Someone on Bluesky asked me to talk about Batman. So, here I am, talking about Batman!
I’ll start off with a good “fuck Batman.” And let me tell a personal anecdote: I can read, basically, because of Batman. I’ve got a case of dyslexia. But – mostly by coincidence – when I was about five, my mother bought a box of comics at a garage sale. This big ol’ box of comics! Most of them were Batman comics, and I read the hell out of them. The images made it easier to put together the words, and the content motivated me to try. I can say with absolute sincerity if not for Batman comics, I might be semi-literate today. I think comic books are a great introduction to the world of literature. And for many years afterward, Batman was my favorite superhero. But, y’know, fuck Batman. Times change, and so do people.
Like, okay, seriously, Batman is this white billionaire who spends a lot of his time going around and beating the crap out of poor people, often people of color. He is consistently portrayed as a drug warrior, a guy who is deeply offended that people are getting high that he trains like a maniac and has armed himself to the teeth with bleeding edge military gear to knock the shit out of poor corner kids, usually of a shade darker.
And if that’s not enough, his rogue’s gallery is a bunch of mentally ill homeless people. That’s the Joker, right? A mentally ill homeless guy. He’s far from the only one. Two-Face, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, the Riddler, and many others are mentally ill without a fixed residence – often quite literally squatters in abandoned buildings. That’s just awful.
Not to mention that stuff he does where he takes kids to be tortured by those mentally ill homeless people. He’s a serial child abuser. Right now, in the comics, he’s taking his mentally ill son whose early life was spent under Ra’s and Talia’s psychological and physical abuse, and putting him in situations that are psychologically traumatic and incredibly violent. Rather than getting his son the psychological and psychiatric care Damien needs, Batman is instead subjecting him to brutality and ugliness. This is true with all the Robin’s. Dick Grayson didn’t need revenge against his family’s killers but tenderness, love, and counseling. Instead, he got thrust into a world of nightmarish horror of madness and violence. But probably the worst was what he did to Stephanie. He took her on to make Tim jealous, which led to her getting tortured and “killed.” Or was it Tim? Because of his participation with Batman, he lost his whole family. Regardless, Batman is a serial child abuser.
Oh, and along the way, he breaks so many laws! The most common one is illegal surveillance, but he also engages in a LOT of breaking and entering, theft (often data theft,) tampers with evidence, tortures people for information, obstructs justice, etc., etc., without dwelling on the whole “beats people up all the time” thing. He is also guilt for more than one murder, despite his comic book form’s “no killing “policy, he consistently engages in behavior that causes others to die. When you’re fighting someone, and they “happen” to fall off a building? Manslaughter, bare minimum, but a strong case for murder. But how do you fight crime when, in fighting crime, you become a terrible criminal?
And, over the years, Batman’s ego has been responsible for some truly nightmarish scenarios, too. There was that time when he decided to try to monitor everyone on Earth, for instance. Brother Eye was f’d up. And he keeps a list of contingencies to torture his friends because, y’know, he’s the kind of guy who does that – who makes plans on how to fuck up the people he “loves.” And these plans often get into the wrong hands – such as that time when Ra’s al-Ghul stole his files about how to defeat the Justice League (1) or that other time that Stephanie Brown stole his War Games plans. Just… I mean… just… awful, right?
Batman also has a far greater tolerance for institutional evil than the crimes of the poor. The big comic book companies say that’s because they don’t want to “be political,” but that’s nonsense. Turning the poor and mentally ill into the bad guys for a violent white billionaire is incredibly political. So, Batman’s relative quietism on institutional crimes is noteworthy. He’s not just kicking the shit out of poor and sick people, he’s giving a big ol’ pass to institutional crimes. It’s harder to get outraged at things that don’t happen, but I’ve noticed that he spends a lot more time spying on, stealing from, harassing, and hurting poor people than rich ones, that he both knows that Arkham is an evil hellscape of corruption and violence but keeps sending people there, ditto Blackgate Prison. And not once (to my knowledge) has he kicked the shit out any Gotham officials, discounting a few particularly corrupt cops. He’s certainly not going into the mayor’s office and engaging in the kind of violence and intimidation that he routinely uses on, say, the Penguin.
Plus, as time goes by, why do we imagine that billionaires would be the best at everything? Or even anything (other than making money, and he’s not even good at that since he’s a trust fund baby with almost zero interest in his companies.) We now have such great access to the minds of billionaires like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Mark Zuckerberg that we know they’re full of shit. Donald Trump constantly campaigns on how hard he works, but we all know he spends a lot of time watching TV while eating junk food or flying around his golf clubs hitting the links. Elon Musk tried to present himself as the greatest gamer in the world before he was forced to admit that he bought his way to the top – taking credit for other people’s work in account boosting… though we also know that he does play a lot of video games, often while high, which sorta undercuts his whole “I work all the time” image. So, beyond just what the character does, we live in a world where the shine is off the super-rich. We know they’re preposterous liars, exaggerating their abilities to stroke their inflated egoes. Year by year, Batman gets harder to swallow, in my opinion.
Batman is the fantasy of well-to-do white men – a world where a rich white man can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants without consequences. In the end, everything Batman does is just fine! He has the support of the community and the government, and his superhuman friends think he’s so great! The world NEEDS Batman! Even after he threatens the world with his vast surveillance projects (Brother Eye and the OMAC Project) or his friends are tormented because of his stolen plans (The Tower of Babel), or that time the Joker used Batman’s plans against the “Bat family” to torment Batman’s allies (Death of the Family, with added bonus that Batman hid from everyone that the Joker has known who they all are for years,) the comics are clear. We need Batman. For… reasons?
It is occasionally touched on that Batman is as mentally ill as his victims, but if that’s the case, he should be in a cell next to them in Arkham. Except he’d never go to Arkham, but some private facility, or, more likely, one of his superpowered friends would wave their magic wand over him, and he’d be “cured.” But he should be locked up because he’s a danger to himself and others.
My AI overlord editor also says I should address Bruce Wayne’s philanthropic work to balance my critique. So I will! To me, philanthropy is no great virtue. I don’t think that people should need to go to billionaires and beg for their help, not to mention that charities that target the wealthy often use most of their funds in all those galas and balls that Bruce Wayne attends that little of the money gets to the people who need the help. Through taxation, I think that society should redistribute the wealth of the rich for the benefit of society and that private philanthropy is a power move to keep people dependent on the rich. After all, if your charity’s funding comes from the wealthy, you can’t effectively criticize the concentration of wealth and its corrosive effect on society because you’ll lose your funding. Private philanthropy is a devil’s deal.
The short form: Batman is a bad guy. He’s a violent thug who tortures poor people, people of color, and the mentally ill. He’s a serial child abuser. He is, himself, probably deeply mentally ill, and that indicts everyone around him for allowing him – due to his wealth and status – to continue abusing people while endangering himself. (2)
As awful as all that is, it’s also bad writing. Usually, action heroes are portrayed as the underdog. Batman is not. He’s rich, powerful, well-trained, and well-armed. To me, that seems a very American fantasy. That Batman is at some kind of disadvantage to his mentally ill, wracked-with-poverty villains. That’s an unsubtle metaphor for how the US often sees itself, right? Incredibly rich and powerful but at constant peril from weaker, poorer countries whose main complaint is almost always that the US throws its weight around internationally. Al-Qaida didn’t hate us because of our “way of life” but because the US is constantly meddling in Middle Eastern affairs (for instance, the President saying we’re going to displace a couple of million Palestinians from Gaza to build hotels, or that time when the CIA overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran and replaced him with a tyrant whose secret police terrorized the country for decades!) But America is in constant peril from these weaker nations!
Even beyond the metaphor for a crazy right-wing view of the world, it’s bad writing in other ways. Making a hefty dose of your bad guys physically, mentally, technologically, and socially inferior to the protagonist is weird. Making crime stories that ignore the political dimension is shallow, particularly when the comics often acknowledge that Gotham City’s institutional problems play a role in its crime. Like, seriously? You acknowledge that Gotham is a poor city with a corrupt police department and a government captured by organized crime but the answer is never – never – that Batman go into the commissioner of police’s office and kick the shit out of him! Sorry, Jim, you’re part of the problem, not the solution! We’ve seen The Wire! (Have you seen The Wire? You should see The Wire! The smartest thing Cedric Daniels did was to turn down the commissioner’s job!) You can’t have integrity in a corrupt system and hold that position! And Baltimore is a peach compared to Gotham. Jim Gordon isn’t the solution. He’s part of the problem. Or would it be if the comics were written with greater social realism? (3)
We also live in a time when we can see the political and social consequences of having no restraint on the very rich. The most obvious example is Elon Musk, obviously. But he’s hardly the only one. Right now, the super-rich in the US – Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, the usual tech bro suspects – are engaging in a de facto takeover of the US government and are working to change society on a fundamental level. And regardless of how intelligent they were at the start of their careers (they are, as a group, quite clever people, but hardly the geniuses they’ve been made to be, I reckon,) their minds have been corroded by years of yes-men and lickspittles polishing every turd they shit out and calling it gold. But Batman is still, y’know, part of this parasitic social class, enacting a deeply regressive political agenda – violence against the poor and sick, but otherwise a true blue capitalist paternalist overlord – at a time when it is both easy to see how rotten the rich are while they wield unprecedented social and political capital to reshape society. For me, that’s not a good look, and, honestly, I have no idea how the character could be “saved.” I also find I have no desire to try.
On the other hand, some of my favorite comics storylines are still Batman storylines. I love “The Dark Knight” and “Year One” (and consider them to be some of the best work Frank Miller has done, despite my reservations about him, too.) “The Long Halloween” is great! I have an irrational love of the whole epic “No Man’s Land” arc! But as I grew and times changed, it has gotten so much harder for me to enjoy the character, even on the level of fantasy. In particular, the super-rich have come to define this era in a way that hasn’t been true since, I’d say, the days of the robber barons. And in the days of social media, they’re no longer distant figures, either, known only from press releases and often hagiographic biographies. Now, we have social media and a news culture where almost nothing escapes notice. We can see, in almost real-time, the bigotry, callousness, stupidity, and evil of the moneyed class.
I also don’t want this to come off as an attack against people who like Batman. I understand that almost everyone views Batman as a fantasy. Few want a thug going around and doing the things he does! Liking Batman doesn’t mean you’re an Elon Musk nuthugger or anarcho-capitalist screwball. I know this. To most, the character is some fun catharsis. Though I haven’t read any Batman comics in several years, I’ve heard that some of the new stuff is very good in storytelling and art. But I do have strong feelings about the character because he was, for so long, very important to me.
Lastly, there’s no particular financial reason to change the character. Batman is probably the most valuable comic-based intellectual property out there. So long as Batman makes all those incredibly profitable movies, video games, cartoons, etc., it isn’t in DC or Warner’s interests to change the character. It’ll be a while before we see broad acknowledgment that Batman is, at best, as mentally sick as the people he fights (though Garth Ennis has made some of these same points,) much less that he’s one of the foremost villains in the DCU. But I can dream that someday, Batman comics will be written like plots for “The Wire.” That’d be awesome. So, maybe the character can be saved, but I won’t hold my breath.
Notes:
(1) I’d’ve loved to have been there when Ra’s found that information. I mean, it’s Ra’s, and that’s totally the kind of thing he’d do because he’s a sick and evil guy, but did he pause for a smile? Did he laugh aloud at the absurdity of this guy, claiming to be a good guy, planning to torment his friends in case THEY became a problem when Batman is, himself, the cause of so much harm? Overall, I dislike the trope when bad guys say “we’re the same” nonsense, but in many ways, yeah, they’re the same – overprivileged rich assholes using their wealth, power, and connections to shape the world.
(2) Seriously, Alfred is fucked up and, in many ways, the author of it all. After Bruce Wayne’s parents’ deaths, he socially and physically isolated Bruce from other children and failed to get Bruce the counseling he needed to process the death of his parents. I have made great hay out of calling Batman a child abuser, and he is, but like most child abusers, he learned it from his caregivers.
(3) This might be a weird thing to say, but it is one of the ways that Batman comics are weird. Any critique of Superman would have to acknowledge that most of his enemies are literally aliens who could destroy the world by batting an eyelash. Wonder Woman’s rogue’s gallery is mostly fantasy-themed, gods and monsters. Most other comics are far more sci-fi and fantasy than Batman, whose best stories are about urban violence, crime, corruption, and decay. I find the editorial position that Batman refuses to face systematic corruption cowardly because the comics deal with crime, and systematic corruption is part of the problem as described in the comics. If Batman spent all of his time fighting space aliens, I would like the character more… but I would have far less interest in him.