Under the guise of gritty realism, Nolan and Miller give us a cheerful, libertarian, cowboy power fantasy — billionaire savior as Bernhard Goetz. The ‘60s television Batman, on the other hand, presented fantastically wealthy would-be do-gooders as helplessly square busybodies, fighting crime less out of sober obsession than as a kind of decadent game of dress-up. When those stately Wayne bookcases slid back to reveal the Batpoles, you got the sense that crimefighting and/or the entire society in which crime occurred was a kind of amusement park for the obscenely rich.

Batman's omnipotence in the television show isn't a function of his popularity. It's a multi-level gag. Wouldn't it be fun, the TV Batman asks, to live in a world where the fuddy-duddy scions won't run stop-lights, where they'd rather die than blow up a handful of baby ducks, and where they can always get the right answer out of the bat computer? And isn't it also more than a little ridiculous to hope for that world and its paunchy, bat-eared dad? Trust me, Adam West assures us, and I will pretend to save you. Thus we have the conclusion of Batman: The Movie from 1966, in which Adam West in the batsuit accidentally swaps all the brains of the members of the UN Security Council one with the other. Having completely screwed everything up, he quietly declares victory and leaves — which is a much more insightful take on American imperial adventures than anything you're likely to find in Iron Man.

Batman-as-doofus has showed up in some other venues as well. Perhaps the greatest is the comic book The Brave and The Bold #104, "Second Chance for a Deadman?" with script by Bob Haney and art by Jim Aparo.

Haney was always willing to tailor his Batman to fit whatever nutty story was coming out of his keyboard. One memorable effort had Batman turn into an obsessive mad scientist type sporadically possessed by the ghost of an evil pirate. "Second Chance for a Deadman" is almost as fanciful: Batman is trying to disrupt an operation that gives criminals complete plastic surgery makeovers. To do this, he enlists the help of Boston Brand, a.k.a. Deadman, a ghost who can possess the bodies of others.

What's great about this tale is that Batman is both utterly incompetent and blithely immoral. When he tries to infiltrate the plastic surgery operation, he is instantly detected and beaten up by two standard-issue thugs — so much for the greatest martial artist ever. Then, his next plan is to have Deadman possess the body of the chief suspect, because warrants are for sissies. Inevitably, Deadman, in the body of the bad guy, falls in love with the bad guy's girlfriend and partner in crime, Lily Lang. When the ghost tries to get Batman to let his new love off the hook for her role in the operation, Batman refuses, because doing that, unlike taking over a suspect's body, would be wrong. And, anyway, why should he feel gratitude to Brand just because the guy is doing all of his work for him? Batman goes on to mess up the investigation further, with the result that Lily ends up dead, and Deadman is grief-stricken. The last we see of Batman, our hero is thinking about how happy he is that the criminal ring has been shut down, and entertaining an ineffectual regret or two about having so completely screwed Deadman over. "I feel badly about Boston," he muses. That's big of you, chief.