Batman being an aristocrat is the least distinctive part of the character…. He’s a straight-up ripoff of Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel with extra gadgetry. For the last hundred years or so, every pulp character who runs his own complicated crime-fighting operation without having any supernatural powers has been a rich guy, for the basic reasons that 1. they have the time and money to do that, and 2. 20th-century pulp came out of 19th-century genre fiction in which nearly all of the characters were rich guys, so people were already used to that. Dissecting the significance of Batman on that basis is a little like saying that what makes James Bond so much creepier than other spies is that he has a gun and works for the government.

EliBishop, commenter on “Batman: Plutocrat” by Steven Padnick, X