I didn’t say it was good, I said it was extra. Everything about Batman is extra. He’s not just good at figuring things out, he’s The World’s Greatest Detective. He’s not just good at fighting, he’s Mastered Every Martial Art. And he’s not just rich, he’s The Richest Man on the Planet.
There’s a scene in the Justice League animated series where Batman casually drops that he’s bought an orbital space station for the League’s headquarters, and hidden the cost in a line item in the Wayne Industries budget. He’s so rich he can hide a whole-ass space station in the petty cash slush fund. That’s objectively hilarious, and there’s no way you’re going to convince me that he’d be improved as a character by making him not rich enough to do shit like that.
He does. That’s literally my entire point. He’s just got so much money that it would take him decades to spend it all, and comic books don’t really do the whole “passage of time” thing - Batman is eternally ten to fifteen years into his war on crime. If it takes thirty years to blow through the entire Wayne fortune, then he’s perpetually halfway through his inheritance.
I’m sure; there always are, in comic books. But Joe Chill as a random nobody is the one that best serves the story, so that’s the one that I choose to consider canonical.
Conversely, have there been any examples of real world multimillionaires decided to dress up in tights and a cape and go out on the streets punching bank robbers?
There’s a comic where Batman shows up at Black Mask’s apartment where he’s surrounded by henchman. Instead of fighting them, he pops a DVD in the player and Bruce Waybe appears on the television saying something like, “You all probably had some difficult circumstances that led you to this life. You’ve probably gone to prison and weren’t able to find a regular job when you looked for one. But eventually you’re going to go back to prison or get injured and Black Mask isn’t going to take care of you. He doens’t care about you. If you come down to the Wayne Foundation tomorrow, I promise each and every one of you a job. You can start a better life.”
The henchman look at Batman, they turn to Black Mask, and they walk away en masse.
In WATCHMEN, a costumed adventurer donated his family fortune to charity before (a) making a second fortune, and getting yet more charity work funded, in his spare time from (b) working to mitigate deforestation and free up money for nations “to spend upon their old; their sick and homeless; on their children’s educations.”
The 1987 of Watchman already had several major deviations from the real 1987: Richard Nixon was still president, the existence of Dr. Manhattan allowed the US to run a much hotter Cold War, and the US was no longer on the oil economy, thanks to Dr. Manhattan’s ability to synthesize large volumes of otherwise ultra rare fissile material. It was those specific factors that, with the trigger of Dr. Manhattan disappearing, would lead to nuclear war in Ozymandius’s calculations. His prediction never applied to the real world chance of nuclear war, only one where a single metahuman was the lynchpin to the entire world order.
I think that the original readers were also supposed to regard it as not inevitable. It’s just that Ozymandias thought it was inevitable. He was justified only in his own mind. A mind which, despite all his genius, was all too fallible.
But Dr. Manhattan only disappeared because Ozymandias had engineered that, too. It really does come down to “It’s all Ozymandias’s fault, because of his immense hubris”.
Dr. Manhattan was going to leave Earth sooner or later. He’s barely connected to his former humanity, and less and less concerned with human affairs in general. Ozy’s smear campaign against him was to make sure it happened on a time-table Ozy could control. And his departure is going to cripple the US. He’s not only our primary nuclear deterrent, he’s the cornerstone of our entire energy economy. After the last several decades of repeatedly humiliating the Russians thanks to our big, blue, naked win button, they’re going to respond to that aggressively, and the American response is going to be determined by Richard Milhous Nixon.
Ozy was absolutely right about the inevitability of nuclear war.