Batfam Fight Club! Or Let’s Draw Flying Pieces Of Broken Stuff.
Just a set of daily sketches I’ve been doing over the week. Also, as a small note because I know it’s confused a couple of people before: I don’t fill in skin tones for fast stuff like this.
The story behind the bat nomenclature, or, batkids from Jason onwards question Bruce Wayne’s obsession with bats
Inspired by batfamscreaming’s very cute post about Batman being a dad, and the very adorable and real phenomenon of words or phrases coined by older siblings being added to the family’s lexicon.
I took the liberty of including the typical (if altered) “Why?”/”Because I’m your father, that’s why” exchange because there can never be enough batdad, dammit.
“22 year old puts on bat costume to punch criminals, has no powers” is hard enough to wrap your head around but throw in “24 year old adopts 12 year old who also punches criminals, has no powers” and that is not something that would ever occur to anyone
like OBVIOUSLY batman must be an older man who knows what he’s doing, and not just some traumatized 20-something accidentally collecting traumatized children
haha wow referring to bruce wayne as a 20-something really puts things in perspective. batman: probably actually younger than joey from friends.
i am enjoying how completely horrified everyone is by this thought
to elaborate on my preferred timeline it goes:
orphaned at 12 (consistent with how his ptsd manifests)
tested out of high school and accepted into yale at 16 (because he is an overachieving type a motherfucker who channels his survivor’s guilt into being The Best)
spends six years at yale getting a jd/mba and using all his free time to travel the world and learn punches
ready to take over the family biz at 22
“hello alfred i am back from yale here are all of my fancy degrees ps i’m going to dress like a bat now good luck talking me out of it i’m technically a lawyer now lol”
TWENTY-TWO YEAR OLD BATMAN. TWENTY-THREE YEAR OLD BATMAN. GOING IT ALONE. IT’S JUST HIM.
this is probably when he is most nolan-esque because have you ever met a man in his early twenties who thinks it’s his job to save the world
they’re the fucking worst
TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD BATMAN MEETS A TWELVE YEAR OLD WHO JUST WATCHED HIS PARENTS DIE
twelve year old mistakenly assumes someone who is 24 is a grownup, no one corrects him
the fact that either of them survive is a miracle even before you take the night job into account, thank god for alfred or they would probably get scurvy
i told you that just so you would understand how i have justified it when i tell you that this makes Batman during his first year with Robin younger than:
Still thinking about that last post about Gotham and now I’m wondering what would Gotham’s equivalent be for a Batman that wasn’t in the US? Gotham is the imaginary setting as to place our detective-noir-inspired superhero, and the character of his urban setting is a huge component of his story – he needs a large city, (a port as to constantly bring in new plots organically and to explain the city’s size and age), one that is crime-ridden (especially organized crime) but could still evoke the idea that it had once been less ugly and dangerous, that it had a ‘golden age’. And the foil of Metropolis literally means a big city and it the archetypal large city of opportunities and advances and a tech (but also dangers and disappointments). Both cities, according to comic lore, were based of the concept of New York City- a bright side and the dark. Gotham comes from a nickname for NYC coined in the early 1800s by authors that disliked it. I ask because I know there’s the fic rec about the Batman mythos as re-imagined as taking place in Brazil (which sadly I read no Portuguese or there’d go my weekend), and I’m wondering then what city would the stand-in or inspiration for Gotham (Rio? Recife? Sao Paulo?) Of course the fabric of Batman himself would be quite different (and I read it suggested that Batman is as a superhero character very “American” in his appeal as compared to say Superman, which sounds right to me), so that wouldn’t change. But what region or place would be the one that readers could imagine “Gotham”?
Conversely, while Smallville wasn’t originally in Kansas, the Superman origin is that it’s the alien boy found and raised in Smallville, Kansas – literally ‘archetype of tiny rural farm community in the middle of the country, underscore rural and isolated and traditional or ‘old-fashioned’. (There’s a reason an AU/Elseworld replaced Clark Kent’s upbringing with the Amish and the character was less radically changed than “Red Son” – which again famous AU where the equivalent to Smallville, Kansas was a collective farm in the Ukraine). Also that Perry White can make a Wizard of Oz joke because of Kansas makes me smile months later. So what’s the Smallville, Kansas equivalent? (…Sadly I bet Gascony is too touristy instead of rural that the imaginary French versions of Clark Kent wouldn’t get D’artangan jokes, but then what region of France is considered ‘rural small town surrounded by only crop fields’ and is Gotham named after one of Paris’s nicknames or can another region or city of France claim Gotham? Metropolis is def. a Paris)
as a kid i always thought gotham was in michigan because i thought it was a midwestern city like chicago, and there was always shit going down at the pier or in abandoned factories and if michigan has anything it’s a lot of piers and abandoned factories. anyway turns out it’s probably in jersey.
other good reasons for gotham to be in michigan:
one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck
there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown
there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for
“63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes
mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy
MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW
imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand
“we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb
good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses
“kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay
i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there
our most famous abandoned theme park is dinosaur themed so I GUESS WE KNOW WHERE HE GOT THE T-REX
we have a special kind of ice cream called superman ice cream and i think bruce would be really bitter about it and that’s hilarious
there are nine different species of bat in michigan and they have all lived in my kitchen at some point
michigan is full of mines both abandoned and active and bats love them
put an abandoned train station next to and abandoned mine and you have a totally plausible CRIMEZONE
and none of this is getting into the most compelling evidence
put a city in michigan and watch how fast no one gives a fuck
gotham, MI needs batman because who the fuck else is going to help
batman please save us from the cops and the state government
I always thought that Gotham was Chicago and Metropolis was New York City.
that’s what i thought but apparently metropolis is new york during the day and gotham is new york at night which means the dc universe has three new yorks which i think even new yorkers can agree is too many
when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin
there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it
rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them
michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it
if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink
this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi
this is the charles t fisher house
here’s the james scott residence
welcome to michigan hope u like houses with turrets and fucked up clowns and evil men poisoning the water
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