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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.
I was talking about Batman from the viewpoint of someone who can't overstate enough how little they care about the extended universes of comics.
Most people who like Batman media don't really care about The Thing, Boxman, Mid-Tier and the Stiffler. /j
Batman has mad PTSD and probably a personality disorder tbh.
Ok, maybe it's not exactly ableist.
But I'm still not ready to pretend that the whole premise Batman wasn't originally based on relied on some quite... let's say authoritarian worldview about a mentally ill, criminal underclass who don't know their proper place in the world.
You are allowed to enjoy old, a bit fucked up things. But let's not pretend they aren't a bit fucked up.
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.
I think the most striking theme for me from the comics is the idea that one man with billions of dollars is responsible for the safety and well being of many others. And that bad people collectively come together in armies and groups to fight against the single wealthy rich person who is fighting for good.
It reinforces that idea that rich people are altruistic individuals who are using their wealth for the betterment of others ... and that collective groups of small minded people want to come together to try to destroy that one altruistic billionaire.
It's a constant reinforcement that being ultra wealthy is good and that there will always be those will try to take down that person with the massive wealth.
It sounds to me like you're deliberately misinterpreting what goes on in these comics to suit your narrative.
There's 1 altruistic billionaire and he often is at odds with other rich people, Lex Luthor being the most obvious example. I'd wager that more often than not the wealthy people in Batman stories are portrayed negatively or "above it all" while Batman is going down to the street level to address issues. He's an oddity, not the norm. The criminals are not banding together to take down Bruce Wayne (usually), they're banding together to take down Batman, because he opposes their criminal schemes. It's not about his wealth.
These critiques also always feel like massive misunderstandings of why we tell stories (and the necessary metaphor/allegory comics almost certainly have to take in order to tell meaningful stories that we can relate to).
Can I guarantee that the creator of Batman had class-consciousness in mind when creating the character (Hell, I can't even guarantee that it wasn't any deeper than finding old money such as still having a butler just quirky because the creator was so far removed from it)? No. If we're making new characters, should we continue to make benevolent billionaires? Probably not.
But stories are something we shape and (as many people keep pointing out) the narrative and world of Batman keeps getting complicated so that we can tell interesting stories and not have it function as a glorification of capital and put forward the idea that we just need rich men to save us.
It also feels like people who fundamental don't under stand how comics (or any long-form media) works; if we found out the creator was actually a capitalist fascist, that doesn't suddenly expose a rot at the root. Long-form media is continuously building on what came before it and sometimes we don't like it so we retcon or restructure things (there's no way we can guarantee that every contributor to the decades-long canon was swell and great, after all); or create alternative universes as one-shots to try thought experiments about the characters and universe. I don't particularly like Frank Miller's politics but that doesn't mean that I'm bound, now, to take his takes on Batman as foundation to how I view Batman; we create an alternative universe and chuck out the trash. Like, are we so alienated from art that we don't understand how it works, anymore?
Anyway, doesn't directly touch the Batman-is-a-billionaire debate but my favorite encapsulation of my headcanon of the character: https://youtu.be/CUy5rsO5cwo
Comic book ~~hacks~~ writers literally invent a curse/demon gate haunting a city in their semi-realistic noir comic books before criticizing capitalism. /s
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?
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
It would be a fun little limited alternative universe run to release starting on April 1 or something.
I assure you, if Ursula K LeGuin would have written it, the story would slap af.
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.
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.
True Brit has entered the chat.
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?
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.
idk the town i grew up in was built on an indian burial ground and they still ain't got fiber internet. i'd like to blame a curse.
A curse is a cheap excuse. Even cursed Gotham without Batman would be better off than cursed Gotham featuring Batman. It's a false product meant to treat a false ailment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He makes that lil boy run around in underwear 2
