Yes, Wonder Woman does have super senses - it’s part of Artemis’s gift to her, along with her ability to communicate with animals.
And, sure, Kyle Rayner lives in a shitty little apartment, now.
But that’s because he’s a superhero living on an artist’s income.
But he’s a Green Lantern - he won’t be living in a shitty apartment (with his ring out of his control, to boot) when he decides he’s gonna be a supervillain. The ring, also, is a sensory device, which protects the user.
And Aquaman lives under the ocean. Not outer space, no, but still an inhospitable environment.
Diana doesn’t have super-hearing or super-vision like Superman, even still.
And the Ring’s ‘automatic protection’ function was disabled with the destruction of the original Central Power Battery and hasn’t been seen since. Kyle explicitly did not have access to it.
And you mean Batman would have to buy some kind of stealth sub? Damn! Foiled again. If only he had billions of dollars..
She doesn’t need to be Superman’s level to keep some non-enhanced human from being able to sneak up on her.
Batman is a human. He is the best a human could possibly be, certainly. But he is still a human, with no powers, no enhancements, no NOTHING.
So, of course he could totally sneak past somebody with divinely enhanced senses.
The fact that until Bruce’s ‘death’, Batman only had access to this insane technology when he’s got to show up Superman (or whoever) should be a pretty good indicator that ‘oh, he can totally take out Superman, he has a Bat-sound-preventer!’ is pure nonsense.
And now that he routinely has it?
Hilariously, they don’t have him using it to show up everybody else in the League. For some reason, now that the Batmobile flies, and Batman regularly hangs around with Oracle in cyberspace, they don’t seem to feel the need to constantly put him in dick measuring contests with Superman and win.
I might just be stating the obvious here but the real reason this happens is because Batman might just be the ultimate example of Popularity Power.
People just like the character. Myself included. His psychology is interesting, he’s got great supporting characters and iconic villains. Some damn good stories have told with him. And he’s been the subject of a huge number of TV shows, cartoons, and movies over the last 70+ years so the general public is familiar with him in ways they aren’t with other superheroes. (The boom in superhero movies over the last 10 years is making this less relevant than it used to be, but I think it’s still true to a degree.)
“Popularity Power” directly leads to Power Creep as has been pointed out earlier in the thread.
Batman’s real power doesn’t come from his wealth, his intellect, his gadgets or anything else we see on the page. It comes from merchandising.
Well, the seeds of the idea are certainly there with the Batman/Superman fistfight in Dark Knight Returns, but if it was discussed among fans it was probably more in a joking manner than anything else. It wasn’t until Morrison’s JLA run in the late 90’s than anyone had tried taking the idea seriously.
There was of course also the one panel punch where Batman belted Guy Gardner in a previous issue of Justice League, but he baited into taking off his ring first. It was mostly played for comedy.
I got no problem with laying this thing at Morrison’s feet.
Ironically, it has a bit of a perverse effect on people like me, who are, usually, lukewarm to him, but like the characters he’s constantly upstaging, of making us actively dislike him. (As such, I’ve gotten to like him again, of late, since, like I mentioned, both Bruce and Dick are being allowed to shine without tearing everyone else down.)
Missed this post before - didn’t think to preview after writing my last one, even though the tab’d been sitting there for a while.
A particularly egregious example was from one of the first arcs. The Shaggy Man is on a rampage (or perhaps the General - I can’t remember, offhand, if it’s before or after the brain swap, but I think before). The League are doing a fairly lousy job of subduing him, until Batman causes him to zone out with a hypnotic whistle (shades of Silver Age Superman and his asspull superpowers)…which works fine until Superman blunders in, and breaks the hypnosis. But he does, himself, subdue Shaggy, albeit with Kryptonian-level strength, rather than by whistling. Not that that stops Bruce from tearing him a new one for being so unsubtle. (Keep in mind - rampaging Shaggy Man…this isn’t a stealth mission or anything.)
Batman, with prep, when well written is a fromidable foe. As a normal super hero he has no business hanging around anyone from the Justice League (I find non-powered humans in these uber strong teams to be very off putting in my suspension of disbelief).
If it makes you feel any better though, Batman with prep gets utterly and entirely curbstomped out of existence by Reed Richards with prep. It’s not even close. Richards with prep can, and has, done most anything.
I like this thread, and am pleased to see others who consider the Batman concept has gone over the edge. He was a noir character, a detective with gadgets and a gimmick. The constant enhancements of his abilities to compete with the super-duper types have been detrimental in the long run. An occasional story with him besting the big boys was entertaining, but it’s been taken way too far. What the hell is the point of having super powers if a rich psychopathic human is the superior?
See, there’s the real point. All of the “Batman can beat xxx if he’s prepared” arguments omit the question: What if xxx is prepared, too?
In which case, of course, Batman is toast, against just about any competent opponent with powers. 99.99% of the time.
The only time Batman really wins is when the writers stack the odds in Batman’s favour. (Which, of course, they usually do, because otherwise it’s a pretty boring story.)
I should point out that whatever writer’s “say”, Batman is superhumanly intelligent, goddamn omni-competent, his wealth approaches being a superpower in its own right, and he’s quite capable of utterly crushing a well-trained squad of heavily armed and flawlessly trained veteran warriors who themselves possess the advantages of surprise and terrain. His willpower has been repeatedly shown as far beyond that of mortal men.
So, yeah, he’s “human”. He’s just a human who completely shatters the ordinary limits in every conceivable way. He’s just less obviously superhuman than, say, superman.
I agree, and that’s not a trope that was invented for Batman, or even for comic books. it’s practically a staple of the pulp fiction from which early comics drew their ideas.
John Carter had a natural advantage over the Martians due to growing up under Earth’s higher gravitation, but he also happened to be apparently immortal, infinitely skilled in the art of combat, possessed of superhuman will and determination, and capable of astral projection, all even before he travelled to Mars. (One poster here even hypothesized that he was the incarnation of the Roman god Mars, and I thought it fit with everything we know about him even though Burroughs never directly hints at it.)
Tarzan, another Burroughs creation, was superhumanly intelligent, capable of communicating with–and often commanding–any animal he encountered, Spiderman-like in strength and agility (to say nothing of the ability to travel at incredible speeds by swinging in a manner that pretty much defies realism), and eventually became imortal. Being raised by apes is no more explanation for his abilities than Mongoose blood explains super-speed. He was clearly superhuman and essentially a superhero battling evil forces ranging from common thieves to mythical lost civilizations to outright monsters and super-powered beings.
Conan regularly won sword- and fist-fights with ancient demons and elder gods literally straight from the pages of Lovecraft. (I believe Robert Howard made direct allusions to Lovecraft’s ideas in the Conan stories.
Even Sherlock Holmes, besides his uncanny intellect and observational skills, was shown to casually unbend a thick, iron poker that a muscular thug had strained to bend.
These characters aren’t ordinary humans who were made unrealistically powerful through sloppy writing. They were superhuman figures deliberately drawn from the same tradition as the heros of Greek myth and folklore: “ordinary” humans who nevertheless had the ichor of the gods in their veins or rose to demigod status through adventure and ability. These, in turn, are part of an even older and more universal folk tradition that can be found in many cultures, including in the Biblical stories of Jacob, who shows both trickster characteristics (in his battles of wits with Essau and Laban) and superhuman strength (singlehandedly building monolithic alters of unhewn stone and literally wresting with–and nearly beating–God himself).
Bats has also been teaming up with Superman and other high-powered superheros since the Golden Age, which only makes sense if he can hold his own against them. If Morrison did anything, it was to rationalize this. The alternative (which was usually done before that) was to show Superman as inconsistently weak or incompetent.
That’s not to say that the writers always do a good job of showing Batman as theoretically-normal-but-superhuman, but it’s hardly a foreign imposition on the character.