What is it about Batman?

[Miller]

@Scumpup

If anything, Golden Age Batsy is more psycho than modern grim n’ gritty Batsy. You have to be more psychotic, IMPO, to go around beating people up with a smile on your face (all the while trading quips with your sidekick) than to do so angrily.

You’re not the first to notice Batman’s mellowing since his creation.

[Derleth]

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” – Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

“It’s the car, right? Chicks dig the car.” – Batman, Batman Forever

(For the record, my favorite Batman books (so far) are “The Dark Knight Returns”, “Year One”, “The Long Halloween”, and “Dark Victory”.)

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@GoodOmens

He’s us, but better.

I like Batman, but that’s not quite true. His enormous wealth – inherited in the first place and maintained by the good offices of his trusted retainer Lucius Fox – makes him as fantabulous as Superman in many ways.

Spider-Man is the superhero who is basically an ordinary guy. He’s smart but not a genius (yes, I know he’s genius by real-world standards, but in a comic-book world the competition’s much tougher); he has perpetual problems with money with which his powers don’t help; he has a living parent (May is his mother in all but biology & title) who is both adored and annoying. He feels a lot more real than Batman, and is certainly more relatable.

[asterion]

@StusBlues

No, it was from the Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner) story where one of GL’s sidekicks gets gay-bashed.

In the *Bruce Wayne: Fugitive *series, Batman has an exchange with a mercenary leader who taunts him. The mercenary’s intel says conclusively that Batman doesn’t kill. Batman confirms this; he will only disable the mercenary’s crew. The Dark Knight goes into explicit detail as to how he will do this: he will injure the kidney of one thug (who has given the other to a relative), give a joint wound (prone to infection) to another thug who is allergic to antibiotics, and so on down the line. It’s a pretty chilling vignette.

Elsewhere in the series, Batman confides to the policeman who handled his parents’ murder case that it was reasonably easy to get a confession from the first major killer he brought in: he just dangled him in front of an oncoming train.

In another example whose provenance I can’t recall, Batman was exposed to Scarecrow’s gas and experienced the worst fear he had. Of course, this was his parents’ death–the thing that had driven him into his life as a vigilante. Reliving that scene made him so insanely angry that he nearly beat Scarecrow to death; I forget who stopped him or how they did it, but it was a frightening thing to behold.

This is the Batman I grew up with. Since the late 1970s, he’s been about the most brutal hero in the DC universe who refuses to kill. If you go back to the Golden Age, you see a lot of the same stuff. You may not see it as much in the Silver Age, and not at all on the campy TV series, but those are alternate imaginings of the character; almost every series I’ve read since then recapitulates Batman’s origin story periodically, reminding the reader of the sorrow and rage that drive him. I’d say the dark drives that he started with are a big part of why he’s endured. Superhuman motivation is his only power, and in Batman’s case it’s not pretty.

Something I’ve noticed (I’m not much of one for reading comic books) watching my DVDs of Batman: The Animated Series and playing games like Batman: Arkham Asylum is that Batman may not be out to kill, but I’m not sure he cares if the bad guys die later. I don’t think you can throw people into and through things, hang them upside down, beat the crap out of them, and so on without racking up a body count. And the thing is, it’s never mentioned at all. It’s almost like looking for loopholes in a religion–the Sabbath setting on my oven, for example.

[Tom_Scud]

@asterion

Something I’ve noticed (I’m not much of one for reading comic books) watching my DVDs of Batman: The Animated Series and playing games like Batman: Arkham Asylum is that Batman may not be out to kill, but I’m not sure he cares if the bad guys die later. I don’t think you can throw people into and through things, hang them upside down, beat the crap out of them, and so on without racking up a body count. And the thing is, it’s never mentioned at all. It’s almost like looking for loopholes in a religion–the Sabbath setting on my oven, for example.

Back in the day they used to pretend that The Hulk had never killed anyone. Even accidentally.

ETA: after googling, apparently they still do.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@StusBlues

In another example whose provenance I can’t recall, Batman was exposed to Scarecrow’s gas and experienced the worst fear he had. Of course, this was his parents’ death–the thing that had driven him into his life as a vigilante. Reliving that scene made him so insanely angry that he nearly beat Scarecrow to death; I forget who stopped him or how they did it, but it was a frightening thing to behold.

IIRC, an exhausted Batman gets exposed to the Scarecrow’s gas in the “Knightfall” storyline and winds up seeing the death of Robin at the hands of the Joker. ** JASON TODD,** he screams while delivering a frenzied beatdown. JASON TODD!

[Capitaine_Zombie]

@Tom_Scud

Back in the day they used to pretend that The Hulk had never killed anyone. Even accidentally.

ETA: after googling, apparently they still do.

Hey, The Hulk appeared as Banner was trying to develop a Gamma bomb. That is an incredibly powerful bomb that would destroy structures but leave people unscathed. That’s the Hulk itself. Banner did succeed in making his bomb, he just didnt consider he’d have to carry it in his body forever.