Why didn’t Bruce Wayne start fighting crime as a teenager

[John Venus]

Pre Crisis Bruce was the first Robin and became an apprentice to a detective name Harvey Harris who trained him. This was all retconned Post Crisis wherein we shifted from Bruce wanting to be a crime fighter almost immediately after his parents death to him initially just wanting to avenge his parents deaths and later realizing that he needs to have a wider focus.

In his post crisis origin he iirc actually joined the FBI (maybe as an intern?) and realised that with all the bureaucracy he couldn't effectively fight crime.

I think you might be referring to his Pre Crisis origin. He didn't join the FBI but he was planning to while he was in university. However during one of his lectures Bruce got into a debate with his professor about the difference between justice and the law which lead him to abandon the idea entirely. Bruce wanted justice not follow the law blindly.

[bat39]

Pre Crisis Bruce was the first Robin and became an apprentice to a detective name Harvey Harris who trained him. This was all retconned Post Crisis wherein we shifted from Bruce wanting to be a crime fighter almost immediately after his parents death to him initially just wanting to avenge his parents deaths and later realizing that he needs to have a wider focus.



I think you might be referring to his Pre Crisis origin. He didn't join the FBI but he was planning to while he was in university. However during one of his lectures Bruce got into a debate with his professor about the difference between justice and the law which lead him to abandon the idea entirely. Bruce wanted justice not follow the law blindly.

Not sure where/when the shift you're talking about happened Post-Crisis. What you're describing fits what happened in Batman Begins, where Bruce just starts out wanting to kill Joe Chill when the latter is paroled, but then discovers Carmine Falcone's strangehold over the city and realizes that someone needs to tackle injustice at a much larger scale.

Post-Crisis, for the most part, we retained Bruce's motivation of wanting to become a crime-fighter immediately after his parent's death. I think the only significant deviation from that in the comics was in a New 52-era one-shot which depicted something close to what happened in Begins (at 18, Bruce hunts down Joe Chill intending to kill him, but then realizes that Chill is not the real enemy he needs to fight...and then leaves Gotham to begin his training).

Oh and the FBI thing was from a Post-Crisis story, The Man Who Falls. It was obviously a nod to the Pre-Crisis versions. But its one of those things that just got ignored over time, though not officially retconned out.