In the ‘40s, really? My knowledge of those early comics is far, far from complete, but I’ve read some, and I don’t recall anything like that.
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Sorry. I meant the TV show. I’m much less knowledgeable about the comics.
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It really puts things into perspective and now I’m not that keen about another Batman movie anymore.
For what it’s worth … I did stick it out (at least in part because I enjoyed the original comics), and the characters do develop. Don’t get me wrong, the super"heroes" are not nice people (one of the themes of the series is definitely the tendency of power to corrupt): but they are people, not chiaroscuro cartoon villains. They have their pains and their pressures and their weakness, and some of them have some actual good points. Like the comics, the series makes it pretty clear that the real villain of the piece is the corporate structure that keeps them in a gilded cage and rolls them out in public like performing animals, and heaven help them if their ratings start slipping.
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Thanks. I appreciate the insight. If time permits I might revisit it picking back up where I left off.
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Just to be clear, when I said they “are not nice people”, it would’ve been more accurate to say “are (mostly) shitbags”. But we do get some insight into why they’re shitbags, and how maybe if things had been different they might not have been so shitty.
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I’m always recommending people read Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged on this topic. The “criminal justice” system has never been about justice in specific cases; its sole purpose is to establish The Law as the apex predator.
To the extent that the system cares about punishing the right person, that’s only for the sake of burnishing its political image. When it comes to the actual task at hand, 99% of it is accomplished just by punishing someone for each given crime. For deterrence purposes, the system can afford to routinely punish the wrong person (since the public only has their word for it anyway), but it cannot afford to let crimes go unpunished.
This is why right-wing violence-boner propaganda (i.e. every cop show and action movie) likes vigilante violence and dirty cops. They’re not criticising the justice system, they’re cheerleading for what they instinctively understand to be its real function: not justice, but indiscriminate beatings.
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Garth Ennis hates superheroes. He probably agrees with the idea that Batman is a fascist. We can agree Batman’s ideals are in the right place, even if his tactics are not compatible with the real world and things like civil rights for people who are allegedly criminals.
So in a “real world” with people with super human powers, they of course are tools of the Government. And most of them are severely flawed because either they are so powerful they see little point why human morality should apply to them, or they have have to do so much fucked up shit in the name of “good” they are numb to it.
So you’re right it is cynical, and dark. But it probably is a more realistic portrayal of what superheroes would be like, and it doesn’t try to cover up the fact that they are doing horrible things in the name of good.
While I haven’t read it - there was a Batman '66 series and several miniseries where they went back to that campy, fun, irreverent tone of the TV show. But if they were all like that people would complain that comic books are out of touch with society. That they were showing a sugary, bubblegum version of reality that would make Opie from the Andy Griffith get a cavity. Where the cops were always the good guys and helped Batman catch the cartoony dastardly villains and there were no social ills or struggles. Just giant bombs to disarm and sharks to repel. But these stories I am sure would striker a chord with Ditko and his Objectivism - where everything was black and white - we know who the good guys and bad guys are.
Veiled fascism where good guys do bad things? Nobody happy. Blatant fascism where the good guys aren’t good? Nobody happy. Fantasy goody-two-shoes where A is A? Nobody happy.
I think people just like to complain 
As bad as the cops are now, from what I’ve read they used to be even worse. All of the laws and legal rights that are spelled out now in laws are because they used to be just run over roughshod. I mean shit, you have seen the Bonnie and Clyde car, right? They set up and ambush and murdered them and were famous for a hot minute (fyi the movie The Highwaymen was really good about this.)
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The only quibble I have about the idea that portrayals of superheroes can be realistic is that is rests on the existence of something that’s fundamentally highly unrealistic, not unlike ghosts and faeries. While it’s fun to extrapolate what that kind of power would really do to people, we’re (probably for the best) limited to speculation. Whereas the prime utility of such fictions are symbolic, much like the morality tales you mentioned earlier.
Perhaps but I think often people have difficulty distinguishing complaint from critique.
I’m not convinced it’s a simple as that. In some ways it seems better, in some ways it seems worse, and in still other ways it seems disturbingly consistent. I’m not convinced those various metrics can be weighed on any absolutely objective scale, and I’m not sure it’s very useful to try even if they can. Rather, to quote the Man In Black ♬things need changing everywhere you go♫.
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Actually, in the very earliest [1] Batman stories he didn’t mind killing and even sometimes used a gun to do it. Then we got the Comics Code, and that changed.
Also, as you note, the older (up until roughly 1960) Batman was specifically dealing with the corruption in Gotham. That specifically included the GCPD, although the corruption was usually organized crime rather than fascist self-indulgence like we see in Real Life now.
[1] before my time; I started reading Detective Comics in the '50s
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Which is of course why there is a whole genre of detective fiction called the police procedural…
Not Batman but similar idea with Sherlock Holmes (did they get a licence?):
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Please, Ennis is a walking hard-on for the Punisher. Good drama, absolutely garbage morals.
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… which is often made up of the very shows being complained about here. Procedurals contain the exact same standard tropes as any other cop show. Just with maybe slightly fewer firefights.
I am a law geek and I tend to actually enjoy this genre - I’ve probably seen every episode of OG Law & Order - but I am very cognizant (now) to its copaganda masked as entertainment.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned the wondermark comic that BoingBoing itself highlighted:
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I just like to mention that there’s a sun-source for all these superheroes, and it’s “Doc Savage”, from pulp magazines in the 1930s.
The rights to plunder Doc for material were purchased from Street and Smith, so it’s not plagiarism that Doc had a Fortress of Solitude in the high arctic where he developed all his endless tech-toys he fought crime with, nor that Doc had a “utility vest” containing all his glass balls of anaethetic gas and teeny radios and tracking devices and so on.
Street and Smith had enjoyed great success with the very first superhero, (unless you count classical sources like Hercules, or call Sherlock Holmes super at detecting) The Shadow.
But The Shadow tended to just dispose of bad guys with his twin .45s that left a trail of bodies, and Moms didn’t like that; some authors didn’t like the “power to cloud men’s minds” as being supernatural and therefore unChristian, or something.
So Doc was invented, with New Rules, enforced after the first story written, where Doc bumps off several bad guys, that Doc would always disarm; they used “mercy bullets” on people, adapted from sleep darts for wild game. Rule 2 was that Doc exercised two hours every day, studied all his life, achieved his “powers” entirely by being an ultra boy-scout.
What WAS weird was that, in an era of many executions for murderers, Doc would “save” them from the noose by quietly sending them off to his special hospital in “Upstate New York”, where his special brain operation would wipe their memories, make them good citizens, taught a trade. (In some of the pulps, they serve as his baker-street-type detective force.) Needless to say, this hasn’t aged well, especially since “Clockwork Orange”.
But my point is that this superhero==inherent-bad-guy dynamic has been argued for 80 years now.
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How about a retro-Batman, 1930s/40s, tricked out with the best possible tech for that time (or envisioned for that time… but never realized), and kicking Nazi ass?
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Seems like the thread for this again:
https://twitter.com/mrianmacintyre/status/1134902513973567490?s=21
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I’m finding myself almost completely unable to watch copaganda as entertainment these days. Regrettably, this rules out 50%+ of what’s on the TV during the evening in my neighbourhood. Between the bootlicking fashy “reality” shows (Border Force, Highway Patrol, Territory Cops, etc) and the endless collection of Law & Order / CSI / NCIS / etc., there’s barely anything else to watch.
OTOH, I do have one exception: Death in Paradise. Notable for being a highly formulaic detective cosy in which the cops never arrest anyone except proven murderers. Who are then politely and non-violently taken into custody, from where they will be delivered to a fair trial. It’s about as realistic as the Smurfs, and I use it for brainless comfort-food TV on rainy days.
Unfortunately, it has its own problem: the first two series are good, and the last few series are okay, but the middle series (the Kris Marshall era) are unwatchably shite. And, at the moment, only the middle series are screening on Oz television.
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