Out of all the superheroes, batman has to be one of my favorites. As a child I loved the cartoons like Batman Beyond and Justice League. I liked the darker world it was set in and the villains that he always faced. Lately, I've been thinking about Batman as a character and the villains that he usually faces. Almost all of them have something to do with deeper a psychological motive that causes the comics to classify them as criminally insane. I wanted to draw connections between Batman and the criminals he faces.
The first thing I thought of when thinking of Batman is his main villain, the Joker. The Joker is an insane clown who is hell-bent on causing anarchy and creating new challenges for Batman. Every time he tries, again and again, to cause some catastrophe and send the city of Gotham spiraling into a cesspool of chaos, but why? What is the Joker’s motive? In many of the games, comics, and movies it’s usually one simple idea. His character believes that everyone has the potential to go insane if they have a traumatic enough experience. It’s a fairly simple idea, it fits his character and why he acts the way he does, but why does he need to prove it? Who does he need to prove it to? It would only make sense that he does it to prove a message to Batman. He is the one person who gets his strategies, who gets his motive, who is able to make these connections to the Joker. The two are tied together in a symbiotic way because Batman understands the message the Joker is trying to make.
We all know the origin story of Batman, his parents were killed in front of him in a back alleyway. It’s a simple back story that builds his character in an easy way, but has a lot more implications when you think about it more. For a child to be exposed to such a traumatic event at such a young age can have a range of effects on his psyche. As a child the event could have caused Bruce to develop PTSD, depression, paranoia, and anything else that could have an effect on his mental health. The reason that every villain in the series has some kind of mental disorder is because it is a representation of Bruce Wayne’s battle against his own mental health. In one Batman comic, The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, the Joker says, “You had a bad day once am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?” The line implies that Bruce Wayne does suffer from mental trauma. He knows what most of the villains he fights feel like because he suffers from similar conditions.
After reading The Killing Joke I began to think about Batman in a new way. Everyone assumes that his motive is to stop crime so no one can suffer from the same fate that he had to endure as a child. But after reading what was presented in the comic, I think it’s a little deeper than that. The main reason Batman tries to defeat the Joker is to help the Joker. He knows that the villains he faces are sick and need help because he suffers from similar conditions. At the end of the comic there is an important last page that puts their relationship into a new perspective.
It shows that there is another side to the conflict besides the usual fisticuffs and schemes. The two are in a battle to overcome their mental issues, trying to come to terms with what has happened in their lives.
To circle back to my thoughts on the series, the Batman is a fun comic book hero who stands apart from a lot of other heroes who are a lot less serious, but underneath is a lot of context that can be looked further into when analyzing the characters. I think that the series can have a lot more meaning when you look at it again through different lenses and themes.
