Batman General Discussion

What about Wonder Woman and Superman? I don’t remember them having Reverse Flash villains.

It's harder to do that with Wonder Woman, but I feel we get tons of Superman villains responsible for blowing up Krypton all the time.

But what about villains petty enough to do shit like going to their houses and eating all the food?

Or buying out the daily planet and turning it into a shitty clickbait rag?

Oh, he doesn't need villains for that. Silver Age Lois and Jimmy did that stuff in every issue.

Edited by Joshbones on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:42:15 AM

Lois: IT WAS ME LANA! I WENT BACK IN TIME AND STOLE SUPERMAN"S FIRST KISS AND GAVE YOU A FAILING GRADE!!!!

Bonus points if anyone gets that reference.

>Or buying out the daily planet and turning it into a shitty clickbait rag?

Superman IV The Quest for Peace. Although he didn't do it to mess with Superman.

Wasn't that another family?

And IIRC, Bruce DID buy out the Daily Planet once to protect it from Luthor.

Plot twist, reverse flash was created by Zur, so that one day he would kill Barry's parents, which would cause Barry to cause Flashpoint by trying to undo it.

And it was all part of the Joker's plan.

I will never let it go that Chip Zdarksy retconned a vast majority of Joker stories like the Snyder Joker arcs, Batman RIP, and Joker War as all a big gambit to meet Zur. Regardless of how little sense that makes and how it contradicts what he’s actually going for in those stories.

And it just took Joker a little bit of coaxing to actually get Zur out of Batman in this run. “Sigh”

Joker is pretty much the absolute worst character to use in that kind of "all these prior stories and characters were connected as part of a big Myth Arc" Arc Welding since his whole gimmick is being an "agent of chaos" and his stories increasingly emphasize him as supposedly only caring about chaos and destruction for it's own sake (and fucking with Batman), so trying to link together his various past stories into an overarching plan just doesn't work. Both because it goes against the character's entire concept and because there's no real way to coherently tie these plots together in a way that actually makes sense.

If it was done with a different kind of character who'd suit these kinds of plots like Ra's or someone of that vein, I could see it working.

It's a Batman thread, you should have used this one.

Anyway, Wonder Woman doesn't quite have a Norman Osborn villain who stops at nothing to fuck with her in any conceivable way but she's had some who almost made it there. The reason none of them quite qualify is mainly because they don't last long enough, especially when the retools and cosmic retcons.

Mars/Ares for most of his existence messed with Diana's professional life bit not her personal life. There was a brief time during Volume 3 when he decided he was going to haunt her personal life too, but then Zeus cut him off. The first Cheetah, Priscilla Rich, was the first villain with no grand designs beyond making Wonder Woman for its own sake, but she didn't actually appear very often in the comic books before Super Friends cemented her as Wonder Woman's Arch-Enemy in the public consciousness, and even then we rarely got Cheetah as Priscilla Rich actually reformed on Earth 1, where most of the comics were set. Cheetah only remained evil on Earth 2. Then, as you know Crisis and Rich no more. Doctor Cyber was starting to get there, Earth One, between torturing Donna Troy just to draw out Diana and trying to start world war three to frame Diana, but after Crisis Cylvia Cyber was reduced to a joke. White Magician gains some points for poking at Diana and Artemis, even successfully turning Artemsis on Diana(though not too many because that isn't hard to do), but then White Magician went and killed himself when he was on the road to being the first human life Diana ever took(Maxwell Lord is an unworthy thief!) Genocide only cared about committing genocide and screwing up Wonder Woman's life, but Doctor Morrow made sure Genocide didn't last too long. Doctor Psycho, he can be petty. But he's also a Mood-Swinger who sometimes isn't in the mood for petty. Post Crisis Circe was a strong contender, but only Post Crisis Circe. Golden Age, Silver Age, New 52 and Rebirth Circe don't count. Veronica Cale, another strong contender, but only post Crisis, not Rebirth.

Now if you really want a Wonder Woman villain who is defined for destroying a hero's life, look no further than Dark Angel. But it's Donna Troy's life Dark Angel irrevocably broke, not Diana's. Still she did a pretty impressive job considering Dark Angel didn't even appear in New 52 or Rebirth/Infinite Frontier/Dawn of DC but Donna has yet to recover. Otherwise you're just going to have to settle for Silver Age Doctor Cyber, Post Crisis Circe and Post Crisis Veronica Cale for Diana's persistently petty Doctor Doom/Norman Osborn...Reverse Flash(?) type. Whatever Doctor Hurt guy anyway? Batman really doesn't have one either.

Yeah, that would feel like a Ra's plot.

My main objection to Chip retconning the Joker's last few plots as an attempt at summoning Zur is that the idea doesn't fit what the Joker is attempting to achieve in those stories, and we see in Chip's run that the Joker is just now mentioning Zur and trying to get Batman to unleash him.

I'm fine with Joker being a long term planner since he's full of shit when it comes to being a pure agent of chaos, everything he does is all intricately planned out. Granted, I can also go with him just doing random shit for giggles like he did in Grant Morrison's run.

In Endgame, the Joker is explicitly trying to end his game with Bats, and destroy Gotham once and for all, and he starts panicking and screaming in fear when Batman prevents him from going to the healing pool and potentially dooming them both. I can't see Endgame, Death of the family, or even Joker War as an attempt at summoning Zur, when the goal was to destroy Batman.

Heck, in the prelude to Joker War, the Joker mocks Bane for killing Alfred and wasting all that trauma on Damien, not Bruce. When Alfred being dead is the reason, Failsafe got as bad as it did. And the retcons claim he wanted Failsafe activated and Joker's interaction with Alfred during Death in the Family is what lead to him learning about Failsafe and Alfred's role in it.

Yeah, it REALLY doesn't add up and is a nonsensical retcon.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:30:02 PM

Okay so the new Nightwing issue, too much celebration.

Its an anniversary issue, Nightwing issue 300, Dick does investigating that Heartless is gun-running but most of the issue is spent on him celebrating his birthday, he gets a key to the city awarded for his philanthropy efforts to fix Bludhaven, and then he's told by the Marv Wolfman how proud he is of him.

According to Marv Dick created programs that lead to free school lunches for the kids and created state of the art shelters for the homeless people. We see none of this, all this was in the background offscreen.

But yes lets spend a whole celebrating all the great things Dick did compeltely offscreen And the issue ends with Heartless finally declaring "Yeah I'm gonna do something now because he's at the highest point of belovedness".

Is Bludhaven still a shit hold city that's worse than New York?

Not anymore! Now it has the best pizza.

I hadn't caught up with Nightwing so I took it for granted that the stuff they were talking about actually happened on-panel... XD;

Edited by lalalei2001 on Apr 17th 2024 at 3:44:52 PM

Dick's been cleaning it up. He started the Alfred Pennyworth foundation with the billions Alfred left him so its shaping up now.

Where the fuck did Alfred get billions of dollars?

Years of paychecks and wise investments.

Bruce payed him all those years and its not like Alfred was ever in need of money. So he just banked and invested it safely.

That’s amazing.

Grayson has more money than Wayne now? That would actually feel good!

Alfred's method of being filthy rich is hilariously smart.

Also Dick managing to actually clean up Bludhaven - a city even worse than Gotham - pretty effectively either shows how much he's an improvement over Bruce, how incompetent Bruce really is beneath his popular image, or just how deeply ingrained Gotham's freaky-ass curse shit keeping it a hellhole is.

Bludhaven doesn't have the real-world-money raking Rogues, Gotham has them.

Gotham has the court of owls who are all very old money families who want gotham to be crap

Plus Nightwing actually has narrative fiat on his side.

Keep in mind Heartless could have apparently striked at any point but he wanted to wait until Dick was his most beloved to do anything. Otherwise there has been no major disruptions to his civil services programs.

So unlike Batman Taylor is having the narrative go easy on Dick.

I mean considering Batman is suffering no term consequences from Failsafe, like the police not tolerating him anymore, public trust declining, guilt from people dying from Failsafe's rampage, or expulsion from the league, I'd say the narrative is going easy on Bats.