You’re thinking of Poison Ivy.
Superman was already going after CEOs when Batman was first created. Batman was always a hero for the right wing.
Is this a ThinBlueLine x Punisher crossover episode?
Batman is a CEO, right?
He just goes after the ones he can beat without much backlash from the public/system.
Imagine if he takes down a CEO. He’d not be able to play batman. Gordon and batman sympathisers would be affected, so Batman’s human connection in the police would be lost. He can hack stuff, but might not always be enough.
He can do other stuff, but he can only do it gradually and much more tactfully.
He did take down Lau in the dark knight tho.
Lau laundered money for the mob and also was Chinese.
I don’t think the public/mainstream would have issues there, where he goes after the non-native guy who laundered money for the mob.
Yes the billionaire that spent a shit ton on money on gadgets to beat up poor people would definitely be a champion of the people
That’s what happens if you take all your knowledge from memes. Good luck.
He also beats up rich people, like the Penguin. The Joker and Riddler and all those guys get their crazy gadgets and hordes of minions somehow. They must be rich af
Upper middle class. They’ve got the kind of money Al Capone had, not the kind of money Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos have.
Batman generally leaves Lex Luthor, who does have that kind of money, alone. (And I don’t usually read DC, so I may be wrong, but I don’t think he tends to get physical with the court of owls much either…),
But all those are poor people who got rich via crime since they didn’t really have other avenues.
The Batman lore has a lot of hidden messages about social class and hierarchy which doesn’t translate well to today.
CEOs of companies existed in 1939, and did before. 1939 would have been the time of the great depression, World War 2, fascism, and Batman didn’t go after them, he went after the people who needed work and took the last chance they had.
Bruce Wayne is just a form of Bill Gates. Donates millions to charity, good causes, hospitals, fighting diseases, but he still has lots of more money than when he did before all this “charity”. The difference is that Gates doesn’t put on a mask and go punch the poor of Seattle.
If Batman was real, he’d be a dickhead, worse than Musk or Bezos.
EDIT: Why mine and no one elses? This dude is annoying.
Yeah because when I think of the working class I think lunatics dressed like clowns arming chemical weapon dispersing explosives on the orders of a guy who caught a chemical burn induced skin condition and decided everyone was gonna die suffocating over it.
Batman is a detective, a detective! 99% of what he does has nothing to do with fighting, you just don’t hate read the detective work because Batman going out of his way to find the murderer of some nobody with nobody to care enough to ask it be done doesn’t feed this bizarre obsession some folks have with making Batman the worst thing ever because he has money as a plot convenience to explain where all his insane tech comes from.
Also, he does constantly do work addressing wealth inequality by backing community efforts to relieve the effects of poverty and by championing community leaders standing up to corruption. Why doesn’t it work? Because there’s a literal criminal conspiracy of the wealthiest of Gotham dating back centuries that most recent versions of Batman has been at war with since near the outset of his investigative career. Again, read any of the comic books published in the last like 20 years and this would all be entry level stuff.
Also, Gotham’s gangs are not normal gangs, like I exampled above, but also consider the sheer level of advanced education or ability to outsmart most folks who have one Gotham’s criminal leaders have. Even Joker is heavily implied to have retained advanced chemical engineering training from before he went psycho.
If the idea that even one rich person has genuinely good intentions and does genuine work addressing the causes of criminal activity at every level is that hard for people to grasp, maybe just put the comics down and find another topic because man are you all gonna struggle with basically everything else you’re gonna find in the genre.
Batman is a detective, a detective! 99% of what he does has nothing to do with fighting
Wayne’s a deranged lunatic. 99% of what he does has everything to do with failing to cope with childhood trauma (and a bad case of affluenza), and very little to do with any real events happening around him.
99% of what he’s doing is using his own past traumas as a tool to prevent similar traumas from happening to other children.
If you can’t see your batman comforting a dying child in her last moments, you don’t have batman, you have the punisher in a funny hat.
Stop commenting on the punisher in a funny hat and telling us you’re talking about the guy with the best track record in comics for rehabilitating rogue’s gallery members if not completely then to the point of finding a place in society where they can live their peace, save maybe for the flash, depends on how much of his rogue’s gallery by mass is currently evil speedsters.
I had an upvote on your comment until the last paragraph. But that’s a bad last paragraph.
Batman is a good person and that’s why it’s fiction.
Why doesn’t it work? Because there’s a literal criminal conspiracy of the wealthiest of Gotham dating back centuries that most recent versions of Batman has been at war with since near the outset of his investigative career.
Also, Gotham is literally cursed
Was that actually confirmed or was it just Joker vandalizing historical documents to make bruce think he knew about a Lazarus pit under the bat cave?
The exact nature of the curse varies, but it’s canonically cursed in most continuities
Like Bruce never engaged in union busting. He’s literally one of the billionaire class.
He regularly aligns himself with other upper class people to take over the city.
Hell, he has his own gang.
So, seppuku then?
Inb4 the flood of people who get all their batman knowledge from the Nolan trilogy and the stupid one liners they added to Injustice to try and whataboutism him against superman literally murdering people and installing a fascist autocracy.
If Batman was real today, he’d be Donald Trump.
That’s what these (alleged) “super heroes” really are… idealized, ubermensch-esque metaphors for the actual power wielded by the rich and privileged.
In fact, I’d say that Batman is the ultimate Objectivist wet dream - he perfectly personifies the fascist (as Batman) and the capitalist (as Bruce Wayne) in one person. Even Ayn Rand’s creepazoid ancap sugar-daddy “heroes” didn’t manage that.
I would like you to explain how Captain America and Superman are reactionary.
Captain America is an artificial warrior created by a Jewish scientist to fight the Nazis, and Superman is a baby sent away in a basket to be raised by not-dead parents who chose to use his privilege to help people.
Zack Snyder is an Objectivist and that’s why his Superman movies stink. He doesn’t understand the core themes of superheroes, he only understands the spectacle and surface theatrics.
I like Superman Returns, and I don’t care who knows it. Brandon Routh did a fine job imo.
I know it’s unrelated but your comment made me think of it.
I would like you to explain how Captain America and Superman are reactionary.
I mean… c’mon. Captain America is low-hanging fruit - the correlation between Captain America and actual US behavior in the world essentially writes itself.
Superman is a far more sophisticated representation of US-style liberalism - but, just like liberalism itself, that doesn’t make Super Cheese any less of a reactionary.
However… we can talk about the individual politics of these characters all day long - and we’d be missing the entire point of the metaphor in it’s entirety.
The problem with the “super hero” genre is not the individual politics of the characters concerned - it’s with how they normalize and justify the concentration of power in the hands of these exalted individuals.
In other words - the problem is fundamental.
He doesn’t understand the core themes of superheroes,
I think he understand them perfectly, because…
Zack Snyder is an Objectivist
Okay do fucking Spider-Man and tell me how “with great power comes great responsibility” is Objectivist. Rand wanted all the talented people to fuck off and leave the stupid poors to die! Spider-Man’s first arc is realising that his powers shouldn’t be used for self enrichment.
If you actually read the early comics, it takes Peter a good long while to learn that lesson and he still forgot it pretty frequently. Still, his journey toward learning that lesson was a core part of his character until the writers decided to just make him a flawless Mary-Sue.
it takes Peter a good long while to learn that lesson
That’s called a Character Arc. He’s a kid in the beginning.
I don’t think the writers have made him perfect. His most recent movie, No Way Home, is about Peter trying to use superpowers to help his friends get out of trouble. Which backfires and causes a bunch of problems, and Aunt May dies saying “with great power there must also come great responsibility.” Seems like a pretty on-theme story.
Like Lex Luthor, who hes fought on several occasions? Or more like the Court of Owls, one of his recurring set of villains?
Also the Penguin
Penguin is a mobster first and wealthy second, as a result of being a successful mobster.
And the difference between Penguin and a billionaire is about a billion dollars.
Why do you people make up such obviously false head cannon. This is degenerate shit lol.
In sans serif fonts, it can be hard to distinguish capital i from lowercase L.
Yes!
You’re aware he is a CEO of a company?
I thought Lucius Fox was the CEO. Bruce Wayne is chair of the board.
Depends on the particular telling I think. DC has IIRC gone both ways with that.
Huh, maybe. Although my point was more batman is part of that class (albeit begrudgingly) so expecting batman in a position of great power and influence to actively take that from other people is just very hypocritical. Not that he shouldn’t (or someone shouldn’t). Just a very weird position.
In Batman Beyond, Batman’s nemesis is a CEO. He’s a villain called Blight, who killed Batman’s father.
Yeah, but in that Batman is basically Spider-Man with ex-Batman as a mentor.
He’s still Batman. He does detective stuff, doesn’t have superpowers, Gotham is appropriately grimdark, etc. Terry doesn’t have to learn that with great power comes great responsibility like Peter does. The only similarity is that he’s a working class wisecracking teenager with a somewhat agility based fighting style. Peter Parker was never a burly hoodlum before he got his powers, and he doesn’t see being a superhero as a way to make up for mistakes he made as a normal. He also didn’t steal his powers. Terry is a much more mature and slightly darker character than Peter at the start of his journey. He’s not an academically minded geek, he’s someone who’s experienced the real world and understands it. He’s got street smarts, he can fight, and he can lie.
And politicians. Clearly corrupt republican politicians who are trying to destroy democracy for some reason.
This is why I’m so excited for Batman Azteca. Aztec warrior Batman killing colonisers like the insane conquistadore Two-Face
Are we going to pretend that Wayne Enterprises isn’t likely 1 of those 100?
I think that’s kinda the point of the comic…
In most Batman lore, I’d expect Wayne Enterprises to be #1 out of those 100.
