Even..... Howard the Duck?!?

A) Howard the Duck IS NOT a super hero!
B) Yes, I enjoyed it.

Hmm, what about the Cheetahmen?

I just watched the animated version of the dark knight returns last night. Talk about coincidence. I loved it. I was a bit surprised with the violence though. Not that I mind, I just didn't expected it. Granted it is written by Miller but then again Year One wasn't like this if i remember correctly. I believe the new batman movie (bats vs superman) will take some influences here, but they will leave the joker out of it?

Hmm. I don't think a questionable motive alone turns him into an anti-hero, but I get what you are saying. More importantly though, I do not really see him depicted as a multifaceted character in the movies. People have often told me that Batman is supposed to be different and "more interesting" than other superheroes, but in the movies (which are my source, I didn't read the comics) I just don't see it. As far as I remember, Nolan's movies repeatedly hammer the message home that batman is a violent badass, who has to be this way because the world is full of superevil supervillains, and ruthless violence from a single vigilante is the only way to deal with those, because the world's combined security forces are incapable of doing so and a guy in a bat costume is more badass than all of those together. Which is a pretty silly concept on multiple levels, and not terribly interesting, imho.

Anyway, I've been told that the "printed" Batman supposedly has a more interesting personality and character than the one in the movies. However, if having a revenge motive is the thing that sets him apart from the more primitively designed other superheroes as a better developed character, then I'm afraid it looks like a case of "among the blind, the one-eyed is king" ... ;)

I just realized we are missing two, and we should all be VERY ashamed for their omission!

It depends on the writer who writes him, really. As I said I'm no fan of Miller, his Batman stories tend to be masturbatory fanfics that make Batman out to be so epic he could single handedly take out every bad guy and good guy and everyone in between in one fell swoop, all done at the expense of every other character he writes into his batman stories (including superman, which is why I'm not at all interested in seeing the batman vs superman movie if he has any influence over it whatsoever.)

But Miller also isn't the worst, there's stories like 'fortunate son' where all of a sudden Batman has a severe hatred of rock, rap and punk music and hurls abusive tirades at Robin just for liking the music. You might think this is from the early years of batman and therefore just a product of it's time. nope,1999. Yeah, someone actually wrote that in 1999.

On the other hand you'll get touching moments where Batman doesn't even need to be Batman, just a man, like this scene from Batman Beyond: Batman and Ace.

So yeah, it comes down to the writer, some Batman stories are amazing, some are laughably bad.

I used to consider taking your opinion seriously, but now that you've outted yourself as the kind of judgemental old snob who looks down on people who read superhero comics and listen to rap music Thankfully I don't have to.

Can you really say superhero comic are stupider than people spending 500+ dollars on IPods with Flappy Bird? Or death/rape threats for people who say/do things you don't like in conjunction with video games? Or people who make bad movies in the hopes getting a cult following and the people who want those bad movies to be shocked at? Or how about trickle-down-theory? Which is dumber than all the rest combined.

I could explain the appeal of superhero and escapist fiction (and rap music even though I'm personally not a fan). But why bother? I know from experience you'd "shut your ears" and ignore it all so you could say right in your mind's eye then be proved wrong and become wiser.

So I'll leave it with this. The Dark Knight movies aren't "gritty and realistic". The phrase "Realistic Superhero fiction" is like "Peaceful warzone", "Quite heavy metal" "Healthy cancer sufferer". An oxymoron. People really just want comics to be taken seriously by people who don't read them and have (mistakenly IMO) picked Chris Nolan as there messiah.

I could say that Adventure games are anti-immersive, cannot be used to tell serious stories, and are inherently dumb. I could ever make a really stong case for those points. I wont though 'cus I like to see the good in things.

Diagnosis: Butthurt.

And if you even read my posts, you'll notice I said that I had no problem with fictional stories where protagonist/characters have supernatural or other powers, I simply find the comic-book cliche of wearing the brightly-colored tight plastic uniform and taking on names ridiculous, which it is. Maybe you can answer to me why traditional comic-books are so terrible and why they all look trapped by some 1950's or 60's model of what a "comic book" should be, ie all comics should be about superheroes with stupid names and stupid outfits. I mean how ~old~ is Superman and Batman and those characters, literally decades old. I don't dislike the medium, I guess, comics have the potential to tell thousands of different types of stories, any kind of story, but they pretty much all stick to what the decades-old idea of what "comic" should be, ie over-dramatic and ridiculous. You really know when a culture is diseased when they are literally recycling the same crap decades upon decades of years old instead of coming up with something, anything, which isn't another superhero story. This is Marvel and DC in a nutshell, cultural stagnation. I might even get the weaboo insult for this but at least Japanese manga is not as stunted as Western comics and graphic novels, you can find stories in manga of just about any type. The entire medium of comics and ~graphic novels~ is stale.

Well, I might agree with you if pretty much every adventure game ever made had a protagonist who was a guy in a bright spandex uniform calling himself Spiderman or the Green Lantern, but thankfully the genre is very diverse.

Absolutely fucking true. Superheroes are just retarded American-style individualism and moral absolutism brought to a new level of retardation.

Buthurt: A term only used by trolls to belittle people with genuine grievances. Thank you for validating me more that I ever cold have hoped for. Insult people and they get annoyed, that's your fault not mine. Am I "buthurt" for thinking my friends are not morons liking rap music?
Diagnosis: "I have no counter argument so I will be personally insulting".

Yeah adventure games are very diverse, that's why the genre's making so much money right now and totally not a niche market for nostalgic gamers Walking Dead fans. And why QTE's are the only gameplay advancement they've had in 20 years. Oh wait.
Maybe it's just me reacting to being called "Buthurt" for saying I'd explain the appeal but I don't think you'd listen biased on previous experience, but I think to do that would require filtering out 100% to filter out the hate. Maybe that's not a bad idea ;)

are [url=http://theglorioblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img000019.jpg]cool.

They are just not to be taken too seriously...thats precisely what western superheroes tend to do wrong in my opinion.

realism and super powers do not exactly mix well.

Yeah, you're right. Japanese superheros are in no way ridiculous... :->

Say what you want, but Nolan at least still remembers that his superhero is still human, prone to injury just like anyone else. Compare this to the Batman from the Arkham computer game series, where he is slammed into a wall multiple times by an antagonist who is a mountain of muscle yet he seems no worse for wear. I don't care how strong his armour is, his insides should have turned into a porridge. Having said that, any Batman film after playing the video game seems empty and ordinary in comparison.