Originally Posted by
K. Jones
Do it like Chinatown (Nicholson!), and have Harley be his private eye secretary, and Bruce Wayne be some paranoid old money incestuous conspirator hoarding all of Gotham's water rights, and I'm in!
How about Superman? Clark Kent is a right-wing news 'journalist' who publicly is Superman (allegedly, for plausible deniability), the hawkish all-american "hero" world police, defending his corporate backers with violence and intimidation. And Lex Luthor is the self-made philanthropist who must expose his corruption using ingenuity ... and whistleblower/hacktivism/social media. Metallo is a PTSD victim of the military-industrial complex. Brainiac is like a Coluan Doctor Who. This is of course an attempt to "flip" them but retain a lot of their core character traits, as opposed to a more overt "Lies, Injustice, and the Fascist Way" take. (Like this is how Luthor actually sees himself!) Here, Luthor is the one with the secret identity - a bit Batmanesque. I don't know what iconography he might use - an American Guy Fawkes equivalent.
Cheetah ... a pagan adventurer who must defend the world from evil Steve Trevor's secret Amazonian super-soldier, Wonder Woman, a paramilitary she-devil (lady Alexander) with no compassion or remorse, who wants to remake the world into a new Sparta/Mediterranean style empire. Cheetah is blessed with powers from older gods who predate the capricious and wicked Olympians and have a grudge from way back when the Olympians sicced their Amazons on elder cultures in Africa. She's got a few northern european allies like the expert in European pagan goddesses, Paula Von Gunther, the former slave of the Olympians, Circe (imprisoned because she dared to love her fellow man after the debut of Christ) and the hero of the subjugated Celtic gods Morgaine le Fey. (Sidenote: In this "flip", Cheetah is a biracial South African. Still Priscilla Rich, though, whose secret identity as a debutante supermodel is a cover for her lower-class roots, a smidge Catwomanesque.)
The "Trinity" then consists of a depravity-uncovering detective Joker, anti-corporate activist Luthor, and retaker of religious freedom Cheetah. The whole thing feels vaguely "Earth-3" except it couldn't work under E-3 logic/physics. Same with Earth-40, where the villains are still villains. It would have to be a proper "flip earth" where the flipped villains can actually win, so maybe one of the unknown earths.