Batman is one of the most popular comic book characters for good reason. He has a tragic backstory and pathos which is often compelling, but plays well against a rogues gallery so iconic that its hard to imagine Batman without characters like the Joker, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, Two-Face, or Poison Ivy. He exists in an expansive universe solely within Gotham. On top of that, he's been given to so many possible interpretations over the history of comics that just about anyone can find one and latch onto it. I'm one of the rare people whom the Bruce Wayne Batman character has not enchanted, so I'm gonna write a series of blogs detailing the reasons for my dislike of the character.
I'll preface this by saying that there have been a number of amazing writers on the Batman books and that the characters and concepts related to him I do enjoy in some cases. I like the Dick!Batman, the Gordons are great characters, Tim Drake & Cass Cain were two of my first crushes in comics when I started reading when I was a teenager, the number of incredible a number of Batman's rogues are great (though the ones I really like aren't that great in numbers) and there have been great stories told with the character at their core, even those which heavily rely on the character's complex comic book backstory. Still, I hate Bruce!Batman in concept and as a particular character.
Why the hate? The first reason is the issue of mental illness surrounding the Batman comics. If there has been a work of fiction which has done more to trivialize and vilify the mentally ill, I would love to see it. One of the best descriptions I've heard about Batman is that he's a rich man who beats up the poor and mentally ill. We'll come back to the rich/poor dichotomy later, fellow members of the 99%, but let's stay on the mentally ill problem.
Arkham Asylum is, by the very fact of its depiction in any Batman related media, one of the deepest and most entrenched problems in comics. Look, there were mental asylums like Arkham back in the day. That would have been a real place. The problem is, we don't have asylums any longer for very good reasons. People with mental problems, you see, are human beings. The mad are not an epidemic to be placed in a leper's asylum. I've spent time in mental hospitals as a patient. There are still massive problems with the system from a patient perspective, but the depiction of Arkham harkens back to a society where, by the very virtue of the fact I have hallucinations, I would have been cut off from normal society. Not that this still doesn't exist, but Batman is the encoding of this into our cultural mythology.
There are still many problems with the mental health system, not unrelated to the mental hospital and the concepts surrounding it, but its not anywhere near as bad as its depicted in the Batman comics and related media. This continues even in the best writers. The Joker is described as a psychotic. Even in the medical literature, he would be a psychopath, the difference is extreme. I'm a psychotic, I'm not a psychopath. Still, Batman's rogues need a Freudian reason for being evil, they need to be diagnosed.
The diagnosing of Batman's villains is horrible and it relates back to the problem of Arkham. As long as Arkham is seen as the go to place for his Rogues, they'll need to be psychopathologized. When a place is so ubiquitous in comics that Brad Meltzer in his series of shout-outs tailored into a loosely fitting story of misogyny and plot holes that could swallow a Hummer had to send Jean Lorring there. You know, because its where crazy people go.
I'm not saying that there isn't a place for psychopaths and sociopaths in comics. I'm not saying that we cannot depict these problems. But, let's be serious, this is how mental health is treated though out comics Batman is just the microcosm of every problem in the depiction and over-diagnosing of evil as mental illness. His villains are almost universally the criminally insane, and I could make this a much longer essay if I were to get into the idea of the "criminally insane," and the construction of the world around him has at its most important foundation Arkham Asylum.
There are other problems with Batman's villains. Psychiatry is used by Hugo Strange for his nefarious evil (as a psychotic himself, because, again, psychotics are horrible) and Harley Quinn is a psychologist who was infected with the psychopathy of the Joker, because mental problems work that way. Harley's one of the most problematic things in my opinion in Batman comics, but we'll get back to that later (Hint: Battered woman as fetish object in fandom). So, even if Arkham were a place of healing in some respect, mental illness infected it and turned it all evil, at least in Harley's case.
Now, some of you may be outraged. Batman's got mental problems to, some may say. Yes. Yes he does. In the most trite fashion possible. I ask you this simple question: When have we ever seen Batman treated as having a mental health which he seeks to understand, which is not an excuse for him to be Batman? In the Batman I've read, which is admittedly not terribly expansive and so I'll be glad if anyone can correct me, I've only seen the character Batman in therapy once. In the Flashpoint universe. Where Thomas Wayne said "Fuck you, I'm not goin' through your stupid therapy!" in fewer words.
Yes, Batman would be diagnosed with PTSD in our society, he witnessed his parents' deaths. And, to their credit, in the comics he is still treated as someone who can function. He's disciplined himself to the extent that he can deal with his traumas. Except no. Take a story like Tower of Babel. Batman's mental issues place him as having betrayed the team. That is to say, when he succumbs to it, he's evil. Really, that evil comes from him being a complete and utter fascist without equivocation, but we'll get to that.
Mental health SHOULD be treated in comics, but it should not be treated as something leading to evil. Take, by contrast to Batman, Spider-man. We can argue the relative traumas of both characters, but its less questionable that Spider-man has a real trauma which pushes him along. Yet, of the two, Spider-man's mental problems are realistic where Batman's aren't. This isn't a problem of DC v. Marvel, mind, if someone were able to actually tell a good story around it, Superman has a great amount of psychical trauma which ought to be explored but isn't. The difference is, Spider-man's problems aren't the character, only an aspect. Batman is every negative of mental health and the depiction of mental health as fixation and root off our concept of evil.
There is a place for Batman in comics, there's a place for that type of character who's dealing with his traumas in the fashion of a paranoid individual. But he's the ONLY consistent depiction of mental health in comics and as such there is a need for responsibility in the depiction. There is a problem with mental health in comics at large. Our heroes are treated as "sane" while villains are "insane." This is a problem, though, since sanity can still be evil and insanity can still be good.
Batman is the flashpoint of this problem as the earliest progenitor in comics. Hopefully, our American macro-society will get past the super-psycholization of our so-called criminal class, but Batman is the mythology encoding that problem. This is the first of my problems with Batman.
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