AJnet Archives: Gotham: The Dumbest City in America (Unfinished Article)
This month, from the AJnet Archives: An unfinished article about Batman!
Most of you already know that I’m a pretty avid comic book fan. My favorite hero by far is the Punisher (which you’ll see I mention in the second sentence of the article), but I also like Batman, Deadpool, and pretty much anything Garth Ennis has done.
As a Batman fan, one of the things that’s always confused me is how the average person in Gotham City doesn’t seem to realize that Bruce Wayne is Batman. Yeah, a lot of villains figured it out (some, like the Joker, don’t care), and every now and then you get someone like Tim Drake who puts two and two together. But for the most part, most of the citizens of Gotham haven’t figured it out.
Maybe my knowledge as the reader skews things a little bit, but to me it’s always seemed like it would be laughably easy to at least link Bruce Wayne to Batman, even if it’s just funding the operation. Batman’s high-tech gadgets are expensive, and how many people in Gotham would have the money required to afford that kind of stuff? On top of that, Wayne Enterprises is heavily invested in things like aerospace, military, biotech, and several other sectors that would apply to Batman’s arsenal. All anyone really needs to do is ask where Batman gets those wonderful toys from, then ask what billionaire in Gotham would have the incentive to fund someone who goes around beating up criminals. Gee, maybe the guy who watched his parents get gunned down in an alleyway by a mugger?
The article, titled “Gotham: The Dumbest City in America”, was my attempt at a criticism of how the people in comics seem to overlook the obvious.
I also started to discuss how easy it would be for someone to take out the Joker, or even Batman himself. The gist of it was, some random bystander who happens to have a gun could easily pop the Joker in the head during a bank robbery. Likewise, some nobody could just plug Batman in his uncovered mouth when he’s not expecting it. Interestingly enough, there’s a short Batman comic that kind of explores this idea, called “An Innocent Guy”. It’s usually attached to copies of “The Killing Joke”, and it’s a pretty good read. I’m sure I would have mentioned this comic had I finished the article.
This unfinished article was yet another case of me starting something and getting distracted. Was my distraction booze, dope, a woman, or all three? Who knows. I started this article in September of 2011, I even wrote quite a bit of it, but I never finished it.
This is “Gotham: The Dumbest City in America”, started in September of 2011.
I love comic books. My favorite hero is the Punisher, simply because he knows what needs to be done to fight crime. None of this “Killing is immoral” bullshit. Frank Castle knows that the only thing these thugs understand is brute force, and delivers death en masse to the criminal scum blighting his world.
My second favorite hero is Batman. While I disagree with the notion of not killing murderers, I can completely respect a guy who is incorruptible and unwavering in his principles, even if I disagree with them. Even if Batman won’t kill you, he’ll still fuck your shit up so bad you’d wish you were dead. He even fucked up the Punisher once in a crossover. Here’s the scene:
Fucking manhandled.
But all awesomeness aside, Batman and the entire city of Gotham are impractical and unrealistic in today’s society.
What I still can’t understand is how nobody in Gotham is able to piece together that Bruce Wayne is Batman. At the very least, one could easily deduce a link between the two. Watch how simple it is:
- Batman’s technological capabilities greatly surpass that of even the police force. Obviously said technology is exceedingly expensive, therefore…
- Batman is being funded by someone very wealthy in or around Gotham. Since it’s very obviously not the Mafia funding Batman, we’re left with only a handful of people who could afford to fund him. Out of those people, who would have reason to fund a vigilante? Oh yeah…
- Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down in front of him by a mugger when he was a kid. And, oh shit, Batman is vehemently against killing and the use of guns! Hmmm…
- Say, did you notice that both Batman and Bruce Wayne have a similar physical build? Wait a minute…
- Didn’t Bruce Wayne disappear for a prolonged amount of time when he was younger? He never did tell anyone where he went, did he? Hey, did you also notice…
- That Batman started popping up around the same time that Wayne returned from his unexplained disappearance? Holy shit guys, maybe…
- BRUCE WAYNE IS BATMAN.
In three steps, I was able to establish a highly plausible connection between Batman and Bruce Wayne, and in six steps provide damning evidence to suggest that the two are one in the same. At the very least, we have enough of a connection to obtain a warrant to search Wayne Manor for more evidence. Or if you’re one of Batman’s enemies, enough of a reason to kill Bruce Wayne when he’s not expecting it. Seriously, this city is supposed to be the size of fucking New York and not one person could put even this much together? Yeah, I guess I can believe that Gotham PD is being willfully lazy in capturing Batman, but what about his enemies? This should be a cinch for the Riddler, and the Joker isn’t stupid either.
While it’s nowhere near as stupid as nobody realizing that Superman is Clark Kent without glasses, at least Superman’s writers made a half-assed attempt to explain that, using some kind of permanently-active hypnovision that blinds people to this obvious fact. Even though it’s a prime example of poor story-telling, at least they tried to explain it. Why hasn’t anyone in Gotham been able to do what some misanthrope nerd was able to do in under 5 minutes?
There’s a simple way to provide more evidence that Batman is Bruce Wayne. Publicly throw something at Bruce Wayne’s head. Something that can travel fast and fuck him up on impact, like a plate or a nice-sized rock. This scenario can have one of three outcomes:
- Bruce uses the same lightning-fast reflexes that Batman has to dodge it or deflect it.
- Bruce sees it coming and uses the same rock-solid endurance that Batman has to take the hit and not need medical attention from a doctor.
- Bruce decides to take the hit like a normal human being. He spends at least one night in the hospital or at home under the care of an actual doctor. Conveniently, Batman wasn’t seen running around Gotham that same night.
The only reason us fans overlook the glaring holes in the Batman comic books is because the stories are entertaining enough to make us not care while we’re reading them. I guess it’s better to not explain things than to poorly explain them like Superman’s writers did, but I love to nitpick at this shit for fun, so let’s look at some more odd things about Gotham City and its inhabitants.
If I had to take a guess, I’d say the Joker has killed at the very least a total of 100,000 people. And yet, every single time Batman simply beats him up and throws him back in Arkham Asylum, only for him to escape again later and have the entire process repeat itself ad infinitum. Alright, I’ll accept that Batman is just that damn incorruptible that he won’t say fuck it and kill the Joker, but what about the rest of Gotham? Surely the insanity defense can only work so many times before it’s obvious that the death penalty is the only solution? One life is a fair price to pay if it will save the lives of countless others. And why is Arkham so easy to escape from anyway? You’d think that someone like the Joker would be kept in a small 6′ x 6′ padded room with no windows and a tiny slot in the door to slide meals through. And even if he escaped, he’s considered highly dangerous, enough so that lethal force would almost certainly be authorized in stopping his escape. Are the guards in this place armed with fucking Nerf guns or something? Gun his ass down if he makes a break for it.
The Joker’s killed hundreds of thousands of people and not a single one of them has a relative looking for revenge on this guy? Bullshit. It’s not hard to pop the Joker off while he’s not expecting it. Most sniper rifles are effective from like a mile away. And even if you didn’t have a sniper rifle, it’s still absurdly easy. The Joker may be clever, but he’s not going to be expecting some Bernie Goetz-looking motherfucker to whip out a handgun and blow his face clean off. And it’s not like other criminals wouldn’t have incentive to kill this guy. The Joker’s fucked the Mafia over countless times, and yet he’s still running around dressed like a faggot and terrorizing everyone. Apparently Gotham’s mobsters are as threatening as a pack of cub scouts. There are a million ways they could whack the Joker, yet they haven’t.
You could also apply this logic to Batman. Pick him off with a M40 from a nearby building while he’s standing on the roof of Gotham City Police HQ talking to the Commissioner. Just whip out a Magnum and blast him in the face when he’s responding to a mugging or something. None of these long drawn-out monologues that bad guys are so fond of. If you’re going to do something, do it.
I fucking love that Batman/Punisher crossover so much, even though my boy Frank gets completely manhandled by Bats. As he should, considering Batman is a master martial artist while Frank was just a recon marine.
As much of a comic book fan as I was, I still made quite a few mistakes in this article.
The Riddler is one of the villains who knows Batman’s identity. There’s also Hugo Strange, Ra’s Al Ghul, Catwoman, and a few others. The Joker also knows that Bruce is Batman, but doesn’t care because he’s only interested in playing with Batman, and views Bruce Wayne as the real “costume”.
The idea that someone could out Bruce as Batman by simply throwing something at him is laughable, and I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. Bruce can just dodge it, then laugh it off and say he was lucky. Hell, Bruce could probably maneuver himself in a subtle way to take the hit but lessen the impact. Bats is shown to be one of the smartest people in the DC universe, he’s no fucking amateur. And if he did get injured and have to take the night off, he could just get Nightwing to wear the Batman costume. It wouldn’t be much of an ass-pull to say that Batman would have a contingency for something like this.
I still think it’s kind of weird that nobody can kill the Joker. Is Joker smart? Yes. Is he resourceful? Yes. Is he bulletproof? No. In reality, the Joker would have been shot by the cops while “resisting arrest”. What’s stopping someone from hiring Deadshot, the assassin who supposedly never misses, to pick Joker off from two miles away? Jason Todd/Red Hood has every reason in the world to kill the Joker, and he only tries once. After Batman saves his playmate, Jason Todd just kind of gives up trying. There’s many characters in the DC universe with no qualms about killing who could put the Joker down, but they don’t.
Of course, we all know the obvious answer is plot armor. DC isn’t going to permanently kill off one of their biggest cash cows, that’s not how comics work. Still, it irks me that there really isn’t any attempt to explain this in-universe. I guess having no explanation is better than something like having Batman be able to instinctively dodge a sniper’s bullet by hearing it.
Comic books are full of ass pulls. And you know what, that’s okay. At the end of the day, we’re not reading a comic book because we want realism, we’re reading it to escape from reality for a little while with an entertaining story told through one of man’s earliest methods of communication. In a world with flying bulletproof human-looking aliens or guys who weld dogs to people’s faces, does it really matter why nobody’s shot the Joker in the face or sniped Batman from two miles out? Speculating and overanalyzing can be fun, but sometimes it’s just better to shut your brain off, go along for the ride, and not ask too many questions.
Anyway, I’m not too sure what next month’s AJnet Archives article will be. I have an article about ways to inflict financial damage on a grocery store through waste, but given that the last two AJnet Archives articles were about working at the grocery store I might go with something else.
