Nagging Thoughts for 12/4
Tower of Babel nagging thoughts...
Superman gave Batman Kryptonite to use in case Superman went bad...but then was going to vote Batman out of the Justice League because Batman kept protocols to use in case superheroes went bad?
Batman should probably think about using a tougher password for his secret files.
If Batman could hypnotize Green Lantern into being blind, couldn't he then also hypnotize him into, like, thinking he was a chicken?
If you could sneak up to Green Lantern to tamper with his ring, couldn't the League of Assasins also KILL him, too?
Superman gave Batman Kryptonite to use in case Superman went bad...but then was going to vote Batman out of the Justice League because Batman kept protocols to use in case superheroes went bad?
Batman should probably think about using a tougher password for his secret files.
If Batman could hypnotize Green Lantern into being blind, couldn't he then also hypnotize him into, like, thinking he was a chicken?
If you could sneak up to Green Lantern to tamper with his ring, couldn't the League of Assasins also KILL him, too?
posted by Brian Cronin at 4:51 AM
4 Comments:
Yeah, considering Batman came up with a non-lethal way of stopping Supes to replace the green k, he wasn't exactly grateful.
Full disclosure: I love just about anything Mark Waid writes (although not even he can get me to read the Legion), and Tower of Babel is my favorite Waid JLA story. That said:
It's a matter of trust. Superman gave Batman the kryptonite to use as a last resort -- he never asked Bruce to reverse-engineer it into a weapon that could be duplicated.
More important, Superman did that voluntarily. None of the other JLAers asked Batman to come up with failsafes for them. If Bats had called a meeting with the rest of the League and proposed that failsafes were needed, the others might have agreed. But he had to go play "Batman knows best," again, and he finally went too far and lost the League's trust. That's why they voted him out.
As for GL, I've always thought that the plans for GL and Flash, and Wonder Woman, to an extent, were somewhat weak. If the hypnosis thing works so well, any number of mind-control villains could have defeated the League by now. I think Bats just thought so little of Kyle that he didn't spend much time on his failsafe.
Yeah, Brian, but the other irritating part of the discussion was how they all insisted that discussing Hal Jordan was "off-limits," which (to me) was essentially saying, "If we bring Hal into this, we cannot win, so no bringing Hal into this!!"
The Leaguers dropped logic wholly for that discussion.
That's not how I read that exchange -- it seems pretty well in-character to me. Kyle brings up Hal, which he should, as GL. Wally flies off the handle, because Hal was one of his heroes, Kyle didn't really know the guy, and his betrayal is still raw. Kyle immediately backs down, saying he doesn't know what he's talking about, which fits his "I don't belong here" attitude perfectly. Diana says that Kyle was right to bring it up, but changes the topic to trust, and defines it in absolutes, which is perfect Diana.
If you accept "But what about Hal?" as a justification for Batman's actions, you're saying that the ends justified the means, which may work for the rampant mind-wipers we've had recently, but Waid's JLA would never agree to that. The idea may have been sound, but the execution sucked, and that was the problem.
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