…after seeing Harley in a thousand Christmas posts…
Harley is actually from an interfaith Jewish and Catholic family, so she could very well celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah! But the fact that her Jewish side is so rarely mentioned to the point that no one knows about it is obviously annoying and likely intentional.
It’s often been remarked that Spider-Man’s schtick wouldn’t work nearly so well if he didn’t live in a town with so many tall buildings, but consider: how well would Batman’s “I am the night” routine work if he was operating out of a normal city where people actually live, rather than a perpetually twilit urban hellscape that looks like the Art Deco movement had a one-night stand with Soviet Brutalism in a wrought-iron-and-gargoyle factory?
That is my favorite description of the Batman aesthetic ever.
OMDFG that’s a perfect description.
Imagine Spiderman ballooning in wide open areas. No, sorry, can’t get to that crime, its against the prevailing wind.
Also, Batman brooding on top of a Wafflehouse.
Batman: God, this stupid city with its sufficient lighting and lack of crumbling infrastructure to shoot grappling hooks into
Superman: Everyone for miles has lead poisoning, I’ve spent the entire night stopping crossword puzzle museum robberies and heists at the Second National Bank of Gotham on the corner of second street and second avenue, and earlier the wall of…clouds? smog?…cleared up for a minute and I’m pretty sure the sky was literally blood red
I want a comic about Batman who actually goes through therapy and has to take medication and has panic and anxiety attacks that he has to fight through to do what he wants to do
who is shown using his wealth to positively impact Gotham, who makes connections within Arkham and is actively trying to make that place fucking better and some of the real villains are the assholes who don’t want to fix the system, who are apathetic or complacent or actively benefiting from how things are and will fight both Bruce Wayne politically and Batman domestically to maintain the status quo
I want a Batman universe where Harley and Ivy and Freeze and Dent are all given the care and respect they deserve. Where there’s a clear distinction between people who are using their doctorates to be asshats and people who want to improve the world and have suffered for it. Where Bruce can learn to trust these people and they to trust him–because he’s just as fucked up as they are and will try and help them become a better version of themselves, as they are, if they want that.
Where mental illness isn’t stigmatized, its the fucking people and their choices that determine who’s good and who’s bad. Not evil, not necessarily, but bad, abusive, selfish, sadistic. More interested in spreading pain than spreading change. Because everyone is fucked up and has to work, and everyone is gonna make mistakes and everyone is gonna hurt themselves and others, but at the end of the day, there’s an underlying message of not just ‘you can choose to be better’ but also ‘we will help you, we want to help you, we want to understand’
There’s just so much left to fester in the Bat Universe and the only reason is to maintain the status-quo of ‘Bruce is like this and the villains are like that’. Like there’s no possible way to take these people wHO ALL SHARE A VERY COMMON PROBLEM and give them not happy endings, but a journey within a narrative that treats them and their problems with some fucking goddamn respect
One thing I really adore about Tom King’s Batman (This is from I Am Gotham with David Finch) is that he takes the Moore/Miller “Isn’t Batman craaaaaazyyyyyy” approach and then flips it on its head, showing the repetition and the obsession, the unhealthy coping mechanisms, and then asks the simple question, why are they unhealthy? They kept him alive, kept him together, helped him become a better person, didn’t they? It takes the mentally ill aspect of Batman’s character and separates it, utterly, from the “Sociopathic villain” perception it seemed to go hand in hand with, explaining that, yes, Batman can be mentally ill, and yes, Batman can still then be an inherently, unambiguously good person
SliceOSunshine 