Bruce is a billionaire. He’s on their side.
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.
this. here’s proof https://x.com/PeoplesMomentum/status/1194221297603088386?ref_src=twsrc
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.
You’re thinking of Poison Ivy.
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.
Batman was a CEO of a company.
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.
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.
Wish we had this instead of a growling guy in a mask headbutting a clown
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.
don’t worry i don’t take it personally. I’ll look into the court of owls.
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.
the group that is always watching Gotham and influencing it state and its key figures.
Bruce is just jealous of being left out of the “cool kids” group, so he plays the other team
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 loversidekick - 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.
Why do you refuse to answer the comments disproving you?
No. Unequivocally no. This might make sense on its face but it misunderstands Batman at a fundamental level- Batman is a hero who cannot make sense. He is severely mentally ill and craves change physically and instantly wrought by his own two hands.
If a CEO were doing something outlandishly and visibly evil then they might find themselves on Batman’s radar, but exacerbating wealth inequality is just not something Batman usually cares about. Would it make sense for Batman to do something about it? Yes. Absolutely. Would the crazy 100 kg gymnast dressed like a giant bat, who has made a nightly ritual of shattering the spines of impoverished criminal dockworkers do that? No.
Now daredevil, daredevil might find himself beating the ass off a shady Manhattan CEO. But daredevil is sane, reasonable, and goal oriented and Batman is just not.
Yeah, doesn’t the dude consider Batman his true identity and Bruce Wayne the costume?
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
Name a place with zero crime or corruption thanks to the actions of a single person.
Are we going to pretend that Wayne Enterprises isn’t likely 1 of those 100?
In most Batman lore, I’d expect Wayne Enterprises to be #1 out of those 100.
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. The Joker and Riddler and all those guys get their crazy gadgets and hordes of minions somehow. They must be rich af
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.
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.
Batman WAS the CEO of companies
Like Lex Luthor, who hes fought on several occasions? Or more like the Court of Owls, one of his recurring set of villains?
Who you want is Rorschach as others have pointed out Batman is part of the problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_(character)
FUCK NO!
Rorschach is a fascist, he only works in absolutes and while the Batman tries not to kill, Rorschach has no such regard for human life. He detests the junky as much as the murderer, for him there is only pureness and evil, every little bit of amoral behavior will be punished and at the same time he considers his own vigilantism as above the law.
He’s a misogynist who thinks that the Comedian raping Silk Spectre was just a “moral lapse”. He holds even for his time outdated socially conservative views and strongly opposes what we would call (gender and sexual) minority rights.
Rorschach is unbending and uncompromising, he is beholden only to his conservative rigid views of black and white morality with no room for shades of grey. That might not sound so bad at first, but if you think about it, that is definitely not someone who you want as a judge of people.
On top of that he’s a far-right believer, he’s not a government man in the same way the alt-right are not. His thinking is deeply conspiratorial and paranoid with a huge dollop of delusion. He’s better described as an Ayn Rand paleolibertarian.
Thinking about it he definitely would fit right in with today’s alt-right with the only difference that (if - and only if - he would not buy into their conspiracy theories - and he’s very much likely to do so) he would detest Trump for his lying.
But Rorschach is definitely the kinda guy who’d shoot up a pizza place looking for tortured kids in the basement.
I love him as a character, he’s one of the best written vigilante “heros” out there but what’s so fascinating - to me at least - is that his principled moral conviction is contrasted by how immensely unlikeable this man is and how his moral uprightness relies on the moral compass of a deranged 11 year old with a gun.
Rorschach is Batman but worse in every single way. All the childhood trauma and mental illness without any of the money, good manners, or training, and with several extra doses of far right conspiranoia and misogyny.
If you read Rorschach as the good guy in Watchmen, you completely misinterpreted what Moore was trying to say. If there’s any good guys in Watchmen (or at least not bad guys), and that’s a big if, it’s the folks around the newsstand, obviously not counting Kovacs.
No he won’t, batman fulfills every billionaires fantasy of dressing up in a costume and beating up poor people.
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.
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?
He works as a lawyer? Typically not a billionaire but not exactly struggling financially either.
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.
