My thoughts exactly.  It's like asking if Bill Finger intended for Batman's origin to be canonical when it was first presented - well, why wouldn't it be?

On a similar note - was there really a debate over whether or not Killing Joke was in continuity back in 1988?  Was there even such a thing as non-canonical stories which weren't identified as such (ie. no declaration of 'This is an Imaginary Tale' or 'If it's set in the future, it might not be the future which will come to pass')?  I ask because it certainly sounds like it was up for debate, but I can't figure out why.  I mean, it's sort of like saying 'Any comic published in 1984 ending in a '7' with a March cover date was assumed to be out of continuity by some fans'.  Why?  Was this a thing?  Or was it an attitude of, "If it doesn't happen in the main titles, it isn't real, and Killing Joke is a prestige one-shot ergo it doesn't count"?

Actually, I believe so. Batman is driving a 1940s era Batmobile, for one. It didn't fit the tone of the still somewhat kid friendly main titles, for two, and Son of the Demon (published prior to it) certainly wasn't intended to be canon, for three. Even Year One was originally slated for a prestige format release, but the success of DKR inspired Denny O'Neil to push a closer alignment between what Miller was writing and what was happening in the core titles.

But I don't think there was a concept as elaborate as "in-continuity / out of continuity" at play. O'Neil was a sloppy editor far more concerned with sales numbers than quality and alignment. He was just publishing whatever he thought might sell. Where it might fit or might not fit really wasn't his concern. It was more up to the writers to decide what counted and what didn't. Jim Aparo was the first to acknowledge (some of) the events of Killing Joke in Death in the Family, but I choose to believe it's a slightly different/more continuity-aligned version that ultimately yields the same outcome for the Gordons.

It really isn't until 1989 that Marv Wolfman begins fleshing out a more carefully considered continuity for the Post-Crisis Batman, Alan Grant following suit, and Peter Milligan pretty much doing whatever the hell he wanted in between.

When Len Wein was running the Bat Office, there was a meticulous, seamless continuity across his writing tenure, Gerry Conway's, and Doug Moench's, and that stretch spanned both core titles and seven years. Once O'Neil took over, the Post-Crisis continuity was a wasteland for three years.

Also - My Golden Age for Batman is the Golden Age. I'm always interested in the juncture between "high" and "low" art and Finger's tongue-in-cheeks surrealism is a lot more interesting to me than the relatively simple pulp narratives of the '70s. Sadly, this more arty less pulpy approach is one that modern writers either don't understand or have no interest in following. (And I would put quite a sizable wager on the former, were I a betting man.)

My Batman love has no bounds, but I will always be biased towards 80's Batman like this:



My first taste of the character

Same here. I never found the work distinctive or taking full advantage of Batman's potential at all.



You are not kidding.



Funny, but accurate. Its a case of someone trying too hard to make characters (or the writer) seem lyrical, or the way your teenager example feels he's written something "deep" after his first try, not knowing that no real writer actually goes off the rails in that way, but he thinks he's bringing something great to the medium.

Not really.




Solid observations.



This is where I disagree; while I said (in an earlier post) that the true Golden Age of Batman was 1968 and throughout the 70s, adding that:



...it was an acknowledgement of the foundation of the Bat-mythos and certain storytelling formats, but it "lost the plot" in only a few short years into the WW2 period, whether it was in Batman, Detective, or especially World's Finest. In that period, Batman was not really growing as a character, but just showing up for variations of the same kind of adventure, until that soured readers, and in came the bizarre additions into the 1950s, where Batman was Batman in name only.

The '68-70s period had the best of the characters' roots to draw from, and made the Herculean achievement of integrating it all into the then-modern times in a way where you could (almost) skip over the worst of the Golden / early Silver Age and just believe one Batman period matured and evolved into the late 60s version. With all that was happening to the slowly aging title leads of Wayne and Grayson, for once, Bat-books were standing shoulder to shoulder with other, well developed titles (no matter the publisher), while its mystery/detective stories were an incredible standout in a field where other titles were still writing the same old "superhero punches supervillain" plots, making them feel a decade (or more) out of step.

This was the period where in-universe, we saw the beginning of Batman treated as some serious, but nota completely company-playing member of the DC worlds, and not some happy guy just there to go along for the ride. He had an undeniable presence in any book where he appeared, and until this era, that was not to be felt, much less attempted in the scripts.

The Batman of 1968-70s effectively edited out nearly 20 years of material that rendered him a joke, and transformed him into an A-list legend, and I'm talking about the perception at the time.

I'm really impressed that you've managed to narrow the start of your Golden Age so precisely to 1968.  I suspect that it's easier to establish a start date for these periods than an end, but too often, people tend to veer to the start of O Neil and Adams run or the beginning of The New Look of 1964 while overlooking the fact that O Neil and Adams didn't materialize out of thin air and The New Look was a work in progress still needing to establish just what worked and what didn't after it began.  

Strangely, The New Look marks the first era in which I feel the character really started to slip up.  I say "strangely" because it seems to be the first time that DC (or Julius Schwartz, I suppose) sat down and asked themselves 'What works and what doesn't for this character?'  After years of following trends (ie. 'Alien movies are popular?  Let's have him go after aliens?  Animal sidekicks are all the rage?  Let's give him a dog') DC seemed to focus on what makes Batman Batman.  

Mecha gave the 1950's era (I'd venture that this extends up to at least the end of the Jack Schiff era in 1964 just before The New Look) as his Golden Age and if you told me I could only have, say, a seven or eight year run collection of any period in Batman's history to take with me to a desert island, 1957/56-1964 would be it.  And yet, "Daytime, cheery crimefighter with a dog who is as likely to be facing off against aliens from another planet or common criminals imbued with superpowers by way of an elf in a Batman costume as he is solving a regular mystery" doesn't sound like the proper answer to the question "How would you describe Batman?"  And yet, those stories work.  No, not every one of them - I'm certainly not going to pretend I care for "When Batman became Bat-Baby" for instance, but what doesn't sound right on paper works surprisingly well on the page.

Getting back to your 1968 start date - it seemed as if things started falling into place nicely around that time.  Though the series never really embraced the camp craze of the TV series, I don't think Schwartz really knew what he wanted with the character hence "Batman doesn't need a Batwoman and come to think of it, he doesn't really need a butler either" as if both were equally unimportant to the mythos when, of course, Alfred should be indispensable.  It was nice to see the addition of villains such as The Getaway Genius - for once, a criminal who actually knew that if you're going to commit a crime in Gotham then you better come up with a plan to avoid Batman - and Carmine Infantino's covers are my favorite images of the character, but Aunt Harriet, The Mystery Analyst Club?  These weren't necessarily bad ideas, but simply felt like something tacked on to fill the hole created by the removal of other elements which didn't need removal.

1968 - I can't think of anything that appeared that year that was immediately noticeable as a change other than perhaps the darker settings - but the quality of the stories just noticeably improved in my opinion.  Batman's fighting The Scarecrow (who's using a submarine as an escape vehicle) in a park during the day after spotting him while driving around in an ice cream van as Bruce Wayne in 1967 (Batman 189) and 1968 sees him operating at night peering through rooftop windows at errie, shadowy figures (Detective Comics 376).  Batman's humming tunes while facing off against The Eraser at the end of 1966 (Batman 188) and 1968 sees him lurking around graveyards under a purplish night sky in silence as he stalks his prey (Batman 202).  Something just seemed to click that year.

Perhaps it's why I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of reboots/restarts such as the beginning of Schwartz's New Look period and more in favour of letting the pieces fall into place naturally.  

I will say, that there is one thing the early 70's has going against it in terms of Batman is the disappearance of many of his classic foes.  Even The Joker vanished for about three years before "Five Way Revenge" and after a 19 year absence, did The Riddler really need to sit out the seven years following 1968?  But I'm not going to argue that the same period which gave us O Neil and Adams on the main titles and Bob Haney and Jim Aparo on Brave and the Bold isn't a solid contender for Golden Age status.

I attended a panel in September with folks like Mike Grell, Marv Wolfman, and Keith Giffen. They were unanimous in their belief that canon/continuity should only be expected within a given author, and not across authors or titles. There might be two Batman books at once, but only one author showing Robin present. Arkham Prison might be exploded in one title and visited in another. Etc.