Thank you! I love everything about this and will kick some money in.
My daughter is 5 and despite not having seen much media on tv with superheroes, loves them anyway at the books written for 5 year olds level. Definitely love the idea of having something lined up for when she’s a bit older.
The more I think about this, the more it reminds me that the problem with comic book superheroes vs. real life is that the “supervillains” in real life aren’t out in the open leading gangs of henchmen in weird heists and public stunts. They’re hoarding wealth offshore using perfectly legal means and leading a horde of lawyers and hedge fund managers and lobbyists. They’re funding think tanks to argue for more tax cuts for the wealthy. They’re dining with senators to angle for defense contracts. They’re contracting out work so they don’t have to pay benefits to employees. You can’t beat them by beating them up and leaving them tied up for the police.
Bruce Wayne would be a supervillain in the real world, whether or not he likes to workout, cosplay, and beat up poor criminals.
Only a fundamentally corrupt system could create a person who had as much wealth and power as Bruce Wayne despite the fact that he spends 95% of his time doing secret vigilante stuff instead of running-the-actual-family-business stuff.
Do we even know how the Wayne corporation makes its money? Most people who end up with that kind of scratch didn’t get there through socially equitable business practices.
Wayne Enterprises is like Halliburton. Nobody knows where all the money comes from, but it ain’t good.
I think this has been a problem with the whole Batman mythos: having his origins in the 1930s society, the idea of a lazy playboy actually being a vigilante might have been more acceptable then. And he needs to be a billionaire to hand-wave why he has all of the neat gadgets that Bill Finger and Bob Kane thought up of, which Julius Schwartz also added on to. There’s even a scene in the first “Hush”* storyline where the Bat Cave is loaded with various Batmobiles, and financing all that needs a billionaire, no mere millionaire will cut it. And you can’t trim down, as fans will scream bloody murder.
The only real wiggle room is how Wayne Enterprises got so big, so most of the time it’s hand-waved as old money. Some times it’s his daddy, other times daddy inherited it himself and was still a medical practitioner, it’s never really made clear on purpose. It doesn’t make for exciting panels in the comic books, and those sorts of details are considered boring anyways.
Nope, like most superheroes, Batman is simply weighted down too much by what was previously written, by fan expectation, and by publisher expectations.
*A storyline I regret buying to read, as I find it exemplifies all I now dislike about superhero comics: the over the top bodies, the ham-handed attempts to be realistic, the whole kayfaybe of it.
He’s not a supervillain, he’s just suffering from economic anxiety… /s
He feels like a first level boss during the tutorial when you learn to use your special attacks - the arrest warrant and the subpoena.
The more intimidating boss with the special attack - butt plug to own the libs!
It has its fingers in everything from defense, home electronics, to agriculture.
More like how did the Wayne family make its money, because it’s essentially old wealth.
That leads to questions like “How many people did they enslave?” and “Which side did the Wayne family support in the US Civil War?”
I doubt DC would be brave enough to deal with that.
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