth by an unnamed master in the Hida Mountains, in Japan. At age 21, Bruce studied the ins and outs of technological gadgetry under the guidance of the brilliant inventor, Sergei Alexandrov. At age 24, Bruce was training in Norway, and after 28 hours of fighting a new opponent each hour, Bruce's determination struck fear into all the Queen's men. Bruce also trained with Chu Chin Li and Tsunetomo, two martial arts masters in the Far East. After this, Bruce traveled to Paris, France, to find Henri Ducard, a skilled manhunter. Bruce also became close training partners with Ducard's son, Morgan. However, when Bruce discovered that Henri killed his targets, he left. This caused Henri to send Morgan after him, but Bruce managed to defeat him, throwing him into Henri's office. Near the end of his travels, Bruce went to the Himalayas to train with Shihan Matsuda, who taught him to fight with the katana. He soon struck up a romance with the sword-sharpener's daughter, Mio. Matsuda warned him against creating personal ties with others, and to embrace his darker side. Matsuda's wife, though encouraged it, and because of Bruce's feelings for her, he inadvertently let an assassin into the Matsuda household. In the following course of events, Bruce discovered that Mio had been hired by Matsuda's wife to seduce him and then kill Matsuda. Both women and Matsuda himself were gravely injured, but before he died, Matsuda warned him that death is what would come of fostering close personal relationships. Taking this lesson to heart, and after seven long years of absence, Bruce finally returned to Gotham at the age of 25.

With only his mission in mind and no care for his legacy as a Wayne, Bruce moved himself out of Wayne Manor and into a brownstone on Park Row from which he based his early attempts to infiltrate the Red Hood Gang after only six weeks back. Despite trying to remain off the grid, Bruce's uncle Philip Kane had kept tabs on him and had also gained control of Wayne Enterprises in Bruce's absence, hiring strategist Edward Nygma, who advised him to have Bruce killed if he wouldn't play ball. Philip outed Bruce's return to the media. When Bruce refused to return to the company while his uncle was selling weapons, Nygma advised Philip to have Bruce killed, and the Red Hood Gang soon attempted just that by blowing up Bruce's brownstone with him inside. Injured, Bruce crawled back to Wayne Manor and, in his father's study, by the light of the moon a injered bat crashed through his window, inspiring him.

Using the fact that he was outed to his advantage, Bruce called a press conference outside the ACE Chemical plant to expose the Red Hood Gang's plans to the media. The gang attempted to disrupt it, and inside the plant, Bruce used a blackout to debut the Batsuit. Through blackmail, Philip was recruited into the Red Hood Gang, and when he failed to kill the Batman, he was shot dead. In fighting with Red Hood One, Batman knocked the man into a vat of chemicals, and he was thought dead, but was severly hurt and disfigured in the process. The fight taught Bruce his harshest lesson yet, that all the true criminals, true powers at work drew on super natural power. To complete on an even footing he would have to use the same magic as well. With the City confused over the apperance of The Batman and the fall of Red Hood One Nygma returned to his lab to detonate an EMP blast that left the entire city in the dark.

Commissioner Loeb declared the Batman a vigilante criminal as Bruce began investigating a series of murders committed by a disgruntled Waynetech employee, while building a jammer to prevent another EMP attack when power was restored, if power was restored. The ex-employee, Dr. Karl Helfern was challenging enough that Batman allied himself begrudgingly with Jim Gordon, and together they learned that Helfern was the Riddler's pawn. Their plan to defeat both men failed, barely, and the jammer was destroyed such that when the power was restored, the Riddler stole complete control of the power grid, shutting it down and flooding the city.

In the following months, the city fell into ruin, with the Riddler nightly challenging the citizens to best him with a riddle in order to earn back civilization. Allying with Jim Gordon and Lucius Fox, Batman planned to locate the Riddler by piggybacking his signal during the challenge. The plan failed, but Batman managed to find the Riddler in the place they'd first met, and best HER in a battle of wits, it turned out the Edward Nygma hd developed technology of his own to tap into the same Magical Powers that fuled such Heroes and Villians as The Blue Blur, The Flash, Cyborg, Posidion: Queen of Atlantis, The Joker, The Penguin, and The Green Lantern, to name a few. Restoring power and saving the city from an inevitable air-strike Bruce retreated to his Bat Cave to study the technology and incorperate it into his arsenal. Afterwards, Bruce and Lucius began rebuilding Wayne Enterprises, and Jim Gordon was promoted to Commissioner in Loeb's stead, and Bruce rebranded The Batman as Mahou Soujo Black Bat.