Batman really is awesome. Don't worry, I do have more to say on the matter than just that. But I thought it best that we start by reflecting how awesome Bruce Wayne is. Now. The question then is why? What makes him by far the best super-hero of all time? And what continues to bring people back to his Gothamist myth? 

It probably has something to do with him not being a superhero at all. He has no powers and is not from planet Krypton. His only weaknesses are our weaknesses, mainly, he is mortal. Batman is one of us. He is the vigilante that any of us could be and the one some of us wish we were. He belongs to no order and is a moral separatist similar to some extent to Rorschach from The Watchmen. But the biggest reason why we love Batman is that he is losing. The hero we know today through Frank Miller's re-imagining and the most recent movies with Christian Bale never wins. Every night he puts on his mask and utility belt and roams the streets fighting crime after crime after crime but the city never changes. The corrupt always come back like scraps of metal to a magnet. Gotham is perpetually lost. 

Batman is as much about Bruce Wayne's personal conflicts with morality and darkness as it is a story about a city. We don't return to his story for him any more than for the criminals he is fighting. We want the whole universe he exists in because it is a dark shadow of our own. Sure, our cities aren't as despicable and crime-ridden as Gotham, but they could be. Batman's city is externally dark and evil and corrupt, ours hide it. Our world is infested with every bit of the evil and amoral crimes as Gotham, the only difference is Gotham is just one city where it all exists. In our world it is spread all over the world and much harder to visualize. And as impossible it is to visualize all the underworld evil dealings of our world, all the organ trading black markets and arms dealing networks, it is just as impossible to visualize an entity or organization combating those networks.

Batman is the closest thing we've got. Because he exists outside the law. And that makes sense to us. It makes sense that sometimes we have to fight fire with fire. And it makes sense that the world looks dark to him, because his presence means its a little less dark for the rest of us. It takes the sacrifice of people like batman for the world to seem less scary for the rest of us. Batman and Rorschach go face to face with the devil so we don't have to. So our cities don't look like Gotham though deep down they are just as sin-filled.

At least that's my take on why Batman is awesome. What's amazing is that behind that mask he is nothing but a shadow. So it's highly likely that the shadow you see is entirely different from the one I do. He is our dark reflection.