LogFAQs > #964494727

Zareth posted...

Is that a billionaire would take his wife and son out to the theater without any armed bodyguards

When the story was originally written, it would have taken place in the 1920s. Much more believable then - at that point the President barely had armed bodyguards. Which is probably why they kept getting shot every 20 years or so.

Yeah, the more you keep pushing the origin forward the more ridiculous it becomes (at this point Bruce would have seen his parents getting shot in like the early 2000s at the earliest), but that's a problem with comics in general. Like how Captain America's suspended animation went from being originally 18 years to winding up nearly 65 years for the movies (radically altering just how alienated he was by the changes that took place in his absence). Or how The Punisher originally fought in Vietnam, but by this point they either have to retcon it forward to Iraq/Afghanistan or just never mention exactly which conflict he was fighting in.

Or, you know, the Fantastic Four taking a rushed test flight in an unproven rocket ship with insufficient shielding because they needed to "beat the Pinko Commie Ruskies to space". Or for that matter, Reed going on the mission at all (you don't send your top scientist on a potentially dangerous test flight), or being stupid enough to bring his young girlfriend and her teen little brother just for the fuck of it.

Sort of completely changing the origin from the ground up (which people would absolutely complain about nonstop), there really isn't much of a solution for these sorts of things.



FrozenBananas posted...

let alone walking down crime alley, alone, at night.

The implication is usually that it wasn't called Crime Alley at the time. The shooting itself is part of what led people to call it that in the first place. Urban decay can turn previously safe neighborhoods into crime-infested hellholes (and gentrification can do the reverse). Though again, it depends on which version of the story you're reading/watching/playing/etc.

It's sort of like how Daredevil is from Hell's Kitchen. Real life Hell's Kitchen didn't turn to absolute shit until after the Civil War, and it's been gentrifying since the mid-1980s. So while setting Daredevil as a character there growing up in a tough Irish slum made sense in the early 1960s, it wouldn't really have made much sense in 1860, nor would it make sense now.

Same deal with Ben Grimm/The Thing in the gentrification sense - the part of NYC he's supposed to be from was a rough neighborhood in the early 20th century (when he would have grown up there), but it would make absolutely no sense for him to come from there now and still have the same sort of childhood. The Yancy Street Gang is based on the Bowery Boys films from the 40s - and a Ben Grimm in a modern retelling of the story would have grown up in the late 90s/early 00s, when a gang like that literally would not exist there.



mooreandrew58 posted...

How many 6 ft 2 jacked billionaires are in gotham?

It's comic books. That's probably more than 80% of the adult male population of the city.

Just like 90% of the women you meet are statuesque supermodels with huge tits.



mooreandrew58 posted...

Iirc there was a plot line once where Bruce came out and said he was funding batman but wasn't batman. I feel they shoulda stuck with that.

Nah - like most of the ideas Grant Morrison introduced, it was kind of stupid.

Realistically, the moment Bruce announces that he's been funding Batman for years, he instantly becomes legally culpable for everything Batman has ever done, and Bruce gets sued straight into poverty.

Sure, it makes more sense ("Of course a rich kid who watched his parents get killed by a criminal is going to be gung ho on supporting a vigilante crime fighter!"), and helps obscure the connections between the two (why suspect that Bruce is Batman if everyone already "knows" that Bruce just works with Batman?). But it doesn't really work once you think about it for more than a few seconds.

It's the same problem Tony Stark had in the comics hiding his identity as Iron Man - he actually had to create multiple false identities for his "bodyguard" over the years when he did something shady and the government wanted to arrest (or kill) Iron Man. If the government knew that it was Tony in the suit from the very beginning, he'd have been in jail for like 40+ years now. And he still has to fend off lawsuits from criminals and rival businessmen related to Iron Man's activities.