At the age of seven, I finally came to terms with the fact that I was never going to be struck by lightning, doused with cosmic rays, or come to earth from Krypton. Oh, and that irradiated spider bite just gave me a rash.
But Batman gave me hope that with enough work “I coulda been a contendah”. I could’ve been a normal “non-super” hero.
Or even Batman by Dostoyevsky.
That’s sort of missing the point, though. Penguin, Bane, and Scarecrow are secondary villains, and considered separately aren’t objectively cooler characters than, say, Dr. Psycho, Crossbones, or the Trapster, but the point is that they add to the rich tapestry that is Batman’s rogues gallery. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and I think RealityChuck is right that the villains are part of Batman’s appeal. The fact that they’re compelling makes it easier to tell good Batman stories.
Also, every successful character finds success because of marketing; that seems to me neither here nor there.
That’s a particularly useless answer. Every comic book character is aggressively marketed. Very few of them succeed the way Batman has succeeded. There is something about this character that is singularly appealing to the general public, in a way that greatly outstrips similar characters. “Marketing” is not a sufficient explanation for this phenomenon. The same marketing is used to push Aqua Man - why isn’t Aqua Man as successful?
“Arbitrarily decided to be cool,” doesn’t really make much sense. It’s not like “cool” is something that a corporation can order shipped in by cargo container from China. Every company on Earth is attempting to manufacture a product that’s “cool.” The overwhelming majority of these attempts fail. There is clearly something that distinguishes those attempts that succeed, from those attempts that fail, and I suspect the answer is a bit more complex than, “It’s marketing, period.”
Properly written, the character has no overt fantasy elements. He doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do with some intense Green Beret training and some weeknights at the dojo.
This is exactly untrue. Batman, Spider-Man, & formerly Superman are aggressively marketed. Most other comic book characters are, by comparison, barely marketed at all. DC puts everything into Batman, so only Batman gets the market penetration, so they keep putting everything into Batman.
How does such a cycle begin?
But if the success of Batman is entirely because of marketing, why don’t DC and Marvel apply those same marketing forces to every character in their stable? If there’s nothing at all to the success of Batman other than marketing, then marketing should be able to make any character as popular as Batman.
In a related question, if the marketing executives at the big comic book houses are so practiced at their craft that they can make any character a pop-culture icon just by throwing marketing money at it, without regard to any inherent qualities to the property itself, why the hell are they so bad at convincing people to actually buy comics?
His name is a trochee.
Batman Robin Alfred Joker Penguin!
“Two-Face” also lends itself to trochaic pronunciation.
Doesn’t matter. The question was why Batman has endured so long. DC as a company runs on multi-generational nostalgia, what might be termed a pop-culture conservatism.
I think it goes to the question of whether the “cool” of Batman is arbitrary, as you suggested, or not.
Let’s look at another long-running character concept with multiple interpretations–say, James Bond–is his popularity also arbitrary and due to nothing but marketing? Or is he marketed because the original character concept, in fact, worked and appealed to people?
I honestly think it’s the origin story. He’s utterly driven, and brutal without remorse, but we forgive him–in fact, celebrate him–because what his has become is a consequence of what he’s been through. As a hero, he’s already had his tragic fall. The humanity in him died in that alley; all that’s left is righteous, disciplined determination to fight evil.
With an origin like that, it it any wonder that scores of writers have wrung so many good stories from the character?
It’s both. Batman as a character took off pretty quickly after his creation, becoming one of the first superheroes to headline his own comics. That popularities leads to things like movie serials, merchandise, and appearing in multiple comics. That just kind of snowballs to the point where it’s unusual for there not to be a Batman cartoon on the air, Batman movies almost always do very well at the box office, and parents are comfortable buying their kids Batman stuff because they’re familiar with the character.
At this point Batman has so much momentum behind Batman’s popularity that marketing is just part of what leads people to, say, buy Batman toys and tickets to Batman movies. Warner Bros. could pour every last cent they have in the bank into promoting Metamorpho, the Element Man and that character wouldn’t have a fraction of Batman’s mass appeal.
Also, “cool” is necessarily arbitrary.
Superman and Batman are both DC comic characters. You say that they both are aggressively marketed, then say that DC puts everything into Batman.
Which is it?
This is it for me. Batman is human–physiologically, he’s no different from anybody else. He has trained himself to be a master detective, and he is physically fit to an almost-unreal point, but he started out just like the rest of us.
It’s about the exploits of seven children who are stalked by an inter-dimensional evil force, but that’s not important right now Robin. Quick to the bat cave!
But what gives Batman longevity in comparison with, say, the Punisher? Back in the early 90’s the Punisher had three monthly books, tons of miniseries, crossovers, etc. Marvel was marketing the hell out of the character. A few years later there were no Punisher comics to be found. Meanwhile Batman’s been going strong for 80 years.
Yeah, if only someone had gunned down your parents right in front of you, you’d be fighting crime today!
I daresay a large part of Batman’s success is the teen sidekick, which in 1940 helped distance him from the numerous other brooding vengeance-minded vigilantes then popular in comics and pulps.
I don’t know about that. Back then, pretty much everyone had a teen sidekick. Off the top of my head, Flash, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, and Captain America all jumped on that boat. Even Superman had his pal Jimmy Olsen. All the original sidekicks have grown up in continuity, but Robin’s the only one who got replaced with a new kid. (Although, it does still seem to be a bit of a thing in Marvel comics, with characters like Amadeus Cho, and whatever bit of jailbait Wolverine is hanging out with lately.) Still, it does raise a good companion question to the OP: what is it about Robin that’s made him so enduring?