Aside wherever wokeness and the apex god tier plot armor modern day Batman has. The character is just inhuman now. He is written as always being "one step ahead", no one can even get a hit on him and he's gone completely sociopath. Older written Bruce Wayne was still a guy at the end of the day, trying to have relationships and a life. Older Wayne also would make mistakes, walk into traps, get captured, and even the Penguin could get a few strikes on him.
No he's just unstoppable and can defeat Superman is a even one on one. His Bat Computer needs to go too because all his detective work is done for him on a machine instead of investigating crime scenes himself.
Thank you for reading my stupid rant, hope you guys have a nice day and hopefully have something fun to do.
Comic book continuities always seem to disappear up their own asses after too much time. They just can't let hit characters die or ride off into the sunset.
Batman Beyond was so good at that. In the later comics Wayne passes away, quietly in bed too I think. Then Terry McGinnis and Tim Drake continue on with Drake taking on Wayne's role as the logistical support.
Batman beyond would’ve been perfect if it wasn’t for the weird ass inclusion of the Barbara Gordon x Bruce Wayne relationship that….is just simply disgusting in every aspect
Barbara x Bruce is Bruce Timm's ship that he tries to stick in to a Batman story when he can get away with it. He did it in the Killing Joke movie as well.
Wasn't Barbera bat girl in that universe?
Conversely, I think Gotham was a step in the right direction too. Expanding into the past and focusing on Gordon's early career, dipping into new unexplored territory while still retaining some of the more classic Batman themes and nostalgia.
Then there's the more recent and awful attempts at making it about something Batman adjacent, but not actually Batman. Where they're quite blatantly positioning characters to take over his role while doing everything they can to belittle and tear down everything about his character, quite clearly reflecting the woke-mindset about everything else in society.
The perpetual continuation of the setting and the characters is the root issue with the whole of Marvel and DC. They don't actually have stories to tell, only franchises to sell.
Of course the story is going to be shit when you don't actually have a story.
this is what happens when the publishers own the ips
The Phantom solved this by each Phantom being a son of the previous one. So there could be episodes set in different time periods etc.
I blame modern copyright law. The big companies wouldn't be able to churn out lazy slop and rely on name recognition for revenue if their big name characters all dropped into public domain after a few years.
It is possible that maybe some comics just have no more material to write? Batman has been a staple comic book icon since he appeared in 1939. 85 years of writing stories about a guy in a bat costume fighting crime. At this point if they drastically change the character, readers would be pissed that you messed with a legacy character and if you keep it stale or give fans what they want, there will be people such as yourself that just wants classic Batman back. It’s a lose-lose and it doesn’t help that wokeness and DEI hires are making the art quality and writing far worse than before.
By and far the largest issue is that not a single inclusive writer ever has an original idea, much less a good one.
That is the same reason I hate Batman. When he was the Batman of the seventies, eighties and nineties he was a street level bad ass. Then he became popular so DC decided he should be the most dangerous member of the JLA... Somehow. I got out of mainstream comics more than decade ago as they were going downhill before DC and Marvel went super woke.
So he hit level 15 and needs a new nemesis?
Batman has been raising his game every time Gotham's secrets start to get answered. When you have portals to hell, a Lazarus pit, and likely more, you need to up your abilities. Suddenly the old villains like Ice Cream Man are not strong enough.
You should watch this video by Arch about why we need Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne MORE than Superman and Batman.
It's a long video but does touch on your point fully.
Maybe you are too old and too developed as an adult to be entertained by children's stories that were written by people who are now your moral and intellectual lessers. This goes for comics, books, games. Your love for tbe material can hold you over for a while, but for how long, in the face of however much mediocrity?
I usually hate this line of thought ("youre an adult, stop watching kids cartoons") but the raw fact is that if you are approaching or past your mid twenties and you have an above average IQ you are competitive with the people make capeslop as part of a 9-to-5 job working on a product that targets a young audience.
When you do your 9-to-5 job, are you exactly straining your brain to its fullest extent to provide the absolute highest quality work you can? Probably not. Neither are the people making capeslop, be it a comic or a game or a film.
Add to that the fact that they could very well be less intelligent than you by real metrics, in fact they might even be members of a race that does not share the full extent of your heriditary talent for abstraction. Many may be younger than you and if you are a real human person in this world they are almost certainly less wise and experienced than you are, because many if not most of them are nepo children who never had any difficulties to overcome that weren't made up on Tumblr.
This is part of the reason I LOVE (LOVE LOVE LOVE) the stories and media that I do love. Things made by wise men who are dead now, who have wisdom that I don't have, who can only teach me through what they've recorded. By contrast, there is nothing you'll absorb from a modern Batman series that you wouldnt pick up from bots and 14 year old redditors in /r/politics.
So I thought when trying to read new Donald Duck comics. But then I tried re-reading some old ones and nope, they are still good.
Barks is basically a cartoon wiseman though
Batman is often OPed as fuck. But he is DC's bread and butter.
This reminds me of a YouTuber who made a bunch of videos poking fun at Steven Seagal's recent line of awful movies. I went through maybe 8 or 9 of them so far; and I remember that in all but maybe one of those movies, Steven's character was never hurt. Never took battle damage of any kind. People would shoot at him from short distances, fight him with knives, fists or whatever was around...and Steven didn't get so much as a bruise. And to me that's one of the reasons they were awful; I just couldn't get invested in an invincible character in an action movie.
Arkham Knight is the most popular form of Batman that does him at (IMO) the right power level.
I agree with almost everything you've said but Batman did have the power/ability to kill Superman in the Dark Knight Returns part 2, and it was written well, that's my only correction. Sorry we can't have nice things.
I only saw the movie to that. I even recall that Batman didn't even win that fight. His whole goal at the time was to distract Superman and buy some time.
It can be both a distraction and a lesson in humility: https://youtu.be/9-ZYZdEN4g4?si=HXIUNrLps1Tia6yU