commodore96 said:
I LOVE BATMAN, but my friend and I recently got into an argument about how awesome he really is. I believe that he is amazing because he beats the crap out of villains, and he doesn't have any super powers. My friend states that he is a crappy hero because he doesn't have super powers, and his main villains are just lunatics with guns (Penguin, Two-Face, Joker, Thorne etc.). My question to you escapist is what do you think of Batman? Do you think he is an awesome crime fighter, or a little girl that who would never be able to take down a villain of Superman or the X-Men?
Well, I think it's kind of ridiculous to say that Batman doesn't have any super powers, the arguement has always struck me as being ridiculous. The guy is a massively talented super scientist and gizmoteer. Batman being a super hero is not any worse than Lex Luthor being a super villain. Indeed they have some fairly similar overlap in abillities, the big differance being that Batman uses his gadgets to fight crime, Lex uses them to commit crime. Lex has been winning rounds against Superman for decades now, sometimes even beating him and having tolet him go, or Superman needing to be saved by another character. It's not all that ridiculous for Batman to ultimatly do the same thing with his own gadgets.
I think the problem with Batman has increasingly been attempts to make the character more realistic, through things like the "Nolanverse". This has even been dripping into the comics for a while. Batman has been operating with increasing levels of support, and doing a lot less of his own science and gizmoteering. I always considered the insanity of Batman having the amount of time to master everything he has, keep it all in tip top shape, and do all this engineering to be part of what made him super (it being just as ridiculous in it's own way as Superman's powers). Honestly the more they "dial back" Batman, the lessof a super hero he becomes, and the less plausible it is for him to successfully confront superhuman opponents.
One thing that also needs to be considered is that Batman's enemies are ALSO supposed to be a bunch of gadgeteers. The Penguin for example quintessentially builds absolutly ridiculous and physics defying things into his Umbrellas, and ALWAYS seems to have another one, just like how Batman has anything the plot requires in his Utility belt. The Joker isn't just a crazy guy with a gun, as he's increasingly presented as, but he's also another super-science guy who builds robot duplicates, clown themed weapons, robots and everything else.
You can't even argue that he fights enemies with just physical skills "and a few gizmos" because the more crazy the opponent, the more crazy the weapons he uses. Just like Lex, when it comes to heavy combat, Batman usually goes and breaks out the Powered Armor. He doesn't use it constantly but accross the comics, animations, and other media he's done this a lot more than people usually want to think about.
I think it's fair to say that Batman is very much a "science hero". His power is that he's smarter than any real person could ever be, rather than having any kind of overt physical power.
As far as Batman going up against the X-men (despite being from differant companies), there have been PLENTY of tech guys who have fought them with amazing degrees of success using gadgets. Heck, while it was an "Elseworlds" type story, think of "Kingdom Come" and how Batman started patrolling Gotham with an army of robots when he got too old to reliably do
it himself. He had enough powerful Robots that could fight superhumans where Lex wanted him as an ally. This kind of thing has always been within his capabilities, it's just that it takes very specific storylins to bring it out (and he can't do it within the shared DC continuity without causing problems with other titles). Simply put if "The Sentinals" and "The Right" were huge threats to the X-men and all of mutant-kind, Batman is going to be the same way. Heck, I'll be blunt, I'd much rather fight Cameron Hodge and his resources than Batman and his potential resources. Especially seeing as when you get to Hodge he's generally just some guy, when you get to Batman it's going to be like fighting Iron Man. Of course Hodge did have a moment like that himself, back during "X-tinction Agenda" his severed head had been re-animated and made immortal by Mephisto and he had it attached to a super-robot body that proceeded to trash a small army of X-men before eventually being brought down.
