Growing up my favorite hero boy was Batman, but its getting really hard to appreciate a character whos main premise is “I’m a billionaire that beats up poor people in a capitalist hellscape because I don’t have a healthy way to deal with my personal trauma”.
Is there any saving him or is there a version of batman that can exist inside of a left narrative? Maybe there’s an existing comic that has tackled this problem, but I’m not really deep into the…ahem…literature.
I’d point to Spiderman as Batman-done-Right. On his face, he’s a working class guy from a low-rent corner of town whose primary antagonists range from billionaire war profiteers (Wilson Fisk and Norman Osborne) to callous violent mercenaries (Hobgoblin, Scorpion, Rhino, Mysterio, Venom) to corporate scientists caught up in their pursuit of fame/fortune and corrupted by their own inventions (Octopus, Lizard, Spencer Smythe).
Its not a perfect picture, because Spiderman is still very much a creature caught within American Capitalist ideology. But a lot of what he struggles with - poverty, work/life balance, stress, sick family members, the allure of selling out - fits neatly into leftist narratives and themes. Meanwhile, a lot of what he opposes - corporate greed, institutional corruption, the perils of fame and a hostile media - reflect struggles that leftist leaders have historically wrestled with.
Best of all, Spiderman often turns to the community at-large to get out of tight spots, rather than just throwing money at the problem or pulling a crazy new invention out of his ass. The Andrew Garfield “Amazing Spiderman” has a great bit at the end in which he relies on a line of construction towers to race to a destination. The Sam Rami produced Spiderman movies both heavily play up the Working Man Hero angle, with Spiderman alternately saving and being saved by NYC residents.