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.
what the story with Lex Luthor is about
I dunno, seems to end with a big fight and / or kryptonite almost as often anyway. Then again, doesn’t that kinda undermine your original point?
Batman WAS the CEO of companies
self punch then?
And there’s no solidarity like class solidarity. Remember Ellen Degeneres hanging out with Bush? Bruce Wayne would’ve been in that skybox too.
“Dark Knight Rises” plot is basically “Bane starts a revolution of the people, and a billionaire must stop him”.
This is why I’m so excited for Batman Azteca. Aztec warrior Batman killing colonisers like the insane conquistadore Two-Face
My brother in Christ, Batman is a billionaire CEO.
Yeah but he is on “our team” though!
People can’t spot corpo propaganda, a lot of educating to be done.
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.
his goals are simply to take an impossible problem to fix and reduce harm from it as much as possible
Corpo propaganda
Nothing can be done, nobody to blame, cope peasant
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.
Treating people with dignity and respect creates a functional society…
Doing the opposite …
Until we start naming people who are doing this nothing will change but NPC normies worship their dear daddies
I think more Superman.
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.
Also his arch nemesis is already a Billionaire.
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.
No he won’t, batman fulfills every billionaires fantasy of dressing up in a costume and beating up poor people.
Yes. Not one really questions why Gotham has such a high crime rate, but where there’s poverty there’s crime. I think we need a working man’s batman.
Someone whose super power isn’t having infinite resources.
You mean like daredevil?
The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_philanthropy
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.
Bruce is a billionaire. He’s on their side.
this. here’s proof https://x.com/PeoplesMomentum/status/1194221297603088386?ref_src=twsrc
And remember, there’s no ethical billionaires, no matter how much philanthropy they do. Their billions are out there exploiting people.
Philanthropy is just the wealthy justifying their tax avoidance by wanking publically about how giving they are. If they were genuine about their concerns for giving back, they would pay their fucking taxes and at a higher rate. Tax avoidance and financial shit fuckery like corporate bailouts, share buy backs and COVID payments accelerate wealth acruell and drive up inflation and wage stagnation. Fuck. Them. All.
Superman was already going after CEOs when Baam was first created. Batman was always a hero for the right wing.
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.
You’re thinking of Poison Ivy.
You’ve got Batman mixed up with the Punisher, OP.
No, Poison Ivy.
Or Green Arrow, really.
Isn’t Queen also a billionaire CEO…?
Trust fund baby, but part of his story is that he straight up murders rich and powerful people who aren’t using it to benefit society.
That would work too.
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.
Watch The Boys
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
He also beats up rich people, like the Penguin.thr Joker and Riddler and all those guys get their crazy gadgets and hordes of minions somehow. They must be rich af
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.
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…),
That’s what happens if you take all your knowledge from memes. Good luck.
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.
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 canonically cursed in most continuities
