DC Comics is full of fictional cities, with two of them becoming huge in pop culture – Metropolis and Gotham City. Metropolis is the city of the future, a shining beacon of everything people could build if we work together. It’s a cool place we all want to live but if we’re being honest, we all know that Gotham is a better setting for superhero stories. Gotham City is the most corrupt place you can imagine, a city that exhales crime like carbon monoxide (it also exhales a lot of that, too). It’s a place with character; from the clean spires of the wealthy to the dark streets of the slums, Gotham is as much a person as any of the other characters in the Batman comics, but it’s also a place that makes no sense.
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Gotham City is the perfect setting for any kind of crime story you can imagine and that’s part of the problem. Batman’s city is a place full of crime and corruption, a place where the worst of humanity not only feels at home but is in charge. There’s no way a city like Gotham could ever run, even in a place like the DC Multiverse. Gotham is DC’s best city but it makes no sense for these five reasons, the things that make it so great also rendering it pretty nonsensical.
5) The Rich Have Little Security
Catwoman is one of Batman’s most important villains, as well as one of the most successful cat burglars in fiction. She’s been robbing the wealthy blind in Gotham for ages and she’s not the only one. Numerous villains are thieves of some kind and it feels like breaking into the houses of the wealthy is something of a rite of passage for Gotham youth. On top of that, there are numerous kidnappings and hostage situations with the rich in the city. This makes zero sense whatsoever.
Just look at the real world. The wealthy often live in the biggest cities and those cities are usually also the place with the highest proportions of crime. The rich pay very well for security, keeping them and their valuables safe. Gotham is a city on a planet where people with superpowers exist and technology is at much higher levels. The rich in Gotham would have amazing security and the fact that they don’t is a little weird.
4) The Corruption Would Make It So Nothing Would Run
Gotham City and corruption go hand in hand. It was created back in the Golden Age, when widespread corruption was common (it’s still common, but it was especially common back then) in American cities. It became the poster child for the excesses of real world crime. The Gotham City Police Department is often thought of as almost entirely corrupt and on the take, and the other municipal authorities are just as likely to be paid off by someone. As a city, Gotham is the most corrupt place you can imagine; it feels like anyone with some money can pay someone off to get what they want.
Gotham City is comically corrupt, both in the literal and figurative sense, and there’s no way anything would run. Take the GCPD, for example. Jim Gordon would have been killed years ago. Any non-corrupt cop would have been. Everyone being on the take in city government would grind everything to a halt, as people with different goals would be paying different people, causing chaos everywhere. There’s such a thing as too corrupt for these kinds of stories and Gotham definitely straddles that line.
3) There’s An Inexhaustible Supply of Henchmen
Batman faces the most dangerous villains in comics, having forged himself into the best crimefighter you can imagine. Bad guys like the Joker, Two-Face, the Penguin, Black Mask, and others pull off big crimes and for those types of capers, they need more than just themselves, they need gangs. Most of the major Gotham villains all have or have had gangs at one point. These various gangs are basically just cannon fodder for Batman, giving him someone to beat up before he gets to the big bad.
Being an henchman is one of the most dangerous jobs in Gotham City; not only are you the one that Batman punches first, but the gang leaders themselves are known for killing their subordinates for failures. However, for some reason, there’s always more henchmen. Being a henchman must pay insanely well, because it’s the kind of job that no one would sign up for. Sure, criminals in the real world will do wild things, but being a henchman in Gotham is a guaranteed bad idea that most wouldn’t even entertain trying.
2) The City Is So Broken the People Welcome Fascist Overlords
Being a citizen of Gotham City is one of the most terrible things I can imagine. You’re in a city where on Monday, you can get mugged, Tuesday get caught in a fight between the Bat-Family and the Falcones, Wednesday have your job destroyed in an attack by the Joker, Thursday get turned into a bat and have your arm broke by Red Hood, and on Friday get infected with fear toxin, along with the rest of the city. You wish you could afford to move to Metropolis, because Superman makes sure none of this stuff happens there and you kind of have a crush on Lex Luthor. The first time a villain says he can solve all the problems and all you have to do is listen to him, you basically jump at it.
Let’s be real – unless you’re being paid to live there, no one would stay in Gotham. When your life is that bad, fascism doesn’t really look like a problem for you. Honestly, you can’t really blame the citizens of Gotham, as they have what amounts to generational PTSD; most of them would do anything to never have to deal with any of that stuff ever again. The more you think about it, the more it makes total sense that the US government cut Gotham off from the US in “No Man’s Land”.
The Bat-Family are comics’ most formidable superhero crew, brought together to help battle the most dangerous criminals ever. They have to fight the supervillains, the gangs, the street thugs, the police, the various secret organizations that run the city, sometimes the US military, sometimes even the Justice League itself, and just about everyone else you can imagine. However, just think about living in the city. There’s always the chance you’re going to get dragged into a battle of some sort. You have teens driving what amounts to tanks at a hundred miles per hour down the streets of the city. Batman himself is basically a supernatural avatar of dread.
The Bat-Family saves the city, but in a lot of ways, they are just as bad as the villains. It doesn’t matter how you get hurt if you get caught up in the middle of Batgirl fighting the Royal Flush Gang. People are just as scared as their heroes in Gotham as they are their villains. Fear keeps the whole city in line. Gotham is a place where there’s never any relief, where even the people who are supposed to protect you scare you.
What do you think about living in Gotham? Do you think it’s really all that bad or would you want to try it? Sound off in the comment section below.
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