Like all significant historical figures of the United States of America, Batman has been nearly entirely converted into a grotesque mass of marketable terms unconcerned with coherency, vision, or longevity. Modern Batman is a found-family father and pseudo-millenial concerned primarily with inert internal monologue therapy talk.
This is not Batman. These things do not materially contribute to the things that make Batman cool, or provide any ground for the character to exist on in perpetuity. Batman has been for many years and will continue to be an American Icon really in the vein of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. He is at least basically understood and readily recognizable to anyone who would consider themselves an American. He is part of every major American industry from film to Military Industrial work.
Batman, in earliest days, was a costumed cult-buster and detective. Gotham city was a fictional arena in which all the problems necessary for a character of that sort could co-exist and not upset the readers understanding of the real world circumstance of a particular place. Huns and vampires and wacky serial killers haunted the streets and alleys of Gotham city, and little could be done about it until the Batman took to the streets. It was so iconic that forever after Gotham has always in every writer and every artists imagination made an effort to mirror or parallel this. But the modern Batman has no place in this city, and this city has no place in modern Batman.
Gotham city is Batman’s kingdom. Bruce Wayne is an old money WASP who lives on a mansion on a hill on the outskirts of town. How many Lovecraft stories start like this? He, as Bruce Wayne, visits upon the city to council with people like the Chief of Police, socialites, the Mayor, etc. At night, he stalks the rooftops and roads as the spirit of vengeance, visiting those who do evil against the kingdom and its inhabitants. He is in every way, the mythical proto-germanic king. He is the vessel of the wild hunt which punishes the wicked that take from those who earn their living by honest labor otherwise uncontested by the incompetent and corrupt police force. He finds and exposes the non-human creatures that do terrible bloody violence in their own quest for vengeance or to slake inhuman bloodthirst.
His terrible form is in the same vein. The Bat is an inversion or a 60 degree turn of the winged, blind justice of european mythology. He is channeling the ancestral traditions that he is endowed to carry as a founding family of the city and of the country. He is entrusted with the public welfare, all the wealth of the Kingdom, and free reign over its territories. To some degree writers actually understand this. Denny O’Neill understands and created the conflict with Ras Al Ghul. Ras Al Ghul is an appropriate threat for Batman and for Gotham precisely because he is a foreign king with an alien and mechanically subversive culture. Not only that, but Ras presents the mytho-poetry of Damian Wayne- who is Mordred to his Arthur. The Court of Owls is similarly a “good” villain for Batman because they present a credible threat to King and Kingdom, they are just as old if not older than his family in Gotham, and they work in the same dark ways that the Batman does to accomplish their agenda.
I will continue to post about Batman in this thread, discussing specific villains and what I think constitutes proper awareness and respect for the character.
