The problem with Batman in his present incarnation is that we need simultaneously to believe that this is a man who can effortlessly ninja his way through dozens of gun-toting mercenaries, and that this is a man to whom Danny DeVito with an umbrella is a credible threat.
Okay, that was glib – let me expand. I'm fully aware that Batman comics generally don't have him fighting guys like the Penguin one on one these days. That's not the problem. The problem is that superhero power creep has rendered Batman functionally immune to hired goons, but owing to his roots as a street-level vigilante, like half of his classic villains are guys whose primary threat vector is the ability to field arbitrary numbers of hired goons. There just aren't a lot of ways to work around that without either doing violence to the villain's idiom or making Batman carry the idiot ball – though I'll grant that some of the attempted workarounds have been very entertaining!
#i say we give the goons powercreep too #some goon moves to gotham and is gobsmacked at the average goons fighting ability; that would render them their own mob boss in another city (via @chaoticspacedust)
You joke, but that's literally one of the workarounds I'm referring to. One of the reasons that recent Batman stories keep looping back around to ancient ninja conspiracy stuff is that an answer to "how do we make hired goons a credible threat when Batman is an invincible ninja?" is "the hired goons are also ninjas".
Imagine turning to crime out of financial desperation and you can’t even land a job as a dumb knuckle cracking brawler anymore without five years of martial arts training, a CDL in evasive getaway driving and a hand written recommendation from an active member of The Court of Owls.
