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Also .... we were all comfortable and accepting of a super hero fighting crime with his billions of dollars of wealth to buy military hardware, vehicles and new tech to fight villains one at a time ... instead of doing something constructive changing the corrupt political system or like feeding the poor or funding public housing
He spent spend his billions fighting the symptoms of the problem .... rather than going after the root causes
Bruce Wayne absolutely did spend billions fighting the root causes too. It just isn't as effective as you'd think given that the city is actually cursed and has a hellmouth or something underneath.
Not to mention that many of the villains are actually people who're experiencing a mental health crisis and need care. Batman has seen the inside of Arkham and yet does nothing to improve the treatment at the facility.
I loved Batman as a kid but have become increasingly disappointed in him as an old.
Many of the villains are literal shark people, plant people, clay people, clown people, crocodile people, or bat people to name a few, there's some leeway in the confinement of them compared to humans.
I'm glad we agree that clowns are not human.
Are there any non-villains with these supernatural "disabilities", or are the Batman comics ableist, as well?
Edit: No, I don't accept Oracle as a redeeming character for ableism.
There's Batgirl who was non-verbal and is now semi-verbal, Batman was paralyzed himself for a good while and was replaced by Azrael, who one could argue had some sort of schizophrenia as a result of his brainwashing from his order.
The Thing has entered the chat.
Daredevil is blind. Stan Lee felt weird about the character, but learned that blind people actually liked him.
Dr. Mid-Nite was visually impaired.
Echo is deaf.
Rose and The Thorn are 'split personalities.'
Box from Alpha Flight was wheelchair bound.
Darkman [one movie] was hideously deformed, as was The Unknown Soldier.
Curiously, Deadpool was also deformed and traumatized brutally by a mutant trafficking / enslavement ring, but he takes it remarkably well. Fourth and fifth wall awareness certainly helps.
IRL, DP would probably be using his mercking to stay one step ahead of suicidal ideation; if he's not on task, he suffers a psychotic break.
Why do so many people think he doesn't spend money on things like that? Is it because the movies don't really show it, and that's a lot of people's only impression of him? He does plenty to try and improve Gotham's situation as Bruce Wayne, but the place is literally cursed, so no amount of money can fix it.
Because he's still a billionaire
Of course he is, because both his playboy persona and activities as Batman require him to have someone else manage his wealth for him. Publicly he's Wayne Enterprises' pretty boy and the board is making the actual decisions. Privately, all he has the time for is to see that they don't go all evil behind his back.
Money gets made with or without you. And when you're in that kind of position, you either stay around and make sure a larger part of it gets used for doing good or you walk away and be sure others will hoard and use it for doing bad.
Gotham is canonically cursed though. The place turns people evil and crazy.
Because the story lines and ideas reinforce in everyone the idea that bad guys just exist out of thin air ... or they are demonic maniacal mentally maladjusted people who were just born bad and do only bad things in the most extraordinary ways ... that we need super heros in order to protect us from the monsters that lurk around us.
It reinforces this childlike mentality that the world is full of complicated questions that can be easily dealt with by employing simple answers
Tons of batman storylines have villains who were created from circumstance that forced them into crime. They're not typically the big bad ones but it happens a lot.
...and then are dealt with by punching them in the face. It doesn't help.
The point is not that Bruce Wayne doesn't spend money on charity. The point is it doesn't matter that he does; his commercial interests cause more damage than all his Batmanning around and charity can compensate for, and his Batman shenanigans cause more harm (or would IRL, when you don't have a dozen legal teams making all the adverse effects disappear).
Batman really is a story of rich dudes doing whatever they want, whether it's punching poor people or taking rocket joyrides or fucking little girls, and then their fanboys trying to justify how their exploits are right and proper.
Just stop.
Gotham is meant to be a city of darkness. If Gotham was redeemable through normal actions it wouldn't be Gotham and we wouldn't have Batman.
I'm not into Batman but from what I understand, newer comics straight up tell you that the city is cursed.
You know what would make a great comic book story? A rich man giving all his money away. The end. Wow what a read, are you publishing?
It would be a fun little limited alternative universe run to release starting on April 1 or something.
He gives it away to charities and organizations that embezzle the money, use a part of it to bribe and threaten their way into decriminalizing their actions and use the rest to steal and hoard even more money in order to wrest control over the populace and treat everyone as less than shit.
Better?
They said comic book story .... not modern day geopolitics
There are a ton of ways to make the Batman paradigm better. One would be just to have him go after his own kind: The Sacklers and Pfizer. The DeVosses and Constellis (formerly Academi, formerly Xe International, formerly Blackwater PMC), The Kochs and big oil and big automotive.
Batman doesn't. He goes after street crime, even though elite deviance / white-collar crime causes more loss of life, more destruction and more cost than all the petty crime combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
So you're not even effing trying. You're making excuses for Detective Comics and should feel shame.
That would be more in character as a detective, but Batman's been more an action hero for decades.
Maybe he could, maybe he should, maybe he would. The character might, but if the writers don't, then that's not on the character.
I'm taking batman, you're talking the company writing him. So there's no reason why I should feel shame, but you might for mixing up the two.
You don't want to give it all away, even in death, that's a fail. Now the rich man has no money to grow, nothing left to give in the future. That's why smart money sets up endowments. The principle earns interest, the interest pays for whatever charity or cause in perpetuity.
There's an Indian proverb about a rich man who travels the country giving 100 rupees to every beggar he sees. Eventually he has no more money and becomes a beggar himself. In the end, he made no impact on the world and now has no more opportunity to do so.
I assure you, if Ursula K LeGuin would have written it, the story would slap af.
I feel like I've read this comment like 3 times in 3 different batman threads this past week.. luckily all the others were down voted as they should be. He actually does do that
The issue is that Gotham is cursed so it can't be fixed, no matter how much he tries.
No. He doesn't.
He thinks he does. And maybe even the DC writers are convinced he's doing all he can. But his Batman budget is much better spent on civics and leaving closing hellmouths and fixing curses to the experts who fix such things.
ETA Then there's the matter that large unilateral capitalist enterprises have a detrimental effect on society that is orders of magnitude greater than all the good that can come of its charitable works, even when no profit is spared.
I get it. Hard truths are hard, yet Batman cannot be justified as a moral good.
If it makes you feel better, neither can the Roman Catholic Church -- nor any large religious ministry.
Well aren't you just the knower of all things! You must be a lot of fun at parties. Your condescending posture doesn't deter everyone, though.
I can tell you don't have a ton of life experience just based on your holier-than-thou attitude, but let me let you in on a secret: This is an imperfect and cruel world where cheaters do win and they win consistently. The overall message of the Batman ethos is spot-on. Civic investment doesn't sanitize human nature - jockeying for position is a core human trait and there will always be some who challenge civic boundaries for a buck.
Please proceed with your ad hominem-centered reply.. I'm eager to analyze it.
I never said he was morally good. People just like to come into batman discussions and be like "akshually, he could be spending that money on social programs to improve the city ". And the answer is that he's doing that as well.
I probably misspoke when I said that "he's doing everything that he can". Maybe he's just flawed. I dunno, it's just a comic book character. Feels pointless to overanalyze him like this. Next issue they could easily write an explanation for why the curse can't be lifted(or maybe there is one, idk). Or they could say how he's running out of money because he's spending so much on social projects. But that wouldn't really make for a great batman comic, imo. In the end, taking any fictional character so seriously is pointless imo because the answer is always the same on my mind: they did something or are a certain way because the writer thought that would be cool or be an interesting story.
Maybe he’s just flawed. I dunno, it’s just a comic book character.
Being just a comic book character is not a valid excuse, especially given the history of our society holding the presumptions that a) comics are just for kids, and b) we can hold content for kids to a lower standard of quality than we hold our content for adults.
Batman may be just a comic book character but then Batman is a bad comic book character and could be a better one. It's worse since most versions of Batman in the 20th and 21st centuries portray hold him up as a paragon of righteousness. World's Greatest Detective, indeed.
Portraying Batman as an anti-villain or antihero, in which the narrative reflects awareness of Wayne's flaws, is, absolutely, a viable direction for Batman stories to go. And it sometimes has been done that way to make it interesting. But too often Batman is portrayed as a hero, and doing so comes with a tuckfun of unfortunate implications. Most versions of Batman have not aged well, and the general concept of Batman, played unironically, has not aged well.
I'm reminded of a presumption that comes with Superman 1978; To quote Bob Chipman:
[Superman] and his world only work when approached from a place of optimism: …Superman only makes sense in the context of a worldview where good is the default setting of the universe and the job of a being of godlike power who aims to do good is to fix things when they break and thwart evil from spoiling the natural state of goodness.
Because if the universe is not good at its core then the moral responsibility of that same godlike being who wants to do good is to assume power absolutely and make the universe good by force.
And that’s not Superman.
note: I quote this originally (and cite sources) here talking about Supergirl, who is, in the TV series, thrust in a world that is not inherently good by definition. And then Supergirl is then hobbled by government agencies with kryptonite technology and forced into becoming an agent of state. Where Superman is allowed to be a benevolent god (sometimes, but not always, having to contend with challenging problems), Supergirl always has to be overwhelmed by the forces against her... I digress.
Batman as the World's Greatest Detective only works in the same system, albeit at a sociopolitical level. He works when the system of state and social institutions are inherently good, and he's fixing corrupting influences, rather than fighting the system itself because it is so corrupt that it needs to be changed via revolution (not necessarily violent revolution, but certainly the degree of extreme overhaul and reform that warrants revolution). And Bruce Wayne is not revolutionary, in fact would oppose revolutionary efforts -- and has.
This, incidentally is a failure of the MCU avengers movies, which take place in a post 9/11 America in which the climate crisis is real and the response to it by institutional powers has been underwhelming and ineffective (and have doomed 7/8ths of the human population and counting). The Avengers only work in a world where society is intrinsically good and stable. Curiously a lot of the antagonists are revolutionary but have to include a STEP 4: Annihilate a couple billion people in their plan to show they are, in fact, villainous.
Anyway, comics are not just for kids, and this has absolutely been the case since the 1980s. And children deserve a higher quality of comic book than ones that posit that Batman is a force for good in a society that works.
Yes, like Chipman, I've thought about this at length, and was a big fan of Batman as a kid and young adult until I realized the society we live in isn't the good, stable one. It's something of a grudge.
These stories are not meant to be realistic, they're not meant to be so in depth.. there's always going to be issues..
To me all that sounds like we shouldn't have heroes. Because they could all be doing other, more "efficient" jobs. Except maybe for captain planet..altho I'm sure we can find improvements for that one as well.
And yes, successful villains all end up either people that want to destroy everything or people that want to make things better but doing it wrong. Anything less than that and they're not important enough.
All these issues are usually features, not bugs, I think.
If it makes you feel better, neither can the Roman Catholic Church -- nor any large religious ministry.
It doesn't 🥺
Are you comfortable and accepting Superman lasering villains when he could singlehandedly end food shortages worldwide and give free unlimited energy to the world by just turning a large turbine for years?
It's comic books, there's only so much real world logic one can throw in there before they run into the wall of "Someone would have shot the Joker in the head by now, c'mon.".
Also, Gotham is a shithole from root to stem. The good folks are the exception, not the rule.
You should read the "Red Sun" comic.
Kal-El lands in the USSR and is raised by Stalin. Eventually Kal realizes that Stalin is a madman and kills him, but leads the world into glorious revolution. Only the USA under President Lex Luthor is free, and Superman is opposed by an orphan lad who saw his parents killed by the KGB.
Pretty much the best Elseworlds/DC "What If" unless we count Kingdom Come.
A corporation would just buy the turbine. Superman absolutely should laser supervillains, starting with his bald nemesis Jeff Bezos. It's not a coincidence that in the 2010s Lex was redesigned to look like Zuckerberg, and in the new movie he's a gamer (he probably plays Path of Exile)
A corporation would just buy the turbine.
And then he'd just stop turning it?
He makes that lil boy run around in underwear 2
That's also the same reason why Jason Todd died the same night Batman's Robin disappeared and no one batted an eye. Poor kids don't matter.
I'm pretty sure Bruce Wayne is Batman is an open secret of Gotham, because rich people get away with everything. And this is unrelated to Bruce beating up poor people rather than implementing civic projects that might reduce crime.
The only town with a higher crime rate than Gotham, New York is Cabot Cove, Maine, and that's largely due to the population difference.
