Batman vs Wonder Woman

[philippos42]

I used to sort of like Batman. But somewhere along the way, it started to seem that Bruce was a guy so obsessed with forever "fighting crime" that he didn't care about actually winning. He avoids the wrath of the law by not playing executioner, fair enough. But as a masked man with a secret identity, he's useless in a chain of evidence. Batman's

Comments

[__marcelo]

I don't think Bruce has been shown to interfere with police work; generally speaking, he seems to assemble evidence in such a way as to make it possible for Gordon and co. to put people in jail or send them to Arkham. Sometimes he just breaks somebody's arm or something like that, but most of the time -at least when Gordon is in charge- he interfaces well enough with the police that the people he catches are processed through the system (he is, after all, the World's Best Detective, something that I think says quite a bit about him).

Of course, it could be argued that this is his essential mistake. People like Zsasz and the Joker can neither be rehabilitated nor contained by the state, and hence an illegal, lethal response to them might be preferred from an ethical point of view. But the Joker is still alive because of Gotham's legal system (although why hasn't anybody won the Governorship of the state by proposing a law to make an exception and execute the Joker? other than fear of him, that is), not because of Bruce. He won't kill

[misterandersen]

That story you mention has the Joker tried normally instead of just being packed off to Arkham. Apart from the crime being a frame job, why has no one else simply tried the Joker again for a crime he did commit?

[__marcelo]

Other than the editorial choice to keep him alive no matter what, I don't know. I don't remember anything specific that could have made possible the Joker's trial in that situation but not in others.

[janegray]

Personally, I've been considering Bruce harmful to Gotham ever since he started saving the Joker's life.

Refusing to kill the Joker, fair enough, it's not Batman's failt if the system is flawed.

But saving the Joker, when the system (that time Joker was condemed to death; granted, it was the one time Joker hadn't actually committed the crime, but if a system's flaw balances the other flaws out to make an overall functional system, isn't that just?) or other people try to kill him, is utterly absurd. And makes Batman indirectly responsible for all the Joker's subsequent crimes.

It's the reason I like Jason Todd so much: he gets it.

[misterandersen]

Exactly. There's no reason why Batman couldn't have dumped the evidence of the true felon's guilt in Gordon's lap one minute after midnight.

[__marcelo]

Bruce didn't interfere with the courts in that case, either. He kept studying the case --- using arguably illegal methods, but par for his course --- and then he gave the evidence to Gordon, who then arranged for the execution to be suspended. It would have been different if he had staged a breakout to get the Joker out of jail on a hunch. Giving information to the police is not interfering with the judicial system.

[kevenn]

Well, they tried killing Circe before, and she just comes back from the dead - as gods who are killed tend to do. I wish they would really point this out, because at least with imprisoning Circe, you know where she is. If you kill her, sure she goes away for a while, but then she pops up from anywhere.

With her seeming resurrection abilities, it makes more tactical sense to imprison her, rather than kill her.

[philippos42]

Agreed.

Barbara Minerva's a little trickier; I like the character, but she arguably falls in the "monster to be killed" category like Dr Psycho, Medusa, & the fleshly clone of Max Lord from "Infinite Crisis." But the main problem there is that she's rarely written the same way twice. I like the WML version, but Gail Simone fans will see her differently, JLA fans will see her as someone who works with Luthor in the Legion of Doom, & so forth.

[misterandersen]

Minerva is, like Diana, the demi-mortal champion of a god and gets the same pass on death that Diana does because of it.