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havent you ever read a batman comic where he thinks about how all this death and violence and punishment of the guilty has done nothing to satisfy him?
Well, he hasn't actually tried the death and violence route, has he? I wouldn't be satisfied either if my job consisted of sending psychos to the asylum, waiting for them to escape, and doing it again. It's always seemed odd to me that Batman is presented as this terrifying figure of the night, on the edge of insanity, able to make hardened criminals shit their pants and surrender on sight, when all he actually does is punch people and take them to jail. I'd be more frightened of fighting an old lady than Batman; the old lady might have a gun in her purse.
If he actually wants satisfaction for the death of his parents, then maybe he should, you know, cap Joe Chill and set the Joker on fire and flay the Penguin alive and see if that makes him feel better. If nothing else, it'd give an actual reason for the dark reputation he's supposed to rely on for survival. Like Gail Simone says, "Whoever said you can't solve problems through violence just wasn't trying hard enough."
I don't particularly object to reading about a guy with a code against killing, but I find it a flaw in most Batman stories that I'm supposed to consider him edgy and scary anyway.
Which, to return to the thread topic, is analogous to one of the problems with Superman. Namely, that the reader is supposed to consider him the bestest superhero in the world. After all, that's what every other hero says whenever his name comes up. But Supes doesn't actually do much to support this. He punches villains and averts cosmic threats just like five thousand other superheroes, except possibly with the assumption that he can punch harder and avert more effectively than they can. All the things he could do which would actually make people think he was a wonderful superhero--regime change and ending world hunger and disease and so forth--he doesn't do, because he "can't interfere with humanity." Nonetheless we're simply told that he's the most important hero on the planet and everything would be unbearably horrible if he weren't around.
Both characters suffer from violations of the "show, don't tell" principle, in my opinion. Or possibly "tell one thing and show the opposite." But at least Batman gets to go properly psycho in the movies, whereas even there Superman has to be hailed as the new messiah while doing nothing more than maintaining the status quo. |
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