The Four Color Media Monitor

According to the woke standards being pushed by Popverse, it's not "cool" for Batman to be a wealthy man:

It’s hard to argue Batman’s appeal.

The Dark Knight has starred in multiple blockbuster films, he’s the lynchpin of DC’s publishing line, and thousands of fans dream of becoming just like him.

In other words, Batman is cool.

However, he’s also a billionaire, which is somewhat less cool. Decades ago, being a billionaire was cool, but things have shifted. Nowadays, being a one-percenter seems synonymous with corruption. Society seems to be rejecting billionaires in favor of working-class heroes. But where does that leave Batman?

At the mercy of left-wing propagandists, regrettably enough. This sure is a strange thing to say when you look upon the subject in the context of Robert Pattinson's The Batman movie doing as well as it did 3 years ago with over $770 million at the box office. If billionaires were really disliked, who with a hatred for fortunes would want to strain their budget paying for tickets? The writer's unverified claim appears to be a very recent form of propaganda, intended to lecture everyone what to think of being wealthy, with surely the biggest irony being that, for all we know, interviewee Tynion could've already made a pretty good fortune himself from any TV and movie deals he's had so far. But if the real life J. Jonah Jameson who wrote this puff piece and Tynion himself really think being wealthy is inherently bad, it's a foregone conclusion they have a low opinion of Tony Stark/Iron Man to boot, ditto his creator, Stan Lee. No doubt, they also have a hostile opinion of Black Panther, Vixen, professor Charles Xavier, and for all we know, this current leftist propaganda might be the reason why there haven't been any Iron Man movie sequels in over a decade. As for Batman's appeal, they have argued, against it, so what's their point? Without all Bruce Wayne's wealth, could he afford to build up the technology base he's got in the Batcave for research and designing gadgets? It's hilarious how that isn't considered.

For James Tynion IV, the solution was to take away Bruce Wayne’s fortune. During Tynion’s 2020 Joker War storyline, Batman lost his family fortune but was left with enough money to live comfortably on a budget. Speaking to a crowd at CCXP, Tynion spoke about the decision.

“In my run we were able to hit that on the head a little bit, where he was still a very wealthy man. When you go back to the old stories, he wasn’t the richest man in the entire world. He was just rich. I knocked him down a few pegs, where he was still doing fine, but it wasn’t like, ‘I can buy six satellites and build a rocketship tomorrow.’”

Tynion is correct about the old Batman comics. In Detective Comics #27 (1939), Bruce Wayne is described as a socialite. When his origin is revealed in Detective Comics #33 (1939), Bruce comments that his father’s estate has “left me wealthy.” Some early comics, such as Batman #5 (1941) describe the Wayne home as an apartment, rather than a mansion or manor. Detective Comics #105 (1945) has Bruce Wayne suffer a financial setback, forcing Dick and Alfred to take part-time jobs. By Batman #64 (1951), writers began to refer to Bruce Wayne as a millionaire. As decades passed, this description shifted to billionaire. The point is, Bruce Wayne wasn’t always one of the richest men in the world.

This sounds like little more than looking for every excuse in the book to justify a political position. I don't think it was ever established Wayne was the numero uno billionaire on the globe, and probably not even as rich as Aristotle Onassis. But, if Bruce could be a billionaire, what about Tony Stark, again? Shell-Head's technology firm was portrayed in the Marvel universe as one of the most prolific developers that could amount to billions of bucks in income, so if Tynion and even Scott Snyder think there's something wrong with being wealthy, it's a foregone conclusion they believe Lee was wrong to establish Tony as a billionaire, and lest we forget, such a view obviously applies to Bob Kane and Bill Finger as well. It's not hard to guess this insulting viewpoint is also closely related to the mindset that got Mary Jane Watson kicked to the curb as Spider-Man's girlfriend/wife.

Tynion spoke more about the dichotomy, noting how Batman fights the corrupt establishment, which set him apart from other billionaires. “Batman was also always against a corrupt system. There is the old stories where it was the vice and corruption inside of Gotham City that he was weeding out. You can’t turn Batman into the system, he always has to be fighting against it, even if he is from the same things that bred that system.”

Something tells me that corrupt establishment doesn't include leftists like George Soros, whose campaigns have caused only so much disaster whereever he ran his businesses, nor will Tynion and company ever take issue with Republicans who turned a deaf ear and blind eye to what harm Soros brought to society. And gee, if Batman's established as being against corrupt systems, what about Iron Man? Wasn't he also written similarly? This is nothing new. Rich people come in both good and bad personas. Didn't that ever occur to them?

That theme has returned in Absolute Batman, a new ongoing series set in an alternate universe. This version of Bruce Wayne was never rich, which recontextualizes everything about the Dark Knight and his relationship with the city. In fact, it was Tynion who convinced Scott Snyder to write the series.

While the world may have a different relationship with billionaires now, Batman will never fall out of style. Whether he’s a one-percenter or a working-class hero, Batman will always be the enemy of the corrupt establishment.

If Donald Trump's reelection is any indication, the relationship with billionaires, or even just millionaires, isn't much different from before. But again, if they see Batman as a slang used by Occupy Wall Street, then they obviously must view Iron Man the same way. On which note, they almost hilariously ignore how, if Tony Stark wasn't rich, then from a real life viewpoint, he definitely couldn't afford to build all those amazing technologies he put into his Shell-Head outfits. A similar observation could be made about Black Panther, and any technologies developed by T'Challa. It's also the same for the Fantastic Four. How could they have built their spacecraft leading to the superpowers they acquired if they didn't have the funding for it? Some of which may have been provided by the government in Lee and Jack Kirby's premise, but even so, a valid point can be made for them too about wealth and expenses. Spider-Man by contrast was never written building anything as elaborate as spaceships and technology fortresses on his own meager budgets when he first debuted.

In any case, the Popverse writer, Tynion and company have made clear with their propaganda where they stand on wealthy Marvel heroes too. I hesitate to think what'll happen when they get their mitts on Iron Man and other rich Marvel heroes, so long as Marvel is still around. Because that's tragically what's bound to happen to boot, no matter what Marvel-created universe their stories will be set it, and the results will be equally awful. Clearly, Tom Taylor wasn't the only problem awaiting both the Masked Manhunter, and Superman, when it came to leftist lecturing about money.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics