Iron Man has plenty of stories where his enemies are other rich businessmen. The plot of his first two films have those bad guys. Captain Americas stories tend to be more about international espionage than street level crime, especially since Brubakers but reinvention in the early 2000s. Batman/Bruce Wayne canonically pumps tons of money into social programs for Gotham. When was the last time you picked up a comic? 1965?

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Philanthropic foundations are known to be a really poor way to actually fuel change in a neighborhood, but a great way to get tax breaks and some positive marketing. We knew that when Andrew Carnegie dumped a bunch of his own money into community works.So no, the Wayne Foundation is no such program. However, note that because of Bruce Wayne's charitable contributions, you managed to believe that was a way that a billionaire might be remotely ethical. A lot of people would like to believe that people who are filthy rich can keep their money and be ethical. It's really not possible.

It comes down to what are they fighting for? What is it that the rich businessmen are trying to do that Iron Man must stop them? What is Iron Man and Batman protecting?

The status quo. If we imagine that this is fine and that our civilization is intrinsically good and just needs protection from some external evils, then sure, it's just like every other 1980s TV show.

And you know, when the fossil fuel industry was able to effectively obfuscate that we weren't headed towards global ecological collapse (because in the 70s, few people had heard of the Holocene extinction, and the crying Indian was telling them it was their fault that the environment was trashed). Batman isn't fighting to end industrial control of the government of Gotham (and the whole US). He's fighting to preserve his own control of government.

That said, I read Batman mostly in the eighties and nineties, After BTAS, the later animated series dropped in quality, and movies got really strange after the Nolan films and the DCEU series emerged. But The Batman the most recent one actually acknowledges how the paradigm typical of the late 20th century (and the MCU and DCEU in the 21st) are more like pro-wrestlers.

But then, that is consistent with hypotheses that human society is infantilizing, and are less interested in seeing reflections of our own world as we are some dudes smacking each other around on a stage or in a cage.