Batman voted the century's most popular comics character?

[kalervideo]

So I was recently reading some comics from the early 2000s, and noticed a few Batman line covers that claim the character was "Voted the century's most popular comics character." Does anyone know by whom? My first thought was that this must be a Wizard Magazine poll, but I don't know where to reliably find old editions of that magazine anywhere--and you can imagine the difficulty of refining the search terms for "Most popular comics characters of the 20th Century" to get useful results--all I get are listicles. To be specific, I've noticed the claim on the following covers:

Batman #576-578 (April-June 2000)
Detective Comics #743-744 (April-May 2000)

It could occur on other covers that I'm not aware of. For context, the claim appears around the same time that several Batman-line books got new designs for their titles following the No Man's Land storyline. I'd be very grateful to anyone who can point me in the right direction to figure this out!

[Lightning Rider]

That's interesting, kind of a surprising result, but maybe not depending on the medium the poll was conducted i.

[red winter]

Has Batman ever met the Phantom?