How to Handle the Punchline

Welcome back to Funding the Kryptonite, a blog that will take a look at the plans of comic book super villains and discuss them from a business perspective.

In today’s post, we’re going to look at a more complicated situation involving Alexander Luthor Jr. (an alternate universe version of Lex Luthor) and his plans in the DC Comic crossover Infinite Crisis. He assembles an extremely large and powerful group of super villains, ranging from A-list material like Deathstroke the Terminator all the way down to D-list cannon fodder, into a group known as The Society to execute a plot to ostensibly erase the minds of the superheroes of the world.

The summary:

While assembling his Society, Alex Luthor went out of his way to extend invitations to just about every known and active super villain on the planet. Most of the few that refused him were summarily executed by those who did sign on in order to provide examples of the strength and power behind the Society, positioning them as a group to be reckoned with. That being said, one key villain was purposefully excluded from the proceedings: The Clown Prince of Crime called The Joker.

Outsourcing Back Breaking

Welcome back to Funding the Kryptonite, a blog that will take a look at the plans of comic book super villains and discuss them from a business perspective.

Today’s blog will examine the plan of one of DC Comic’s most notable creations from the 90’s: Bane. Known colloquially as “The Man Who Broke The Bat”, Bane created and executed a successful long-term plan to escape from jail, travel to Gotham City, gather intelligence about his target, weaken him, and ultimately defeat him. The focus here will be on the element of weakening Batman.

The summary:

Batman is no slouch. Highly intelligent, trained in numerous martial arts, master detective, and incredibly rich, it takes effort to grind down such a man. To do so would require significant effort, and incur the risk of being bested by Batman while he was still in peak performance. How best then to accomplish this goal? Bane outsources the task to the rest of Batman’s rogue gallery by launching an attack on Arkham Asylum (the psychiatric hospital where many of Batman’s most notorious villains are kept after capture) and letting them loose in Gotham City. The effort involved in recapturing such a mass of foes as quickly as possible would grind down Batman and leave him vulnerable.