Shocker: Garth Ennis doesn't get Batman

[cyberghostface]

I was looking forward to Garth Ennis's upcoming Batman miniseries but he recently revealed his approach to the character and, well...

"What we’re talking about here is a billionaire aristocrat who beats up poor people, as well as the mentally ill. I don’t know what that has to do with a code of honor, but it certainly appeals to my sense of humour -- which was probably my way into writing the character and the reason I enjoyed writing him more than I otherwise might have."

I always grit my teeth at the "Batman is a rich guy who beats up the poor and mentally ill" because it's such a gross oversimplification of the character and inaccurate to boot. It's something that you say if you're trying to come up with an edgy "deconstruction" of the character (I.E. like the 'evil fascist Superman' that everyone is doing now) or come clever hashtag commentary (like, let's ignore how Bruce Wayne has spent millions of dollars helping out Gotham City or how he has reached out to those in need).

The notion that "Batman beats up the mentally ill" ignores that Batman, probably moreso than any other superhero, has constantly tried to rehabilitate his mentally ill villains and protect them from harm. I've lost how many times Batman has tried, for example, to help cure Harvey Dent or how many times he's pointed out Joker is mentally ill when people have tried to kill him.

Obviously 'The Killing Joke' needs no introduction but here you go... Batman refuses to beat up the Joker and instead offers to help rehabilitate him.





As for Two-Face, I don't have a whole lot of scans on hand but here's a scene from Gotham Knights #32. It's a small thing but it's Batman just being a decent person when he doesn't have to be.

Comments

[blueprintstyles]

Garth Ennis feels like a juvenile high school with the potential to be a great writer once he gets past 'edgy' bullshit.

[tinygaylaura]

I agree about the juvenile part but completely disagree with the idea he could ever be a great writer

I think he'd have to improve a hell of a lot just to be called a bad writer.

[lordultimus]

He'd probably like Batman more if he killed people.

Also, I know the stereotypical Batman scene has him fight hoodlums or whatever, but how many of Batman's rogues gallery can count as "poor"? Most of them seem to come from affluent backgrounds themselves. Killer Croc, I guess? The Ventriloquist sometimes?

(And looking back at classic Golden/Silver Age stories, he usually fought mobsters in very fine-looking suits, so even the original Batman probably didn't literally fight the poor like that.)

[sadoeuphemist]

I actually went through this one time, a surprising amount of them have some sort of economic troubles featuring heavily in their backstory:

Joker - per The Killing Joke, a struggling stand-up comic who turned to crime to make ends meet.
Riddler - origin story varies, in various media (Batman Forever, TAS, The Batman) he was a wage slave who turned to crime after he got screwed over by his boss taking credit for his work.
Penguin - again, origin kind of varies, I think mainly he's from an old money family that went bankrupt
Catwoman - again, varies, but https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/264645.html
Scarecrow - name originally came from the fact that he was a lanky guy who spent his money on books rather than clothes: "So I look like a scarecrow -- that will be my symbol -- a symbol of poverty and fear combined!"
Bane - grew up in prison
Mr. Freeze - couldn't afford his wife's healthcare

[lonewolf23k]

The irony of Ennis' statement on Batman beating up the Poor and Mentally ill, when he lionizes Frank Castle, a guy who just guns down the poor and mentally ill, is just amazing.

[laughing_tree]

"Batman actually spends tons of money on charitable causes" is the 2021 equivalent of when people responded to "the JLA lack diversity" with "they've got a Martian, Kryptonian, and Atlantean, what are you talking about?"

It's a defense that's making the mistake of focus on a deep in-universe level of texture, when the actual criticism isn't about that level at all.

[cyberghostface]

What is the criticism about then? Because that Justice League response is pretty much a troll/strawman argument.

[jlbarnett]

What about the Batman villains is intrinsically tied to them being poor? If you're looking at the Batman 66 show which so many seem to take as what Batman is, their constant ability to have personally themed lairs suggests some wealth. And they weren't mentally ill there they go to prison when caught not Arkham. In a significant number of the movies he's fighting the mob in a significant way. They're not poor

Who decided that if you commit crimes you must be poor? Because that is the ONLY reason to declare Batman is a rich man beating up on the poor is a significant portion of the Batman mythos

[dragontail]

Don't have a lot of time for Ennis outside of Preacher, but I'd agree his assessment sadly has validity... so long as we're only talking about the post-Denny O'Neil era Batman. The version of Batman that has endured since O'Neil left, and intensified during the Nolan movies era, can - unfortunately, and in my opinion - be reduced down to "billionaire crybaby tantruming through the city in paramilitary pyjamas". It's why so many of the jokes in "The Lego Batman Movie" landed as well as they did for a lot of people (myself included).

I'd argue Bronze Age Batman, and even later into the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle era, was demonnstrablyy focused on rehabilitating his enemies and "ordinary" criminals (giving them jobs at Wayne Enterprises, running programs for schools, the much-missed-by-me "VIP" project from the Wayne Tower Batcave era). And I feel that's an element of the character that's been well and truly lost over the past 15-20 years, where we as readers as supposed to just accept "philanthropist" as part of the trappings without seeing any evidence of same. It's become "tell, don't show".

Do I think Ennis' interpretation is right? Not at all. But the treatment of the Batman character leaves the interpretation open in a way that more careful handling would not. The longer DC allows an "all the money lets you make the bigger gadgets and kick more ass because I'm a grim loner grrrr" interpretation of Batman to reign in the public consciousness, the more embedded it becomes.

Hopefully Tynion's run goes some way to altering this.

[lucean]

I'll be honest, I have real difficulties with this argument because, to me, this criticism would be most valid for the Bronze Age Batman stories just because of the general mainstream culture views on petty crimes at that era.

[tripodeca113]

Perhaps, someday this will be considered so overdone, writers will have to come up with another type of Batman deconstruction.....

Probably not, as it seems the easiest one to come up with.

[lucean]

Or at least be more clever with it. I mean, below a SNL sketch from a few years back that I personally think did a much better job at mocking that aspect of the character:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK0OkpQ4vEU

[lucean]

Jesus Christ, Garth Ennis is writing another Batman story? This legitimately shocked me as you could feel distain he had towards the character when he wrote the first one.

[shakalooloo]

Having read the full interview, at least he's being hionest about hating the rogues gallery and not having read any Batman comics for decades, being only familiar with the eighties stuff.

Nice art, though.

[lucean]

Yeah, it really sounds like that.

[leahandillyana]

That's an actually legitimate alternative interpretation of the character, which I'd put somewhere between "The only reason Ravka still exists is because Kirigan created the Unsee" and "If not for Lotor the Alteans would be an extinct species" in terms of legitimacy. It applies less to modern Batman, who tends to mostly fight supervillains and supernatural threats, and more to 20th century Batman stories where he fought regular street crime. Of course, it's an oversimplification of the character, but still closer to canon than evil fascist superman. As for rehabilitation you mention, Bruce is eager to try to rehabilitate white American villains and antiheroes, but when his antagonists are not American, even the no kill rule becomes relative. I've written about it before: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22016254

[cyberghostface]

“As for rehabilitation you mention, Bruce is eager to try to rehabilitate white American villains and antiheroes, but when his antagonists are not American, even the no kill rule becomes relative.”

Oh come on. Obviously that’s because 99% of his villains are white Americans. Killer Croc is black but even that’s hidden under all his scales.

[onsokumaru]

I want a woke version of Batman who sees a couple of innocent people being attacked by some criminal and his reaction is "Oops, sorry, as a rich white man I don't feel confortable with beating that poor person whose gender I won't assume. But rest assured, brave citizen, I financed an educational program that will make criminality decrease by 30 % in 10 years! You just have to be a little bit patient."

[bmaryott]

You... want him to ignore the victims in front of him while the crime s going on?!?

Also, there are several examples of "I caught this thug, and when he got out of jail I helped him turn his life around."

[tinygaylaura]

They say you can't judge a book by its cover

But if that cover has "Written by Garth Ennis" on it I feel pretty confident in saying that I can 100% judge that it's going to be absolute shit

I also can't stop laughing at this

"After taking superheroes down a peg (to put it mildly) with his and Darick Robertson's successful comic series The Boys"

Oh yeah, he sure showed superhero comics a thing or two what with how superhero fiction is a muti-million dollar business earning DC and Marvel a small fortune every single year. He gave them such a thrashing

Meanwhile the Boys got...a tv show on Amazon Prime which looks like it had roughly the same budget as one of Channel Awesome's anniversary specials

[bmaryott]

Small corrections:

Multi-BILLION dollar industry.

And they are earning HUGE fortunes for Marvel and DC.

[silverhammerman]

Garth Ennis has always preferred army men to superheroes, it's as simple as that and at least he's honest about it. His love of the military is both somewhat juvenile and standard "old guy gets way into military history", and he's had a chip on his soldier about superheroes dominating western comics for decades. His pride at lacking any curiosity about the character and how he's evolved in last 30 years is galling but hardly surprising. I get where Ennis is coming from, I respect his work overall, he is capable to good writing, even if it's not the kind of thing I care for and his sense of humor is dated at best. I just don't care about or respect what he has to say.

I've said this before, but the thing about Garth Ennis is that his largely uncritical worship of army man heroes, the Hard Men Doing Hard Things, is part of a much older and frankly more widespread cultural trend than relatively new and inarguably rather silly superheroes are. Kids join the military and go off to war to kill and get killed because of hundreds of years of stories about cool, noble, self-sacrificing men of action who lay down their lives even when their leaders are cruel or incompetent, by comparison, superheroes at worst give people some silly ideas about personal power and heroism. They're not comparable social evils and I'm not interested in hearing them discussed by Garth Ennis of all people until he reckons with the fact that his run on The Punisher, the ultimate Hard Man Doing Hard Things comics, probably played a big part in making that character so easy for literal white nationalists and fascists to co-opt.

Despite him being, I think, purposely provocative in that interview, I'm sure he can still turn in a solid book, and looking at it through the lens of 80's comics will probably a good way to approach it. I expect it to be a somewhat late arriving cousin to something like Morrison's Arkham Asylum, for all the good and bad that implies.

[laughing_tree]

I don't think Ennis' complaints about superheroes have *ever* been about their social impact or influence, though. Frankly, he strikes me as having far too long regard for superheroes to even be thinking about any potential social impact.

[bmaryott]

Garth Ennis wanting to pee in something until he likes the flavor.

Shocking.

[tinygaylaura]

Garth Ennis writing a shitty comic book

Even more shocking!

[lencannon]

Charitable donations are a deeply inefficient way to spend money on the public good. When I am elected fictional governor, I will make make believe characters like Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, and Richie Rich pay their fair share of taxes to fund infrastructure projects, health care initiatives, and free higher education .

Early voting starts June 25th,and I'll see you at the polls!

[deh_tommy]

Heck, who says they don’t?

[stubbleupdate]

I said this a decade ago, and i maintain it

Garth Ennis is a decent writer.
Most of the Garth Ennis books are not written by Garth Ennis. He gets two teenage boys in his street round to write them and he pays them in pizza and letting them play his Xbox.

the 3 Night Witches books are pretty good, as is Sara. I've not read too much else by him though

[thanekos]

" [Batman's rogues] put me in mind of a bunch of multicolored idiots tittering and twitching as they try to get into a nightclub, with the biggest, baddest, black-clad bouncer on the door ensuring they’ll never succeed.. Croc is a bit more physically formidable but is just as lacking in credibility when it comes to taking on Batman. Something in his origin did, however, inspire a new character that I thought might actually be worthy of Batman’s attention. "

There's potential in that last bit.

[bruinsfan]

Don't worry, I have every confidence in Ennis' ability to squander any potential under a mountain of teenage edgelord shock tactics and obsession with buggery.

[mazway_75]

The thing that gets me on this and how it seems Ennis hates or doesn't understand superheroes?

He wrote a terrific Superman in "Hitman" and the later JLA team-up special.

[tinygaylaura]

He certainly wrote about Superman in those books

I wouldn't call either terrific or even "Okay"

[tcampbell1000]

A couple years back, on this very site, I got rightly schooled for thinking that my take on the X-Men-- basically, "not as great a representation of every single minority ever as Marvel seems to think"-- was one that few other people had thought of. And so I had to reflect that I didn't spend enough time on the internet to know about every hot take that had gotten stale through overexposure.

But even back then, I would've known that this hot take was the most wearisome superhero bullcrit cliche since "They're FASCISTS because they wear bright colors and PRESERVE THE STATUS QUO!" Even from Ennis-the-superhero-critic, who is by far my least favorite Ennis, this is goddamn lazy. But hey, we're here, let's dissect this a little.

Recent Batman comics have been tooling around with the first part of the proposition-- "What if Batman were... less rich, then? Not hobo poor or in student-loan debt or anything, but no longer a billionaire, just one of those millionaires that the billionaires treat like the help. Better?" And arguably it might be: it's at least an interesting variation.

Thing is, it's frankly very difficult for any of us to fathom how much it'd cost to do what he does (this infographic seems to have some questionable math). And without money, Batman has no toys and therefore limited appeal.

But I can understand being concerned about lionizing the ultra-rich in an era of concentrated wealth. It's the second part that really gets my goat.

Many of Batman's enemies, like many supervillains overall, happen to be mentally ill somehow. But that's not why he goes after them. He goes after them because they kill innocent people. He's not going to punch you for having anxiety, you freaking edgelords. He doesn't go to mental wards and kick random patients while screaming "STOP CRAZYING! STOP CRAZYING!"

Frankly, if you're championing the mentally ill by using mass-murderers as their representatives, then something went deeply wrong somewhere in the course of your argument. The mind, like many things, has spectrums. Nobody's completely 100% "normal," what would that even look like, but many of us have problems. Sometimes our problems are severe. But we struggle, we fight, we hope for better. Every day's a chance to get a little more right.

On the outskirts, though, are people who are both completely lost and an undeniable danger to others as well as themselves. And you're allowed to feel compassion for those people, but don't let that blind you to the fact that they have to be stopped.

The construction "beats up the mentally ill" also tries to cloak a criticism of Batman villains as a problem with Batman, as if it somehow reflects badly on his own character who shows up to fight him. And look, clearly nobody's getting rid of the Joker, but if this is an issue for you, then just have Batman fight someone almost neurotypical now and again, it worked fine with Ra's, Talia, and Bane! (And the Penguin's sanity level tends to vary a lot between different interpretations.)

We'll see what this actually leads to, in terms of a story. I'd write it off entirely, but a lot of Ennis' best work was with the Punisher, so we'll see.

[leahandillyana]

The question is why so many writers portray characters who kill innocent people as mentally ill.

[shadowkat]

The difficulty with superhero comic books? OR so I've realized over time - is how you relate to the characters in them - has a lot to do with what version or writer that you read or how you were introduced to the character. For example? If you were introduced to Batman via Frank Miller's take, and only that - you may come at it the same way as Garth Ennis does (or not), if however, you were like me and your first introduction was Adam West in the 1960s/70s television series Batman (reran in the 70s in the afternoon) or via the cartoons - you may see the character very differently.

Same with the X-men. If your introduction to Cyclops/Scott Summer was those horrible 1990s cartoons - you may hate the character. But if your introduction was through the comics of the 1980s through 1990s, you may love the character - depending of course on how you viewed Madelyn Prior (I didn't like Prior.)

Same with Superman - it all depends on which writer, and where you come into the character or version.

Also, it should be mentioned that Garth Ennis irritates me, so I avoid his comics as a matter of course. LOL!

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Funny, I was just thinking of how I can't wait to see how Ennis's Batman will compare to Miller's, and the analyses to follow.

[krait]

Like most soundbites, it has some truth in it, but it flattens many other truths.

Honestly, if we're going to have edgy reinterpretations of Batman, I'd like to see one run with "mentally ill billionaire aristocrat beats up criminals," with some examination of the possibilities inherent in the 'writers can't make Batman get therapy and heal' restriction. It wouldn't be hard to build a young Bruce Wayne reacting to his parents' murder with deep clinical depression, anxiety, and obsessive focus on revenge. When you combine that with 'billionaire' there's a lot of opportunity to set up interesting contrasts between Batman and other heroes, Batman and other victims, and Batman and villains. When does his social and financial position give him advantages? When does it do nothing for him? Is it ever actively detrimental?

At the very least, it can't be a worse take than "Batman is just a perfectly normal rich guy who kills poor mentally ill folks like The Joker for funsies."