Political Memes

Maybe he’s just flawed. I dunno, it’s just a comic book character.

Being just a comic book character is not a valid excuse, especially given the history of our society holding the presumptions that a) comics are just for kids, and b) we can hold content for kids to a lower standard of quality than we hold our content for adults.

Batman may be just a comic book character but then Batman is a bad comic book character and could be a better one. It's worse since most versions of Batman in the 20th and 21st centuries portray hold him up as a paragon of righteousness. World's Greatest Detective, indeed.

Portraying Batman as an anti-villain or antihero, in which the narrative reflects awareness of Wayne's flaws, is, absolutely, a viable direction for Batman stories to go. And it sometimes has been done that way to make it interesting. But too often Batman is portrayed as a hero, and doing so comes with a tuckfun of unfortunate implications. Most versions of Batman have not aged well, and the general concept of Batman, played unironically, has not aged well.

I'm reminded of a presumption that comes with Superman 1978; To quote Bob Chipman:

[Superman] and his world only work when approached from a place of optimism: …Superman only makes sense in the context of a worldview where good is the default setting of the universe and the job of a being of godlike power who aims to do good is to fix things when they break and thwart evil from spoiling the natural state of goodness.

Because if the universe is not good at its core then the moral responsibility of that same godlike being who wants to do good is to assume power absolutely and make the universe good by force.

And that’s not Superman.

note: I quote this originally (and cite sources) here talking about Supergirl, who is, in the TV series, thrust in a world that is not inherently good by definition. And then Supergirl is then hobbled by government agencies with kryptonite technology and forced into becoming an agent of state. Where Superman is allowed to be a benevolent god (sometimes, but not always, having to contend with challenging problems), Supergirl always has to be overwhelmed by the forces against her... I digress.

Batman as the World's Greatest Detective only works in the same system, albeit at a sociopolitical level. He works when the system of state and social institutions are inherently good, and he's fixing corrupting influences, rather than fighting the system itself because it is so corrupt that it needs to be changed via revolution (not necessarily violent revolution, but certainly the degree of extreme overhaul and reform that warrants revolution). And Bruce Wayne is not revolutionary, in fact would oppose revolutionary efforts -- and has.

This, incidentally is a failure of the MCU avengers movies, which take place in a post 9/11 America in which the climate crisis is real and the response to it by institutional powers has been underwhelming and ineffective (and have doomed 7/8ths of the human population and counting). The Avengers only work in a world where society is intrinsically good and stable. Curiously a lot of the antagonists are revolutionary but have to include a STEP 4: Annihilate a couple billion people in their plan to show they are, in fact, villainous.

Anyway, comics are not just for kids, and this has absolutely been the case since the 1980s. And children deserve a higher quality of comic book than ones that posit that Batman is a force for good in a society that works.

Yes, like Chipman, I've thought about this at length, and was a big fan of Batman as a kid and young adult until I realized the society we live in isn't the good, stable one. It's something of a grudge.