How DC Comics Makes Batman A Failure

What’s that you say? Hot take? Clickbait? Batman is such a huge success for DC that they overuse him? I’m not talking about any of that.

However, yes, Batman is an absolute (no pun intended) failure at his job. It’s not just Bruce Wayne, though. All of the defenders of Gotham City are complete failures, and it’s not because of anything the characters are doing. It’s all on the writers and decisions made by DC Entertainment. This is totally meta, not some in-universe discussion, or at least not entirely. I had a revelation recently. Batman and Co (or is that Inc?) are doing a terrible job and it’s on purpose by the writers, editors, and the higher ups at DC Comics or their superiors at either DC Entertainment or Warner Brothers (insert this year’s owners here).

Sure, the only DC movies anyone is interested in stars Batman. The comics do well, even the Absolute spin-off set in Darkseid’s dream universe where hope goes to die. I would make the claim that the main DC Universe is where the corpse came from in this case. Ignoring all the timeline issues with all the constant reboots, Gotham City is not in a better place, and it darn well should be. It can’t, however, because the writers will not allow Batman a true victory. They aren’t even keeping the status quo very well. Instead, thanks to mandates, obsessions not on the characters’ parts, and some stories I’m not a fan hearing about, Gotham City will never be in a better place and in fact will be so much worse that we’re already wondering why anyone who can leave hasn’t already. I’m not just trying to be outlandish here. I come with a legit argument. Allow me to plead my case.

First of all, let’s look at the Bat-Family and all of the members, when they’re not fighting each other:

• Batman
• Robin
• Nightwing, when he’s not in Bludhaven
• Whatever name Tim Drake is using today when he’s the best Robin but DC doesn’t know what to do with him
• Red Hood
• The Spoiler, who has also been both Batgirl and Robin
• Orphan/Black Bat/Batgirl at one point
• current Batgirl
• someone taking current Batgirl’s temp job as Oracle, even when they don’t use the name
• the Birds Of Prey, including Huntress and Black Canary because they killed her marriage to Green Arrow
• Batwoman
• The Signal
• Is Azrael/Jean Paul Valley still active…or even in continuity?
• Alfreeeeeeeeeeed’s unknown and probably superiour daughter because 2026 and screw you DC for killing Alfred! (Yes, the British spelling of “superior” is on purpose. They’re British.)
• the occasional reformed villain
• Catwoman every now and then
• other people who come and go that I’m probably forgetting or just missed
• Gotham Girl, aka Supergirl if her brother was Homelander

I had to go back and remember some while I was writing this article more than once. And that’s just the folks with their own part of the Batcave or some clock tower HQ. Gotham City is also home to the original Earth Green Lantern, now going by Sentinel, Ragman, and last I heard the current Question, Zatanna, The Thorn, The Creeper, and various other heroes have lived there at one point or another or at least stops in a lot. Batman also has Superman on speed dial and they hang out in cafes together talking movies or something. Of course we can’t forget the honest cops like Commissioner Gordon and a handful of other guys. The place has a lot of heroes or visiting heroes. I’m probably still forgetting someone. Using all of them is easy, as I went over in the past. Between them all we should be seeing stories about Gotham improving or at least not slipping further into self-destruction.

So how the @$%$# is Gotham City still a cesspool?

How many teams has Batman created and still Gotham isn’t any safer?

Look, I don’t expect all crime to be cleaned up. It leaves no room for more stories, and even my little town has a police force for a reason. “Henchman” is probably the biggest occupation in that city. Between the mobs, the supervillains, the occasional alien invasion that every superhero city deals with, and the Court Of Owls and their Talon agents there’s plenty of evil to go around and they get more disturbing (Professor Pyg comes to mind) with each appearance. Personally, I don’t think there are that many rich people in Gotham, nevermind enough to fill the Court’s amphitheater. There’s some mannequins in those seats. They probably switch them every meeting just to mess with each other.

That’s because if they haven’t left, they’re probably dead. Gotham has a body count that rivals natural disasters because the place keeps getting blown up, poisoned, or some other horrible thing every couple of months. When they had an actual natural disaster, Washington, DC cut the place off to die. That’s how bad things are. How can it be that bad?

Because the writers refuse to let Gotham get better. If anything, the Gotham guardians are at best only able to slow the destruction of the city, or that’s how it looks. It’s not all the writers’ fault, but it’s mostly their fault. Let’s not ignore the DC/Warner higher ups demanding every story be collected in a trade collection because they don’t understand how trade collections work or why they were selling so well. Thanks to that and every writer wanted to have a big epic run, the stakes are never “a series of bank/jewel robberies” or “stopping a revenge plot of less than 1,000 people” or “crazy guy thinks killing homeless people will give them relief”. We don’t get simple murder stories or gunrunners that last more than a brief interlude before the city destroying threat starts. Like the rest of DC’s output you can’t have a small story that shows us another side to the characters or even Gotham as a city, which often gets treated as a character itself, unless it’s an anthology for some celebration.

They don’t make done in one issue stories anymore, they make graphic novels that go out a chapter at a time. That’s a whole other discussion, but it matters here because it means every story has to be large, epic, and padded out for the trade. There are no small adventures anymore. There are huge stories where nothing less than the city, if not the world, is at stake, and the Bat-Family needs to stop fighting each other long enough to deal with it, unless fighting each other is the epic story. Everyone has to be fighting for all the stakes, not just the simple crimes most of these people created the costumes or put on a badge to deal with. Or if they do, I’m missing the solicitations.

So Gotham doesn’t get better. It gets worse, and at best the heroes keep it from getting worse. Batman can hardly be a symbol of hope when he and his whole team are covering one wound while 15 are still bleeding out. There were stories where Bruce wonders if he’s doing enough, if anything he does matters. Writers today seem to have decided the answer is “not really”. Nothing advances towards the positive. Gotham is a worse place to live than a few months ago our time instead of better because heroes aren’t turning the tide. While blaming Batman just for existing is a storyline that needs to die like an unnamed Gothamite, things never seem to be improving or even holding ground. Every story, every threat, has to be larger than the last as writers race to top each other and themselves, and that comes with a lot of death and destruction.

Without the smaller stories that aren’t part of a title or group epic storyline, there’s no connection. There’s no signs of Gotham City being better, but signs that it gets worse for the normal people of the city, the average citizens who aren’t criminals, aren’t stinking rich, and aren’t crimefighters…not that being a crimefighter is all that great unless you read the Webtoon series. (I need to get caught up on that.) So Gotham City will continue to sink into the swamp, and the Bat-Family and other Gotham heroes will continue to fail, not due to their incompetence, because they aren’t, but because the writers keep looking for bigger stories like a druggie who needs a stronger fix. It tells the readers the only hope is to maybe survive another day, not to overcome, not to get better, and not to improve your life. The most you can hope for is to keep things the same. I’ve had enough of that in my life, and that’s not the story I want from superheroes.

Batman is a failure as a hero because the writers don’t know how to keep the war on crime going while making things better. So much for their most important character.