What's the point in Batman being in the Justice League if Superman is smarter than him?

Also, I read that he has a net worth of $4 billion. How is that enough to be useful to the JL considering their massive expenses.

everyone in the JL regularly abstains from using their powers so Batman has something to do. duh

Superman is often written as a moron when Batman's around, only to be a supergenius when he's back in his own story. It makes sense really, because how else are you supposed to make Batman look useful? He's just Lex without most of the pulp sci-fi tech that makes Lex threatening. The whole idea of a Batman/Superman team-up is based on three contradictory premises:

1. Batman fights street crime. His foes either have no superpowers or very modest ones. The regular police could deal with them if they weren't incompetent. He considers these criminals a challenge.

2. Superman fights world-ending threats. He fights super cyborgs, homicidal robots, clones of himself, planet-destroying mad scientists, alien warlords, and a planet-destroying super cyborg mad scientist who has clones of himself and is also an alien warlord and sometimes a homicidal robot.

3. Batman and Superman can team up on relatively even grounds, with neither drastically exceeding the other in usefulness.

you forget Superman completely has the personality to go eas to make Bruce feel more useful. he's like a dad who plays catch with his son and regularly fucks up on purpose so his son keeps confidence and keeps training harder.

>Batman fights street crime. His foes either have no superpowers or very modest ones

scarecrow: mad scientist, fear toxin
Madhatter: mad scientist, mind control
Poison ivy: mad scientist, mind control, plant control, often nearly destroys Gotham
Mister Freeze: mad scientist, freeze powers, often nearly destroys Gotham
Joker: genius, often almost destroys Gotham
Riddler: genius, often nearly destroys gotham
ra's al ghul: leader of a global network of terrorist assassins

batman's enemies aren't usually giant robots but they do often pose a similar threat to human existence
they don't feel as scary as a giant alien warlord because they're all so old-timey looking they feel grounded but they're very fantastical ideas

They keep him around because basically he's the one hero they have that doesn't suck on a fundamental level. Otherwise you have a Wonder & Hawk Dyke, big blue boy scout, a martian that is afraid of my Bic lighter, Diversity Lantern (Being slightly more interesting than Hal isn't a quality) & one of like 36 different flashes.

>calling Hawkgirl a dyke
>when she much pretty much told Diana to give man a chance because she loves dick

What I've ascertained from a couple different versions and interpretations of the JL is Batman is usually there to ground the JL and stop them from becoming an all powerful militant group above the laws/governments. He also knows how to take down each member of the JL should something go wrong or one of them was to turn evil. It's explored loosely in JL/JLU especially with the first episode of JLU where Green Arrow is brought on for similar purposes and it's obviously explored in JL:Doom.

Hawk Girl is the furthest thing from a dyke

Honestly.
I prefer superman when he isn't written super intelligent.
Makes him far more interesting and less ultra self insert.

>put glowing rock in front of superman
>turns to a pile of jelly
poor, dumb superman, never saw it coming

>1. Batman fights street crime.
You just made me hate TAS just a little bit more.

Batman is useful as a source of funding and Waynetech in conjunction with Kryptonian/Martian etc. technologies to build the watchtower (And Waynetech gets the tech goodies to stay ahead of every company on earth outside of Lex tech).
Above that, he has a keen strategic mind and cbt experience (Teamwork, coordination, prep, planning), he can think from the perspective of 'us mortals' and Supes cannot be everywhere at once.

did someone try to make 'clark raises damian' stories?

Couldn't Super man probably find, defeat, and capture every one of those villains in a couple of days? At least if none had any kryptonite.

And if Superman was in that story, all of those villains would be dead or captured within a day. That's the point. Batman fights guys restricted to one city (except for Ra's, usually) who the regular police are considered a big problem for (hence why Gordon is such a prominent and enduring supporting character). Superman's villains are, at least, written as strong enough to threaten the entire world, even in incarnations where they're not unassailable to conventional weaponry. (That said, there is more divergence here, which sometimes leads to problems with legacy villains. Lex Luthor is the stand-out here, since he really is not in the weight class of any of Superman's other villains. In any case, this premise suggests a relatively high-powered Supes.)

There's no real way around this. Your first option is to power up Batman. You can do this via mental capabilities, but that seems difficult in practice. How smart can he be? Is he smarter than Superman's many genius opponents, like Brainiac or Luthor, but without their powers or resources? The problem with this is that it quickly becomes very dumb: either Batman can deduce things that a human being has no possible way of deducing, or you make Supes dumb.


The second option is to depower Superman. In some ways this is just a return to their power levels when the Batman/Superman team up first came into existence, in the Golden Age of Comics. Golden Age Superman was much closer to being a street level himself (though still higher). Throwing cars was still impressive back then; he could run at several hundred mph at his best, but didn't have FTL reflexes or anything ridiculous like that, so he couldn't just wipe the villains out before they knew what happened. Small arms bullets bounced off his chest with no harm, but a "bursting artillery shell" could still break his skin. Et cetera. The DCAU sorta did this. But General Zod is much less frightening if the National Guard can take him down.

>Put bullet in Batman's skull
>Turns into a corpse

Poor dumb Batman. Never saw it coming

See? you guys kind of made my point for me. Out of everything I said, you pretty much latched on to the fact that Hawk Dyke isn't a dyke, yet there was no defense of any other JL member.

Because Sup Forums is filled with faggots who shit on J'onn, and Stewart is the blandest GL (But not the most annoying or outright offensive)

This applies to everyone else on the League really. It's why WW got such a massive buff trying to push her as near Superman's strength (which never has any concrete effect on the plot or the scale of her own stories, and may as well not be there given that bullets still kill her) in the Modern Age after being distinctly sub-Superman level for most of her history and in every single adaptation. Same with Aquaman and Flash, who are treated as if they can fight Superman-level foes when they're standing next to him but then have trouble with a guy in a diving suit or a guy with boomerangs.

>he can think from the perspective of 'us mortals' and Supes cannot be everywhere at once.
Batman is considerably less in touch with the average person than Superman is.

I think there's a third option. The Super Friends options. Where character's powers are wildly inconstant. Batman can defeat bizzaro superman by hitting a boulder with a baterang and causing said boulder to hit bizzaro. 10 minute later bizzaro can rip steel beams with his bare hands

Well yeah, but that's just shitty story-telling.

And writing everyone else stupid so your pet can be awesome is even worse

What is wrong with that cops eyes ?

Superman has been a redneck and not a genius for decades now.

Something that recently occurred to me. The Christian Bale Batman has always bugged me on some level, and I think I finally figured out why. The entire premise is to take Batman and stick in a more or less real world situation. Which is kind of dumb. Don't get me wrong. I like the movies. It's just that they're completely divorced from a DC universe other than there's a psychologically damaged guy running around in a bat costume. There's no evidence of Superman or Wonder Woman or that there's any other "supers" than Bats and his rogues gallery. Case in poing, the only thing he "Bat Brands" is his actual outfit. The Tumbler doesn't scream "Batman" when you see it, and neither does the flying doohicky in Rises. Don't get me wrong, they're cool. But you could basically take Bale out of the batsuit and make him a ninja, and you've got the same trilogy. On the other hand Bruce running around dressed up like a Bat with a plane that looks like his symbol and a car with completely impractical fins on it makes perfect sense in a world where Superman is flying around. Bruce wants the badguys to say "Oh fuck, its Batman." Because all the other costumed freaks have super powers and can punch out monsters and do all kinds of crazy shit and the badguys have no idea what Batman can or can't do. Does he have crazy vanishing powers? Can he shadow meld? Can he read your thoughts? Can he summon a swarm of bats? Who the fuck knows? He's the Goddamn Batman. The truth is in most iterations of the various DC universes, Bats gets buy partly by riding the reputation of everyone else and backing that up with insane martial and intellectual abilities with his gadgets filling the gaps where he would normally need powers. In the DCAU Batman makes perfect sense. In the Noland films Batman is just a nut job who could have done everything he did without dressing up in a costume.

The point is to get people to watch Justice League. Which would never happen if Batman's not in it.

why?

Since when Superman was smarter?

Superfags need their character to be the best at everything or otherwise sperg about like this, so they latch onto whatever bullshit silver age power Superman had like super memory or super intelligence, while oddly ignoring the retarded ones like firing mini robot-clone Supermen from his palms.

>firing mini robot-clone Supermen from his palms.

Wish they'd bring that back

I liked him in Young Justice, his schtick of working from the shadows fits perfectly ordering the youngsters in what is supposed to be a Black Ops group. Either for missions that can't be on the public eye or those the League can't handle on site because they are busy with bigger threaths

Most of them are not mad scientist. At best, they are like engineers who are very good at one thing, but are pretty useless otherwise.

Joker or Riddler being a genius is no different than Batgod being Batgod. It's plot armour for them that makes as much sense as the never ending supply of useful crap in a utility belt.

The only person on your list who is a comparable threat is Ra's. And that's because of his world-wide network of sycophants.

>complaining about nonsensical plotarmor to defend Superman, a character who has pulled powers out of his ass consistently ever since its was created.