Was Batman right to make plans against the Justice League?

[Vanguard-01]

I think the rest of the Justice League should be making plans on how to take out Batman. He's so rich he could topple all the world economies if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning.

The League should absolutely plan to take down Batman. They know for a fact that he controls an arsenal that allows him to render them worthless with trivial ease and HE'S the one member of the team with a history of mental instability. If I'm any one of the League, I'm coming up with my own Batman countermeasures, and I'm keeping my finger on the trigger every second that guy is in the same room with me.

Is Batman right to have anti-League countermeasures? Yes. The problem is that he is often the ONLY person on the face of the Earth who can access them. That presents two problems.

1.) If Batman is the only one who can access his countermeasures, then any Leaguer who DOES go bad is going to know "Take out Batman first. No Batman? No countermeasures to my nefarious plans."

2.) If DC ever had the guts to do a story where BATMAN is the one who goes bad (and given his mental instability, this should be a very real possibility,) then Batman goes bad and instantaneously has access to everything he'll ever need to crush the League in seconds, leaving him free to run unchecked.

One of the best examples I ever saw of a Batman countermeasure story was Injustice 1. Batman had a Kryptonite laser to handle Superman if he ever went bad. The catch? He couldn't access the laser by himself. He needed the cooperation of several other League members just to gain access to the weapon. Now, yeah, I think it was a bit excessive to require the cooperation of.....what? Five other very specific heroes? Something like that? If Superman ever went bad, there's no guarantee there will BE five specific League members left alive to help Batman gain access to the laser. But the mere idea that he decided that stopping Superman is not and should not be a decision he can make all on his own speaks of a much higher level of respect for his teammates and some actual forethought into preventing the possibility of the responsibility being abused.

I tend to have a problem with Batman having countermeasures for the League exclusively because those stories almost always paint Batman as the sole arbiter of whether or not the League needs to be stopped. He gets to sit in judgement of all the other heroes, and no one else's opinion or feelings matters. Add the very real prospect that Batman may succumb to his own paranoia and megalomania one day and turn those weapons against the League himself, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

The typical Batman countermeasure story shows a Batman who seems to have NOTHING but contempt for the rest of the League and he seems like he's just waiting for them to give him an excuse to beat them down because he's BATMAN!!! Giving the other members some say in how and when his countermeasures are deployed reduces the risk of them being deployed incorrectly and shows that Batman actually DOES respect his teammates. A fact that often seems to get lost in a lot of his stories.

[darkseidpwns]

Why would Superman need a Batman counter measure? just fry him from space.

[Vanguard-01]

Why would Superman need a Batman counter measure? just fry him from space.

In Superman's case, that should pretty much BE his countermeasure: don't hesitate and don't fight fair.

If he thinks Batman's up to no good? Don't wait. Blitz him. Knock him out. Throw him in a cell. Notify the rest of the League immediately. If it turns out he's wrong? "Whoops! Sorry, Bruce! It's not like you haven't done the same thing to me a hundred times before though, amirite?" If it turns out he's right? Well then.....he's right and he did the right thing.

[Lorendiac]

The League should absolutely plan to take down Batman. They know for a fact that he controls an arsenal that allows him to render them worthless with trivial ease and HE'S the one member of the team with a history of mental instability.

Where do you get the idea that he's the only member of the team with a history of mental instability?

There was, for instance, the time in the late 1980s when a nasty vigilante called "Gangbuster" was running around in the streets of Metropolis, beating up low-level criminals with excessive force. Superman seemed unable to catch the guy. Then it turned out that this was because Superman was the new Gangbuster! (The first one had been Jose Delgado, who later resumed the role.) Superman himself had not consciously realized he was Gangbuster; he was suffering from severe mental illness at the time, as a result of unresolved guilt issues from what he had done to the Phantom Zone villains of the Pocket Universe.

And then, of course, there was the time in the mid-1990s when longtime Justice Leaguer Hal Jordan went utterly nuts, trashing the rest of the Green Lantern Corps, terrifying most of the Guardians of the Universe into committing suicide in order to empower their buddy Ganthet, and ultimately trying to reshape the entire cosmos in "Zero Hour."

At the time of "Tower of Babel" in the JLA comics, no excuses involving "yellow fear demons" had been retconned in to justify why Hal acted that way. It had been written, in the mid-1990s, as simply being a case of "he snapped after seeing that Coast City had been turned into a smoking hole in the ground and its millions of inhabitants had been slaughtered all at once."

Heck, at the end of the "Tower of Babel" storyline, Kyle Rayner tried to raise the Hal Jordan thing as a prime example of what Batman had every reason to be so worried about . . . and Flash (Wally) simply yelled at him to shut up. (In my parody of that scene, I also had Kyle raise the "Superman was blacking out and becoming the vicious Gangbuster" thing, too. As well as some other cases where less-famous members of the League had gone rogue.)

[Vanguard-01]

Where do you get the idea that he's the only member of the team with a history of mental instability?

First? I wasn't talking about Tower of Babel specifically. Tower of Babel simply began the "Batman trashes the Justice League" trope. Other writers expanded it into a true trope that is now simply accepted as a daily fact of life in the DCU.

Second? Of the seven core members of the League, which one pretty much LIVES in his childhood trauma 24/7? Which one steadfastly refuses to seek psychological treatment to help him actually heal his psychic wounds?

The other League members may have had their brushes with mental instability. Batman literally NEEDS his mental instability to be what he is. Or at least that's what he tends to believe. If you were looking around the Watchtower with a completely objective mindset, which League member would YOU be most worried about in terms of mental stability? Unless your visit to the Watchtower happened right in the middle of a story in which another Leaguer was currently crazy and/or mind controlled, I would think it'd be pretty obvious which is the one member of the team you'd be the least likely to think should be the one with exclusive access to the "Kill All My Teammates" arsenal.

[godisawesome]

What exactly is the less-than-lethal equivalent of setting a man on fire or inducing a heart attack

The fact that both MM, Wonder Woman and Flash could still be rescued from the attacks imply that no countermeasure was designed around quickly killing them, but that the methods used could become lethal if given enough time. "Less than lethal" is the phrase used for weapons intended to not kill but also still end the fight, often carrying great potential risk of still killing the victim-- like tasers. Admittedly, it always felt kind of weird that MM was revealed to be so durable he could survive a significant amount of time on fire if that was his greatest weakness, but that's the biggest issue with the plans to me.

And I'll say it again, the plans existing is okay, I just want to see them acknowledge the League itself is countermeasure #1; heck, it may make elements of those countermeasures make since if they were designed to be used to let the League capture the rogue member. MM is effectively a walking fire hazard, but not that hard for a pair of Leaguers to rescue. Flash, Plastic Man and Wonder Woman are all immobilized by techniques that Leaguers can circumvent, particularly if all other members are present. And Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Superman are all still physical threats, but ones that can now be approached with a somewhat greater degree of safety.

Injustice's Kryptonite laser requiring multiple Leaguers to access makes even more sense when you consider that it's actuall more lethal than the usual depictions of Batman's kryptonite: the ring and the rock both require a longer exposure to kill than a laser gun designed to effectively snipe Superman.

[Mutant God]

Yes Batman was right but I'm surprised if its just the Justice league he had plans for, and not every hero he meets and every villain they come across he has a "plan" for...in fact I wonder if Batman has a plan for each Robin and each member of the Bat Family?

[TheSeaDragon]

An elseworlds tale. His depiction there is as accurate as Damian's

Besides, Injustice sucks

[TheSeaDragon]

First? I wasn't talking about Tower of Babel specifically. Tower of Babel simply began the "Batman trashes the Justice League" trope. Other writers expanded it into a true trope that is now simply accepted as a daily fact of life in the DCU.

Second? Of the seven core members of the League, which one pretty much LIVES in his childhood trauma 24/7? Which one steadfastly refuses to seek psychological treatment to help him actually heal his psychic wounds?

The other League members may have had their brushes with mental instability. Batman literally NEEDS his mental instability to be what he is. Or at least that's what he tends to believe. If you were looking around the Watchtower with a completely objective mindset, which League member would YOU be most worried about in terms of mental stability? Unless your visit to the Watchtower happened right in the middle of a story in which another Leaguer was currently crazy and/or mind controlled, I would think it'd be pretty obvious which is the one member of the team you'd be the least likely to think should be the one with exclusive access to the "Kill All My Teammates" arsenal.

Vanguard, i like Batman, but we need more people like you in the DC fandom . Keep being awesome

[TheSeaDragon]

The League should absolutely plan to take down Batman. They know for a fact that he controls an arsenal that allows him to render them worthless with trivial ease and HE'S the one member of the team with a history of mental instability. If I'm any one of the League, I'm coming up with my own Batman countermeasures, and I'm keeping my finger on the trigger every second that guy is in the same room with me.

Is Batman right to have anti-League countermeasures? Yes. The problem is that he is often the ONLY person on the face of the Earth who can access them. That presents two problems.

1.) If Batman is the only one who can access his countermeasures, then any Leaguer who DOES go bad is going to know "Take out Batman first. No Batman? No countermeasures to my nefarious plans."

2.) If DC ever had the guts to do a story where BATMAN is the one who goes bad (and given his mental instability, this should be a very real possibility,) then Batman goes bad and instantaneously has access to everything he'll ever need to crush the League in seconds, leaving him free to run unchecked.

One of the best examples I ever saw of a Batman countermeasure story was Injustice 1. Batman had a Kryptonite laser to handle Superman if he ever went bad. The catch? He couldn't access the laser by himself. He needed the cooperation of several other League members just to gain access to the weapon. Now, yeah, I think it was a bit excessive to require the cooperation of.....what? Five other very specific heroes? Something like that? If Superman ever went bad, there's no guarantee there will BE five specific League members left alive to help Batman gain access to the laser. But the mere idea that he decided that stopping Superman is not and should not be a decision he can make all on his own speaks of a much higher level of respect for his teammates and some actual forethought into preventing the possibility of the responsibility being abused.

I tend to have a problem with Batman having countermeasures for the League exclusively because those stories almost always paint Batman as the sole arbiter of whether or not the League needs to be stopped. He gets to sit in judgement of all the other heroes, and no one else's opinion or feelings matters. Add the very real prospect that Batman may succumb to his own paranoia and megalomania one day and turn those weapons against the League himself, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

The typical Batman countermeasure story shows a Batman who seems to have NOTHING but contempt for the rest of the League and he seems like he's just waiting for them to give him an excuse to beat them down because he's BATMAN!!! Giving the other members some say in how and when his countermeasures are deployed reduces the risk of them being deployed incorrectly and shows that Batman actually DOES respect his teammates. A fact that often seems to get lost in a lot of his stories.

OMG, thank you. And yet people says a story where Batman is the one who goes bad for a change will not work because "The league would Crush him in seconds" and "doesnt work" like Evil Superman . I just roll my eyes at that

[Aioros22]

[QUOTE=Lorendiac;2901679]Where do you get the idea that he's the only member of the team with a history of mental instability?

He`s not, even Aquaman has dealt with issues of depression. However he`s the one character who deals it the most and usually just because. Tower of Babel basically exists because he`s both a control nut and an arsehole. You example of Superman, per instance is very straighforward a plot driven storyarc where the moment Superman realizes he`s been asuming Gangbuster`s role (and maneirisms, because he wasn`t acting Superman and therefore outside his normal durability and willpower he barely used his other powers) he makes the quick call to Exile himself and leave the planet.

Aquaman dealth with depression the moment he found out the truth about his real heritage and subquently lost his hand but he never went after any of the others (there was the Metropolis coup but that was to jail Luthor). Just like Superman, in the times he`s had a chip on his shoulders he tends to leave the League to deal with it.

Hal Jordan went nuts the moment he lost his entire city, values and friends but we found out later it was actually a parasite, which is an excuse Batman doesn`t tend to share.

So, There`s a sort of concious responsability that Batman hardly manages to have in these sort of stories. Amazingly, stuff like TOB and BE come hand in hand with stuff like DOTF about a control nut who absolutely shats on security measures. His secrets always come to bite him in the ears.

[oasis1313]

Yes Batman was right but I'm surprised if its just the Justice league he had plans for, and not every hero he meets and every villain they come across he has a "plan" for...in fact I wonder if Batman has a plan for each Robin and each member of the Bat Family?

The grasshoppers are nothing compared to The Batman. He'd just drop some Valium in their milk and cookies.

[Agent Z]

The fact that both MM, Wonder Woman and Flash could still be rescued from the attacks imply that no countermeasure was designed around quickly killing them, but that the methods used could become lethal if given enough time. "Less than lethal" is the phrase used for weapons intended to not kill but also still end the fight, often carrying great potential risk of still killing the victim-- like tasers. Admittedly, it always felt kind of weird that MM was revealed to be so durable he could survive a significant amount of time on fire if that was his greatest weakness, but that's the biggest issue with the plans to me.

And I'll say it again, the plans existing is okay, I just want to see them acknowledge the League itself is countermeasure #1; heck, it may make elements of those countermeasures make since if they were designed to be used to let the League capture the rogue member. MM is effectively a walking fire hazard, but not that hard for a pair of Leaguers to rescue. Flash, Plastic Man and Wonder Woman are all immobilized by techniques that Leaguers can circumvent, particularly if all other members are present. And Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Superman are all still physical threats, but ones that can now be approached with a somewhat greater degree of safety.

Injustice's Kryptonite laser requiring multiple Leaguers to access makes even more sense when you consider that it's actuall more lethal than the usual depictions of Batman's kryptonite: the ring and the rock both require a longer exposure to kill than a laser gun designed to effectively snipe Superman.

It seems to me like there's an awful lot of variables affecting whether the Leaguers would survive these plans or not. Either Bruce didn't put that much thought into it or he was planning on killing them if they turned bad. Given his attitude towards lethal force against non humans either is believable.

As I said just sharing the anti League weaponry with everyone else would have been better

[Photon Torme]

Yes he was. Could he have been a little more careful about keeping that info secure? Well..........

[Zodlike]

As a non-super powered member of a team with incredible super-powers, it makes sense that he established contingencies.