You lost me at Bruce Wayne saying that the city should spend more on infrastructure.
This is ultra-Libertarian playboy Bruce Wayne who attends lavish rich guy parties in a city that’s crumbling all around him. He could do so much to solve Gotham’s problems by just paying higher taxes, but instead he spends his money coming up with cool gadgets he can use to beat up people who escaped from underfunded insane asylums.
Several comic lines have explored this issue. It’s always come down to the fact that there are people just as rich as Wayne who are corrupt and bankrolling mob families, drug traffic, providing weapons, lobbying government, etc. Essentially it is one billionaire against a dozen billionaires. So, he still has to don the bat suit to do illegally the shit he can’t do legally. Often he ends up using intel gathered as the bat for rich-people power plays to oust other corrupt rich people.
I think it’s poignant of real life. If you want to stay rich, you don’t fuck with the other rich people, because they will disappear you faster than you can blink. Being rich is a club that you are only part of until you start fucking with other people’s wealth. If you are an ostracized solitary sod, who doesn’t go to any social event and all you political stances are openly hostile against the entire rich class you are a part of, you won’t stay rich for long and all the power that comes from that wealth will disappear, if you get to keep your life at all. Without all his money, Batman is just a really buff dude who is very smart and knows martial arts. I’ve met a few of those. Almost all of them broke as fuck.
Essentially it is one billionaire against a dozen billionaires.
One billionaire with all the high-tech toys in the world. He could easily bug all these billionaires and expose them. It seems to me that if he wanted real lasting change, they’d be his primary targets. Sure, occasionally there’s a storyline like that, but it’s rare.
If you want to stay rich, you don’t fuck with the other rich people
Which is one of the most corrupt points of view you can have. Is staying rich so important to Batman that he’ll turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of the other rich people?
It’s basically the corrupt effective altruist playbook. Sure, I could help with these issues, but I can most effectively fix the world if I’m ultra rich, so my focus is going to be becoming / staying ultra rich, then I’ll do a bit of charity on the side.
is this a specific comic storyline? because i read he spends most of his money on all sorts of programs and infrastructure and help, but gotham is cursed by a demon so it never improves
It’s not a specific storyline, it’s just the status quo in the Bat Universe.
Maybe he donates to various worthy causes here or there, but it doesn’t seem to be a big enough donation to affect his rich playboy lifestyle at all, nor does it affect his budget for gadgets. What he never does is campaign for a major tax increase for billionaires. He’s never meeting with the “Bernie Sanders” equivalent in Gotham, trying to push through progressive legislation.
The thing is, his character has the perfect excuse. He’s really Batman, and Bruce Wayne is just a cover identity. But, to keep up appearances, he has to put on his tux and go to ultra-rich person parties as Bruce Wayne. It would seem suspicious and draw unwanted attention if his cover identity Bruce Wayne started lobbying for higher taxes on the rich, so he gets to use that as an excuse for why that filthy playboy Bruce Wayne never does those things. It’s so that Batman can keep going out there and “fighting crime”. AFAIK he’s never outright said that that’s his excuse for not lobbying for progressive causes. But, he has definitely said that he goes to ultra-rich person functions as Bruce Wayne and plays the idle rich guy because he needs to keep his cover story intact. It’s mighty convenient, if you ask me.
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“Leftists” are socialists. The “left” is a relative term.
Liberals aren’t leftists. They’re the left (in most places that speak English). There’s a difference.
Wayne Corp’s profits, built by exploiting their workers, being used for the public good as defined by its owner is liberalism at its ideal, not socialism.
Bruce Wayne spends an absurd amount of money keeping Gotham running.
Is there any hint that the amount he spends is having any meaningful impact on his wealth?
If he’s a billionaire and his wealth goes up by $100m/year but he only spends $50m on charity, his charity is nowhere near enough.
The man perpetually puts all of his money back into Gotham.
If that were true he wouldn’t be rich.
a lot of that series, is just Bruce Wayne living his normal life and the whole life is just philanthropy
You say that as if it’s a good thing. Unless that philanthropy is actively making him poor, it’s just something he does to make himself feel good.
He ends up supporting environmental policies … Bludhaven PD.
And then he goes back to his mansion where his butler helps him get ready for bed.
His money is the source of the problem, and he never seems to get any poorer. Is he cursed to be rich? Or is he telling the “effective altruist” lie that he can only continue to good things if he’s insanely rich?
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First off, having that much money in and of itself is going to generate fuckloads of money.
How? Money doesn’t magically just appear. That money comes from somewhere. Every dollar Wayne receives is profit, profit that could go instead to lowering costs for Wayne Enterprises customers. Given that Wayne Enterprises is a huge conglomerate that seems to have its fingers in everything, he’s probably literally taking money from the pockets of Gotham residents and putting it into his own bank account.
I am utterly incapable of seeing how someone helping others to make themselves better is actually a bad thing overall.
Because he’s doing small individual things for individual people when he’s simultaneously making the world a worse place by vacuuming up absurd amounts of profit from all the Wayne Enterprises customers.
It’s like a chemical company that’s poisoning a river, sickening millions, while simultaneously offering a scholarship to one kid, and getting all the good press that scholarship can offer.
His character builds Orphanages and community centers because he is rich.
Yes, individual orphanages, costing what, a few million to build? Meanwhile, Wayne Enterprises is generating massive profits that bring in billions of dollars. His vast enterprise is probably creating the orphans in the first place.
He’s just taking advantage of a world that’s fucked and using the fucked things for good.
He’s certainly taking advantage of the world, and yeah, he does some individual small-scale good, but it doesn’t outweigh the large scale evil that Wayne Enterprises does.
By being rich, he just becomes more rich because that is how the world works.
It doesn’t just work like that. Getting richer is a decision. Instead of taking massive profits from his worldwide enterprises, he could reduce prices and run his companies at break even. But, he prefers to get insanely rich off the backs of all the Wayne Enterprises customers.
Unless you give away literally every dollar, you’re going to make money just by being rich. It’s stupid but that’s how it works.
No it isn’t, getting rich is a decision. Especially true when you’re the poweful head of a company where it would be the simplest possible thing to just lower prices.
The problem isn’t Bruce Wayne, the problem is the system.
And Wayne loves the system because it allows him to get fabulously wealthy while pretending that he’s doing good.
Batman has openly said on multiple occasions that he doesn’t want to be rich
Gee, if only there were a way to not be rich. I guess a genius like Bruce Wayne can’t figure out how to not be rich, so it’s not possible, so he’s cursed to just be fabulously rich.
Seriously. I want you to actually name me a legitimate option of what he could do
- Lower the costs charged by Wayne Enterprises so that it is no longer generating any profit
- Donate Wayne Enterprises stock to charities, not just pay a tiny fraction of his overall wealth to make an orphanage or something. Actually give them stock in his company so that instead of him getting rich, the orphanage gets rich.
- Spend his insane wealth buying up every news source around and having them relentlessly push a progressive agenda, demanding massive wealth taxes on the ultra rich, etc.
- Donate all of his Wayne Enterprises stock to endowments that fund research institution
- Instead of partying with the other ultra rich, call them out, spend all his money exposing them and destroying them if they refuse to reform
- Find the Bernie Sanders of Gotham and campaign with him relentlessly, not just hosting an occasional charity dinner, but appearing with him in every public speaking opportunity, using himself as an example of how rich people get every break imaginable.
- Instead of his R&D divisions producing IP owned by Wayne Enterprises, open it up and release everything created into the public domain.
Basically, the only reason he’s rich is that he chooses to have Wayne Enterprises make a profit. There are a lot of ways that he could either choose to not have Wayne Enterprises make a profit, or could choose to give away all his Wayne Enterprises stock.
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It’s impossible for me to see him as anything other than the sole villain in the series
metro man is objectively a better person than superman
Were there any superman comics that were just about the Clark Kent personality and him using super hearing or this example to find a story and then having to find the right leads and ask the right questions to find the story that he already knows is true? Cause I would read the hell out of that.
I’ve never heard of that. But, I’ve heard that writers say it’s really hard to write good Superman stories because of his super hearing. This guy is portrayed as someone who is always fighting for what he believes in. With his super hearing, he is never unaware of the crimes going on around him. He hears every case of domestic violence, every mugging, every rape, every suicide attempt in a huge city of millions of people. But, sometimes he wants to be Clark Kent, so he has to just ignore all those horrors going on around him.
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City’s Samaritan is a good take on that.
He’s basically Superman (except from the future, not another planet), down to working for a newspaper.
I don’t recall if he’s got superhearing, but he’s got a pocket supercomputer that tells him where he’s needed in the optimum order to maximise how much he can help.
He counts every fraction of a second he spends flying from place to place, because that’s the only part of the job he really enjoys, the only time he can relax. Forty-five seconds is a great day.
And when he finally gets home, exhausted, to sleep for a few hours before starting the next day, he dreams of flying.
Does his supercomputer compute how much sleep and downtime he needs?
I don’t recall, but probably.
I think he got a day off once to go on a date, with the whole equivalent of the Justice League covering for him, if I’m not misremembering.
I have to reread Astro City one of these days. It was a nice series. A homage to classic superhero books.
Sounds interesting. I like it when they find a quirk like that and explore what it would mean.
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I’ve heard James Gunn referred as the “Loser’s director”. Because he turns all the characters he touches into pathetic losers and ridiculous versions of themselves. Then he comes out and shows superman in the fucking Yamcha pose. This movie is gonna suck so bad. Like he is riddled in bed unconscious for over half of the trailer. His own fucking dog kicks him and abuses him. He is even humiliated by Lois with the most basic journalist questions that he should know because he is fucking Clark Kent and a damn good journalist himself. The poster gif of the movie is Superman being hit in the back of the head with a water bottle, and flinching (which they fixed with CGI for the trailer because the criticism went viral). The big monster at the end is literally a giant dick shaped jellyfish.
James Gunn is such a bad director.
Still has to track down his sources
“Superman told me he saw them with his own x-ray vision eyes.”
Kinda like how Peter Parker gets all the best photographs of Spider-Man. Because they are friends.
A lot of causeheads in this thread. I guess it’s easy not to compromise your beliefs when all you’re doing is soapbox online.
