yeah oi cunt how many other farkin blokes d'ya know with spider powers its just me and big fella over here

please australian spiderman this doesnt involve you

Billy’s name gets revealed while he’s Captain Marvel but he expertly covers this up by saying he’s Batman’s son and the “Batson” was just a funny reference to that. Batman completely backs him up on this

It backfires spectacularly btw. In case you didn't guess

Billy : "... what is that?"

Batman : ...

Billy : "No. NO. Nuh-uh, not happening"

Batman : "You wanted me to be your dad, now I am. Sign."

Wisdom of Solomon wasn’t helping him any there

Wisdom of Solomon decided to troll him

Wisdom of Solomon knew it’d be hilarious

Wisdom of Salomon knew he'd become Bat's son in the end and decided to make it happen in the funniest way possible.

HC that the average life expectancy in Gotham is actually four years higher than the national average because they collectively just keep refusing to die

the general concensus being "if we die the clown wins"

Gotham really is the perfect scientist trap, like every scientist in the world is either at "I could fix it" or "I could make it worse" with a few that are like "I could study it so so SO good and win a Nobel"

It's basically the most frantic game of whack-a-mole/herding cats. All STEM majors have a 100-level required class on why you can't go to Gotham.

bonk!

my darling harleen!

idk if someone has already made this post but. imagine gotham upholding bruce wayne as an example of "you can have a tragic backstory and not start doing weird superhero/villain crap" and he just has to Deal with it

There are a lot of fics about the Justice League finding out about Batman's children via a series of circumstances leading to Nightwing joining the League (usually against Batman's will)

and I LOVE this trope, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to imagine a situation where it doesn't happen like that. I want a situation where Nightwing joins the League, but he and Batman play it off well enough that the JL doesn't put them together. They notice that they work well together, sure, and Batman seems to trust Nightwing easier than the other new members, but no one questions it because Nightwing is good.

And the JL reaches a point where it's been months or even years and they still don't know.

Until Nightwing gets hurt. They've seen him hurt before, but he gets hurt. Bleeding out, affected by fear toxin, whatever, the point is, he's in bad shape. And Nightwing - strong, crooked grin, happy facade - screams. He screams for his dad - a word that he never uses, but that doesn't matter now, because he's scared, and he's hurt, and he just wants to go home.

And nobody knows what to do. Every single League member very quickly realizes that they know nothing about this guy. Everyone wonders about Batman because he seems so mysterious, but Nightwing always seemed so open, and it's only in that moment that they realize they have no actual information on him.

But that only last for a split second, because, of course Batman reacts first. He runs to his side and starts to stabilize his injuries while assuring him in a voice that they've never heard before, a voice that is distinctly not his Batman growl, that he's right there and it's all going to be okay.

And Nightwing... well, he stops calling out for his father. And he doesn't stay in the watchtower infirmary after that. When they ask Batman where he took him, he just tells them home.

Nightwing's back a few months later, and that's when they start asking him if he's really Batman's kid, and he just smiles the same crooked grin and says, Of course. You didn't know?

okay so there were a ton of posts/fics about the hilarious "fuck/maryy/kill" Bruce Wayne & Justice League scenario (I read them all, amazing comedic timing y'all) but to me, the most hilarious scenario is the JL play fuck/marry/kill, Bruce's name comes up, and half of the people in the room in the know immediately turn bright red and refuse to keep playing and no one will explain why.

Hal: "...and I would fuck Bruce Wayne. No, I would kill him. Nah, actually I'd fuck him, who am I kidding."

Clark: choking on his coffee and rapidly turning an alarming shade of red

Diana: "An....interesting choice, of course."

J'onn: "Shall we play a different game?"

Hal: "Wait, what? that was the game, wasn't it?"

Ollie: "I'm with Hal, I'd fuck the shit out of Bruce. He's the easiest guy I know, it's not like it'll exactly be a hardship for him."

*every single person in the room turns to Batman, standing in the corner*

Clark: "Wow! I think I just heard someone drop an ice cream cone in Guatemala. Batman, I'll need a team up."

Ollie: "For ice cream?"

Diana, standing up and putting herself in between Bruce and Hal: "This sounds dire. I will also assist."

Clark, under his breath, one hand on Bruce's back: "It's not worth it. He's not worth it. Come on. Walk it off."

The first time the league hears batman laugh is "randomly" during fuck marry kill

MY ROMAN EMPIRE

Do you know this Jewish character?

considering the manor is completely massive and the only person who spends more than a few consecutive hours there at a time is probably Alfred, i think it would be funny if after the pit, Jason decides after everything he's been through that he can't be bothered to do the whole revenge thing, or sort out safe houses or get an apartment and instead just decides to kill the joker himself and just... secretly go home.

like, as long as he kept an ear out to make sure he wasn't eating in the dining room when Bruce comes down, he could probably get away with walking around without ever being caught. Alfred would find out, i assume, but i think knowing how complicated Jasons emotions towards Bruce are right now, he'd keep it quiet and just be happy that the one other person he trusts to leave alone in the kitchen is finally back. And then, of course, there's the kids.

Damian knew from the beginning. Not because he's especially observant, but because this is his big brother from the league and the first night he spent at the manor Jason crawled through his window in full Red Hood gear and told him not to snitch. Considering that in the league Jason once snuck up behind Ra's and shaved a strip of hair off the back of his head, Damian decides there's far stupider shit the guy could be doing and leaves it be.

Tim finds out next. admittedly, the only reason he finds out is because Jason thought he knew and just stopped attempting to avoid him. in reality, what happened was Tim, having not slept for three days and living off nothing but spite and coffee, accidentally walked in on Jason cooking in the middle of the night, and immediately wrote it off as a hallucination. Jason, seeing Tim find him in the manor and not react badly, decided that 'oh, the replacement must just be chill i guess' and mentally pencilled him in as another person in the building that he can be seen by. it came to a head when a few days later Damian was forced by Jason to invite Tim out with them on their weekly 'eat junk food and talk shit about the rest of the family' outings, since he was a part of the group now. Tim cries.

Dick only finds out because Tim and Damian keep forgetting that Jason isn't supposed to be talked about in public. there comes a point where Tim rips Dick's favourite sweater and when Dick confronts him about it, Tim panics and blurts out 'it wasn't me, must have been jason!', and upon seeing Dick's face, Damian smacks him and grumbles 'good job Drake, now we have to show him Todd or he'll cry again.'. Jason is not overly happy when he sneaks through his bedroom window after going out as Red Hood and finds a sobbing Dick sat on his bed, Tim staring at the ground looking very ashamed while Damian straight face points at Tim to make it clear that this was Not His Fault.

after realising literally everyone in the house sans Bruce knows he's there, Jason decides to just. stop hiding. the fact is that he wasn't trying that hard in the first place, and Bruce still didn't have a clue, so he kinda wants to see how long it takes the 'world's greatest detective' to realise his dead kid is just. back.

so he stops hiding. starts showing up for family meals, starts being more friendly with the bats as Red Hood, and they all wait to see what finally tips Bruce off.

they forget how fucking stupid this man can be.

because if Jason had gone up to Bruce and done some sort of dramatic or emotional reveal then sure, Bruce would be shocked. he'd freak out. but the fact is that Bruce has both Batman and Brucie Wayne to keep up with. He's barely paying attention to his own feet while walking, let alone the people around him.

so when Jason starts showing up and acting like nothings changed, and literally nobody else in the house acts like anything's different either? Bruce straight up forgets that Jason's supposed to be dead. His mind just registers 'oh there are his kids, fighting like usual', and forgets to take in whether or not those kids are SUPPOSED to be ALIVE.

the kids find it fucking fascinating. Jason can actually have conversations with Bruce at the dinner table, and Bruce doesn't even realise that this is a wild fucking thing to be happening. Tim starts laughing at him and Bruce gets confused, only making the poor kid laugh harder. Jason just can't believe he actually bothered putting effort into hiding when he first came back. Damian's respect for his father diminishes every day.

it becomes a game, to see how far it will go. at one point Dick straight up asks who was better as Robin, him or Jason, in an attempt to jog his memory, and Bruce without looking up from the batcomputer goes 'you were both equally good, stop trying to start competitions with your brother'. Dick throws his hands up in the air and Jason, who has been sat on top of his own fucking memorial case to watch this shit show for the past 20 minutes, slow claps.

it's only after like a month of this that half way through a casual family breakfast, Damian asks Jason to pass him the orange juice or something, and Bruce finally has the fucking moment of

he never lives it down.

hangin out with the stepson ☀️🌧

Justice League identity reveal where they don’t know who Batman is and one day a bunch of them walk in on him just casually eating yogurt in the cafeteria with his cowl off. A bunch of them recognize him, a couple don’t, and they’re all shocked.

Turns out Batman didn’t realize none of them knew who he was, since it had taken him all of ten minutes and three google searches to put everyone’s secret identities together and he just assumed they had all figured it out by this point. Or maybe he had meant to tell them and then just forgotten. Either way, he regularly interacts with half of them outside of hero stuff and hasn’t bothered with the whole separate persona thing with them in years. Shouldn’t they really have figured this out by now? So what if he forgot? This is clearly on them.

I love that we have two Spider-Verse movies, soon to be three, and not a single one of them has even so much implied that they're going to include Morlun, the interdimensional vampire who only eats people with spider powers, who was the reason for the Spider-verse crossover event that the movies are a loose adaptation of.

I love this because Morlun sucks and is a truly shitty character, in many ways being the pinnacle of all the things that one can do wrong when creating a new supervillain for a superhero who's had over half a century of adventures.

Ok, so, when adding a new antagonist to the mythos of a long-running character like Spider-Man, a lot of writers seem to think the only way to make their contribution count is to try and top the antagonists that came before. They don't just want to make another Spider-Man villain, but rather The Best Spider-Man Villain, the Archest of Arch-Foes, the one so bad that all the previous arch-enemies look like a pile of shit by comparison. They will craft a character who isn't so much a person as a collection of traits designed to antagonize the protagonist as much as possible - someone who has no facet of their existence that isn't entirely dependent on that comparison with the protagonist.

The thing is, a character that's existed as long as Spider-Man will have arch-enemies already, and they're probably much better characters. The Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man's time-tested arch-enemies, both have a lot to their characterization that can be divorced from Spider-Man entirely and still make them recognizable. They don't exist solely for Spider-Man's narrative, which in turn allows them to bring more depth to that narrative when they're included in it. Both villains have their own shit going on, their own lives, their own motivations and desires outside of Spider-Man, which allows them to make all sorts of interesting plots when they do come into conflict with him.

But Morlun, the Interdimensional Vampire Who Only Eats People With Spider-Powers, doesn't have that. Everything about him is crafted solely to be a dick to Spider-Man. Doctor Octopus has big evil schemes - harnessing the power of the sun, recruiting other villains to become a supervillain crimelord, etc. Green Goblin kills his business rivals, abuses his son, and even tries to corrupt Spider-Man into being his sidekick in crime. But Morlun? His evil schemes are, uh, killing and eating alternate versions of Spider-Man, and then trying to kill and eat the version of Spider-Man we care about. That's it. That's all he does, because it's all he can do, because there's nothing about him that isn't solely devoted to being Spider-Man's Biggest Bad Guy.

Decades from now, people will still have new ideas for stories where Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus, because those two are actual characters. And no one will remember Morlun unless they've memorized whatever passes for The Big Book of Obscure Spider-Man trivia in the future, because Morlun was a badly written plot device masquerading as an antagonist.

Post-Script:

I should note that Venom, the evil alien parasite that was Spider-Man's costume for a hot minute and now hates him because Spider-Man rejected his love confession and bonded to another reporter who is basically Peter Parker But Douchier, initially had the exact same problem as Morlun, i.e. being so obviously designed to be an Anti-Spider-Man that it was kind of painful. But the kernel of a unique idea buried in that concept - i.e. "a douchebag and his evil alien parasite boyfriend" - proved interesting enough to make Venom his own character, and that's honestly pretty good. And hell, even Venom's arch-enemy, Carnage, who is basically the Morlun to Venom's Spider-Man, ended up growing into his own character too, in a Freddy Krueger sort of way. I don't think Morlun's going to be salvaged the way those two were, though.

Post-Post-Script:

The correct way to add an iconic new villain to a long-running superhero story is the Harley Quinn method, btw. Harley Quinn worked not because she was "The Baddest Bad Guy Batman has ever and will ever face," but because she had a unique personality that no other rogue in Batman's wide pantheon of villains sported, and as such added a new dynamic to Batman's adventures whenever she popped up. This is reason 143 why Harley Quinn is one of the best characters of all time.

Ok one last bit: a consistent lesson I've taken away from my time reading Spider-Man comics (and do not be mistaken, I am very much a Filthy Casual Spider-Man fan, I have read nowhere near all the comics starring him because Jesus Christ do you know how many that is an how many of those comics suck ass) is that characters are better when they have their own shit going on.

The reason why Mary Jane became Spider-Man's most famous love interest is that she was the first one whose personality did not begin and end with "is Spider-Man's love interest." Liz Allen, Betty Brant, and Gwen Stacy were all written by Stan Lee with the character concept of "A girlfriend for Spider-Man," while Mary Jane was written with the concept of "A recurring obstacle/temptation in Spider-Man's romance with Girlfriend Character of the Moment." Mary Jane could flirt with Spider-Man, invite him to parties, present all these little temptations for him to quit his current course of action, whether that be trying to sneak out to be a superhero or trying to keep a date with Gwen Stacy or whoever, but since they were never intended to get together, Mary Jane also had to have Her Own Shit Going On. Gwen Stacy was emotionally available for a relationship - Mary Jane, however, was hard to get.

And the result was that Peter and Mary Jane's relationship had a lot more intrigue to it, a lot more push and pull. Their flirtations and growing friendship had a push and pull - it was a conflict of its own in a way that was far more nuanced and realistic than the "Peter I love you but this is the seventeenth issue in a row you've been late for our date, and also I hate your alter-ego because of some contrived bullshit probably involving the Daily Bugle" routine that Liz/Betty/Gwen pulled.

The writers broke up the Peter/Liz and Peter/Betty ships pretty quickly, and spun their wheels with redundant Gwen Stacy plot-lines until finally realizing they had no idea what to do with her and killed her off. But Mary Jane stuck around because, like Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, she had her own shit going on, and that made her relationship with Peter interesting. It made their romance complicated and fun.

...until writers started writing Mary Jane as, well, Spider-Man's girlfriend/wife, and failed to give her any shit to do beyond Being Spider-Man's love interest. And soon writers who grew up in the "Mary Jane is just Peter's love interest" era wanted to get rid of her, because, like Gwen, what the fuck can you do with that?

And ironically, getting killed is kind of the best thing to happen to Gwen, because now she has THAT as her Own Shit Going on. Post-death Gwen stories really bring a lot of dimension to the character that she originally lacked - one of the reasons Spider-Gwen/Ghost Spider is so popular is that they can really play with dramatic irony and the cosmic tragedy of Gwen and Peter seemingly being predestined to love each other only for one of them to die tragically. That's compelling shit - Gwen's own compelling shit, going on, making her cool!

Characters should have relationships to each other in a narrative, and those relationships can and should be important. But if you want a character to be truly memorable and lasting, they have to also have their own shit going on, because if they're nothing more than a satellite, well, they're kinda doomed to be boring.

Ok, so, this post breached containment ages ago and I didn't think much of it for the most part, since no one's been getting weird about it like they have with some of my other popular posts. And I mostly ignored it, only occasionally checking to see if anyone left fun tags or something.

Then I noticed a name that people were reblogging from.

That's - that's not who I think it is, right? It can't be. It can't be.

No. No, it - it can't- I watched so many of his comic reviews in college, there's no way-

...is it weird if I feel validated by this?

hits head against the table jason didn’t want bruce to kill the joker he wanted bruce to let him kill the joker the ultimatum wasn’t “kill the joker or kill me” it was “kill me or i kill the joker”

like yeah he wanted bruce to avenge him but realised “okay bruce won’t kill the joker. but he can still die. bruce won’t have to break his rule and i can still be avenged because he’s letting me do it myself”

and right before this was the conversation where jason demanded WHY. WHY did you let him live after he took me from you? WHY didn’t you kill him?

and bruce answers with how he wants to kill the joker but can’t cross that line.

jason wanted to be avenged because in his mind that meant bruce cared about him. and if bruce can’t kill the joker that’s fine jason can kill the joker and as long as bruce lets him kill the joker that’s proof enough that bruce cared about him

saving these tags from @roseworth u get it

my commissions have moved to a new site! they’re now on artistree.io, which is more specifically geared towards doing commission work than ko-fi and therefore should be much more streamlined. you don’t even need an account to commission me! all you have to do is fill out a request form and we go from there :3

one thing with artistree is that it adds an extra 6% fee on top of the commission price, but this is just to guarantee the artist gets the full money from their work and to keep the site running :D plus they donate to help plant trees. even with my most expensive single-character commission this is only around an extra $6AUD. just felt i should warn about that so nobody is taken off guard by it

any additional info is on my [carrd] or artistree! and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

[if you’d like to commission me, send in a request on artistree!]