How do you "buy off crime?"
Theoretically? You use your vast fortune to combat the root causes of crime; poverty, wealth inequality, food insecurity, etc. It's just fact that crime goes down significantly when all of peoples' needs are met. "If bread is free, no one steals bread" as it were.
It's also worth noting that Bruce Wayne was created as the son of "wealthy socialites." The Waynes were probably rich, and maybe even very rich if they came from old money. But the Waynes weren't the Rockefellers. It doesn't make sense to me that the son of a doctor would be a billionaire. The story has necessitated that more than anything. How could Bruce own a jet, military equipment, and state-of-the-art vehicles without hundreds of millions of dollars?
Making him a billionaire has fundamentally changed his character. It changed his morality. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, [insert your billionaire of choice], could end world hunger, cure disease, [insert your human suffering of choice]. The fact that Bruce could do that and doesn't make him a far more complex figure than he would've been even 40 years ago.
Oh yeah - 1 million percent. When you give Batman literally unlimited means, you change the very foundation of the character and make him something starkly different from what he was at conception. Unfortunately, the more our real life technology develops, the less sense can be made from Batman having any effectiveness JUST being a costumed dude with a cool car and a good hiding spot.
I don't envy comic writers today that have to grapple with this.
Absolutely. To me, superheroes work best as new-age mythology. What's the biggest problem facing our world right now? Climate change? Keep Superman as far away from it as humanly possible. Superheroes should only deal with larger-than-life villains within their pantheon, like Cronus (Greek mythology) or Loki (Norse). Once you turn them toward real-world problems, the entire fantasy collapses on itself.
Absolutely true. But you're also always going to struggle with external (and internal, sometimes) questions of 'if they can do this, why don't they do that?' When DC has 724 God-level beings hanging around on earth at any given time, it takes some mental gymnastics to convince yourself away from even thinking about how much good they don't seem to bother doing in the day-to-day existence of regular people.
That's yet another reason why I've always preferred supernatural/street level heroes. It's much easier to explain why 300 Daredevils didn't stop the genocide in Gaza than it is to explain why 300 Supermans didn't stop it.
Yeah, sticking to the former is the safe bet and one I don't mind companies sticking to as long as possible. Once your superhero starts tangling with the later, people's real-world politics start to enter in and if the hero makes the choice that's opposite someone's political perception then you have an online kerfuffle which, worst case, billion dollar Disney and WB might start to feel in their pocketbook. Nothing risky about punching an intergalactic despot.
I don't think it's fully possible to avoid this. Basically everything beyond 'the supervillain created a death ray to murder the entire world' is going to have political context. You can only have so many villains that are in the vein of 'chaos for the sake of chaos.' X-Men literally only exist as a politically motivated story. In a way, so does every Punisher story. We could even argue that Daredevil's more interesting character element is that he's deeply Catholic - but making him religious IS a political decision that can upset or alienate all kinds of people.
Just me, just my opinion, but I don't think comics should be afraid of anything. Tell the story and let people react how they're gonna react. At the end of the day, as we've clearly seen in the modern world, plenty of people will just ignore the real politics if it doesn't align with their beliefs anyway (i.e. racists that like X-Men, or fascists that love Superman and Captain America).
I think there's a fundamental tension in superhero comics not necessarily because we know more about rich people now (because, I mean, rich people were pretty obviously immoral shitheels since time immemorial and rarely hid it) but rather because we're all older, and comics started to grow up with its audience. This is that same thing that takes people out of Indiana Jones, where people who saw it as children recognize now he's not only a bad archeologist, but that his endeavors are pilfering the holy relics of OTHER cultures for his own enrichment.
I agree, but I also don't think it should be understated how much 'being massively wealthy' has changed since the '50s and '60s, and even the '80s and '90s. I think rich people did spend more resources on hiding how awful they were. I do think we knew less about what they were up to, and society at large (not just us as children) understood less about how much they were destroying civilization. Wealth inequality wasn't -that- bad (in 1st world countries) in the '80s. People felt things were going well. Most, even intelligent, people still bought into the idea that massive wealth was a possibility for anyone. And we didn't have social media to show us, in real time, how fucking atrociously disgusting rich people were and what they -actually- do with their money day-to-day, or what the difference -really- was between a regular working guy and a millionaire (we didn't even think in terms of 'billionaires' back then - that was a fantasy idea).
