So many stories portray Gotham City as a hellhole, it's a wonder any sane/decent people would stay there.

But if they do, why can't Batman just move them out of Gotham and then keep the villains/monsters inside like a prison?

 

Maybe some can't afford to, or maybe it has good parts and bad parts and most of the crime is concentrated in a few areas like most cities.

I know that if I found out a supercrim like Joker was anywhere in town I'd move to the other side of the country... more to the question, how do Bat-villains with their distinctive and hard-to-disguise physical oddities manage to handle their basic survival-supplies (food/medical/etc) needs without venturing out into public where they can be recognized and capped-their-trash on sight?

 

Well these days with online shopping and stuff, its not actually that hard. Food delivered to your door and paid for electronically, as for medicine - well, they're fucking criminals so that's super easy solved. Non-internet order stuff I imagine they can send some of their goons to pick up.

 

DC said it's "it won't happen to me" tone. It's like people ask "why do you live in tornado alley" or "why do you live in that city full of crime" They will say "that won't happen to me."

It's more funny as superman and a nicer city is right across the water!

 

Just like so many people do in real life... I call it HICS, "Head In Cement Syndrome." (h/t SEAL Team Six founder Richard Marcinko for coining the phrase.)

 

Stupid question. The same reason people still live in St. Louis, Camden, Detroit, Flint, or Oakland.

 

People live in NYC after 9/11 too. You can't escape crime, terrorists, gangs, drugs, etc. I lived in a upscale neighborhood outside NYC, people had tennis courts, pools, horses in their yards. We never locked our doors (lived there up to 2013). I could walk alone at night. But, I would ride my bike and see syringes in a church parking lot, the teenagers sold pot from the gas station, people ran kids over while waiting for the bus, no one stopped at stop signs, etc.

 

Because the villains and monsters would just follow them? Who do you think guys like the Joker prey on?

Also, why should the criminals get the city?

 

These are questions that arose more as the Bat-continuity got increasingly bloated over his ~80 years of existence, plus the gradual darkening of his associated mythology. It wouldn't have been so egregious if his rogues gallery had stuck to robbing banks and wanton acts of mischief like the majority of comic villains of the early eras. But as the characterization of Batman evolved into a violent vigilante in the 80s and beyond (disregarding his brief origins as such), his Rogues Gallery similarly evolved in their violence and cruelty to match. It makes for headier, more compelling stories when well-written, but for sure it begins to stress the limits of suspension of disbelief when you assess the setting as a whole.

For the citizens themselves, as to why they don't abandon the city of their own accord, it comes down to many of the factors as described above. Even in real life, sometimes emotional attachments override self-preservation, and as long as things are "safe enough" people can be relatively assuaged that the bad things won't happen to them personally, then out-of-sight-out-of-mind. And y'know, despite the relatively sunnier disposition of Gotham's sister city, Metropolis, people might take relative solace of the mere off-chance at being mugged at knifepoint, rather than having to dodge flying tanker trucks and alien-incited meteor showers every other week  .

As for Batman/Bruce himself, and why he hasn't taken more proactive measures in cleaning up Gotham (for sure, it's been analyzed to death that with the billions of dollars at his disposal, even with all his philanthropic pursuits, if he channeled his efforts more into criminal rehabilitation and re-education, he could have cleaned up the city in just a few years), writers generally seem to be of the mind nowadays that Bruce is probably just as insane as his Rogues Gallery, and that permission of his actions is the lesser of two evils, more than anything. His modus operandi is "useful" to various parties, and he's given way more leniency than he realistically should be, as a result. For Bruce himself, while he devotes himself to protecting the innocent, it's the city itself that he's most concerned about. His ego is tied to the city, because it's his birthplace, and the death place of his parents, and he absolutely refuses to see that go to rot.

 

I was thinking maybe Batman should just isolate the bad guys and quarantine their area or something. But you're right, they'd get out and run wild.

But outside of the normal villains that are part of a hero's job, Gotham is portrayed as such a dystopian place - corruption, organized crime, corporate politics, dark secrets by its founders, and so on - that for safe people it's just too big a risk, even if they have nowhere else to go.

It could help IMO if writers slacked on the grim noirish portrayal of Gotham and allowed it room to be a city that people could live and thrive in. In a lighter setting it's okay for Batman to be less a Dark Knight and more a Caped Crusader, and his rogues gallery can be made lighter and softer too.

 

I bet you could make a great video game out of that idea. Oh, wait.

 

Arkham City, I remember.

But while that was Hugo Strange's idea and he did it in an attempt to beat Batman, Batman doing a similar plan could work out better, even if it doesn't last.

 

Something like that could never work better, because then the comic would be over.

 

Like others have sorta stated, then the comic would be over. Batman works on quasi-realism but you can’t apply too much realistic logic otherwise you break the premise.

 

Never saw batman as real. Sorry dark knight movies it's a guy in a big bat suit with a kid in a bright "target" outfit fighting a guy in bozo makeup, a fat guy with trick umbrellas that went "wah wah wah" for years, a plant girl, a girl in a cat suit, a guy made out of clay, a guy who turns into a giant bat, a ice powers guy and a guy with a puppet for bad guys!

Add to the fact they all get thrown into the same place they have broke out of 200 times over and over (and why is people like catwoman and penguin who are just crooks and not crazy getting thrown in there and not in jail) and joker who has killed hundreds of people has not been put to death for his many, many deaths or been killed by the many bad guys he has double crossed.

Never saw batman as real.

 

What you’re railing about is logic, not realism. Realism is about expectations. When you read a Batman comic book or watch a movie, you expect there to be a level of law and order that is recognizable in modern America- you don’t expect a frontier town setting with a single sheriff or a dystopian future with Judge Dredd type cops.

Nothing in Batman is ‘realistic’ but it does have ‘realistic rules.’ Gotham has a mayor and police commissioner, not a king and executioner. You don’t expect the police to publicly execute criminals because the mayor got fed up with them. But it’s also illogical that Joker (or Batman) is still alive. Again, there’s logic and there’s ‘quasi-realism.’

Turning Gotham into a giant prison oversteps the realism and defeats the reason for Batman to exist. He wants to get rid of crime in Gotham, not just contain inside its boundaries.

American superhero comics constantly test how far they can push the boundaries of ‘realism’ but they do exist. Batman losing his body and becoming a head in a jar just wouldn’t fly with the level of realism that his stories want to have. But at the same time, we all know that Bruce Wayne would have been dead in a month after becoming Batman. But we always expect Batman to have a long career fighting crime, some fantastical elements are ignored, some are not. But no one believes Batman is ‘real’.

 

I know that but there are people saying everything is real in batman no matter what. They take him to seriously at times. A comic that had a story of batman turning into a purple ape with a cape in the 60s should not be taken to seriously all the time.

 

Well, seeing that law and order in stronger effect would be welcome.

I suppose the problem is balance: make Batman necessary enough for the situations where the police can't act, but enable him to let the lawforce work in reducing/subduing crime, if not eradicating it.

Like I said, Gotham shouldn't always be a hellhole.

 

Being from mid-Michigan I can tell you everyone who could have moved out Flint, did. Only the too poor to move and the people who go to the Flint colleges are still there.

 

In a lot of those places, there is an economic component to people staying. People are trapped. In the cases of places like Flint, the people who have the financial ability to leave, do leave. Which compounds the city's problems. But there has been no such mass exodus from Gotham, even among the wealthier residents who easily could relocate.

Also, it feels like a bit of a false comparison, because while those places do have crime, they don't have psycho super-villains who randomly murder people hundreds at a time over and over again, the way Gotham does.

It's funny, though, because DC did have a more realistic depiction of a city in that kind of trouble. Hub City (which was actually based on East St. Louis). And the residents who were able actually did abandon it at the end of Denny O'Neil's Question series. Even the Question threw up his hands, gave up and left the entire country.