Pretty sure theres a lot of batman media that confirms that people hate him because he basically just protects the rich. They even call him a billionaire playboy.
I once read that Superman was a humble man who faces big exploitative businessmen, while Batman is a big exploitative businessman who stands up to homeless people. The implications of Batman being more popular than Superman today and what this says about our society is enough for a complete essay.
Or Batman's more popular because he's a more interesting character. Superman can only experience kryptonite so many times before you start to suspect he never actually left the planet Krypton.
Maybe, or maybe they have bad writers because they are not able to imagine credible stories in which Superman's strength is useless in the face of the corruption of the system and the businessmen who abuse their power, no one would believe stories like that, you need to add kryptonite to make it realistic
useless in the face of the corruption of the system and the businessmen who abuse their power
You could put any superhero in that situation and have a story. But if it's just a white-collar crime setting, would Supe then be any different from any other Tom Dick or Harry? Is it even a superhero comic at that point? It would be interesting to some, but I can see why the writers wouldn't want to take that risk.
Well, I'm not a big comic reader but that's what the story with Lex Luthor is about, right? how all of Superman's immense power is useless against the intelligence of a rich and evil man. I think that is the most famous antagonist and that has transcended the comics the most for a reason. Maybe for fans it's doomsday or zod, but for casual readers and the general public it is lex and it is for good reason.
Instead of being trained by Ras Al gul, he’d have been trained under both 4chan and qanon. Instead of working out his emotional demons by maiming henchmen, he’d be an incel shitposting. Instead of Alfred admonishing him to be careful, he admonish Bruce to go outside and socialize once in a while
Batman could have done more good as Bruce Wayne and instead dressed up like a bat to beat up street level thugs. If he was real, I don't think it would make a difference what time period he was in, he'd still be traumatized by his parents death and decide to dress up like a bat to beat up street level thugs.
not to mention he's a psycho himself. instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons while letting the biggest maniacs and the ones leading these gangs run away every time.
Yeah but he never actually went after the original murder if you notice. He spent his entire time going after lunatics who thought that they were going to take over the city because they had planted a bomb on a bridge or something.
And that "vengeance" is what taught him that vengeance is dumb, and it's better to fight to better the world around him than go after people Punisher style.
instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change
Do we know this? I don't follow the comics at all but do they ever go into the things Bruce Wayne does as CEO of Wayne Enterprises? I can't fathom we have gone decades without someone touching on this.
i don't follow the comics but things that are established that i know of are:
Bruce Wayne is insanely wealthy
Uses his wealth for his bat-themed middle age crisis (bat sports car, bat private jet, bat motorcycle, bat gondola probably)
Other than that the best thing he does for other people is "philanthropy" (in the real world this is a scam by the wealthy) unless you count taking in his young lover sidekick
The police and the politicians are extremely corrupt and are for sale.
Now from all this i gather it would be very easy for Bruce to get actual political power in Gotham to make real change but he doesn't do it because running around in a furry costume is more fun.
Even apart from that, sneaking around in a costume talking about how you're the night or the knight or whatever is on its own very cringe and psychotic.
idk what the hell you're talking about. there's one comment that gives reasons, and excuse me for being asleep at the time. other comments are just people being offended on batman's behalf. that's not disproving.
i know right. i mean we're in showerthoughts, and some of these people are accusing me of not having inhaled the entire batman anthology. i like two of the comments though, supersaiyanswag and underpantsweevil
instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons
Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.
Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.
He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.
The best Batman stories aren't the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents' home and gives him a second chance at life.
I don’t mean to direct this at only you, but I hate this take. There are plenty of comics that dive into this, him using his wealth to help Gotham, the city just had too many problems. Court of Owls for instance, the group that is always watching Gotham and influencing it state and its key figures.
One of my favorites story arcs. I do agree with you to some degree though because there are a lot of comic book writers that have a habit of romanticizing his wealth, that’s why he does come off as a “typical billionaire” most often. Then it is up to the next writers to mitigate the damage. Comics are tricky like that, you just have to pick and choose your own head canon.
Yeah I was thinking about this in regards to superhero relevance.
A relevant Spider-Man story today would be one in which Spider-Man is saving people from the NYPD. Webbing up cops doing stop and frisk, terrorizing a racist cop, fucking with the mayor who shut down libraries on Sundays.
The joker isn't the disease in Gotham, he's the symptom. In a world where the effort of an individual results in proportional gains, where people have a home, family, and attachments to their community, there is no joker. The populace is innoculated against his desire to tear it all down, because they have a stake in "it all". The few that are vulnerable to his views, are getting the support and care they need from trained staff, and the people around them are keeping the joker away. Batman isn't in Gotham because of the Joker; the Joker can exist in Gotham because of Batman, a billionaire who spent his efforts and resource on violence, instead of outreach.
Plus, giving OSHA some teeth, and forcing corporations to compensate fairly for workplace accidents, and regulations requiring the inspection and certification of toxic chemical plants would have stopped the joker, and countless other tragedies, at a fraction of the cost.
At first I thought you were insinuating this post was corpo propaganda, but then it clicked that you were talking about Batman himself lol. I'd like to say that many if not most versions of batman is more gentle and forgiving than the police, his goals are simply to take an impossible problem to fix and reduce harm from it as much as possible, without all the sophistry of purely hypothetical philanthropy and political reform.
He is just a working class guy, both his wife and his own job are probably getting replaced by AI, his mother pension keeps getting lower and his dad died because he couldn't afford proper healthcare.
Martha and Pa both got hooked on Oxy in the 00s, nothing Superman can do about it. He tries writing a big expose as Clark Kent but the Planet kills the story because Perdue buys a lot of ad space with them.
Public got too weird about Supergirl, forcing her to retire as incels kept jumping off of buildings so they could grope her when she saved them.
Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He's in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.
To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.
That's the internet pop-psychologist interpretation, but the people actually writing him often have him doing his best to better the Gotham around him. A lot of the petty thugs he catches are given chances to redeem themselves via Wayne based welfare programs.