DC Comics: At their prime, Batman is a better vigilante than Green Arrow.

I’m not going to rebut the credentials my opponent has spent much time putting on Batman’s résumé. It cannot be disputed that batman has pushed himself greatly in his entire being of the body, mind, and the spirit. At least not with ease. Instead I’m going to focus on maintaining my case supporting the Green Arrow. Also my opponent seems to think my main contention is about Green Arrows aim. I guess that’s cause I presented that case first, but it’s not my main one (and it’s not really about his aim but I’ll get to that) for that implies I consider it the strongest case and it’s not. So I’m going to reorder my points by priority this time so there’s no doubt how strong I consider any given argument. 1) Green Arrow-Mayor of Star City: the social politics advocate side of Oliver Queen was my strongest point. And I see I need to spend much more time explaining why if you think it does not hold weight on the resolution concerning who’s the better vigilante. My opponent contends the argument only supports him as a better hero, but not his effectiveness in the down and dirty duty of fighting crime on the streets. But it does. In Jon Acuff’s book “Quitter”, a book to help people bridge the gap between their dream jobs and their day jobs, he speaks about how our day jobs can actually help our dream jobs (a). For example if you work at star bucks but want to be a financial advisor you can still use your Starbucks work experience to make yourself ready to be a financial advisor. You have plenty of people every day to learn how to deal with and you are also handling money. And this works in reverse as well. Jon Acuff writes about how he had a life changing experience when his wife told him ‘superman needed Clark Kent to stay connected to the world” and it made him look at his day job differently. You might be asking ‘what does dream job stuff have to do with this debate?” Well lots. Consider the vigilante thing the dream job for both Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen. And their public day life as playboy billionaires is their day job they have to do. While Bruce largely uses his alter ego mostly to just make the city suspect him of being able to be Batman the least, Oliver Queen is using it to change public policy, govern the city, build playgrounds, ect. To truly make war against crime, you can’t just go find AL Capone and knock his teeth out, you have to remove the infrastructure that feeds him and every other crime lord ruling the streets of Gotham or Star City. This can include things that a hero can take care of in his cape like stopping guns from being transported to the bad guys, but there’s also things that feed crime like poor education that a mayor can do something about (b). While Batman is doing admirably fighting crimes infrastructure on the street level, Green Arrow has made himself versatile enough to fight its infrastructure with his public identity as well, for example ordering the Swat team to help back up his caped exploits or using the office to blackmail corrupt businessmen (c). 2) Green Arrow-married man: I did put the ‘ladies’ man’ point in mostly for laughs and to rev up the audiences perception of him as awesome, but its ironically my second strongest point when I focus on the fact that he has Black Canary as his spouse to come home to. When one has a spouse in their life in a healthy marriage (d&e) it can have revitalizing effects on all aspects of their life. Someone who can support them in things that tax their money, their time, and their spirit. And man with virtuous woman shall find no lack of gain (f) and it goes without saying you’ve got that if she’s a superhero with you too. Batman lives a much harder life without a warm lady to come home to after a hard days of skull bashing, nor one to support his big decisions like launching a satellite to spy on other superheroes (g) which he may have gotten some wise encouragement to not do that if he had Wonderwoman to encourage him not too. 3) The Clean up Process: by this I was referencing Brad Metzler’s Identity Crisis series (h&i). This series revealed much of what goes on behind the scenes at the end of the comic when the supervillian team is beat by the JLA. Batman and Superman and Wonderwoman take off right away to fight some other villain like the Joker or Luthor, leaving Green Arrow along with others (zatana, GL, flash, hawkman, elongated man, black canary) to figure out what to do with the supervillians that just almost got away with body snatching the superheroes, and definitely got away with their identities. They had to mindwipe them and they kept this to themselves, even when they mind wiped Dr Light, Catwoman, and Batman, 2 of those they altered the personalities of as well. This shows Green Arrow works at fighting crime and supervillians on more levels than Batman does, much like my case about his work as mayor of star city 4) Quiver=Versatility: my point about his quiver was not ultimately about his aim, though that is indisputably better than batman’s. It was about his versatility with just that one strength. To take something as mundane and seeming only useful in special situations and use to do all that batman can do with his gadgets is a impressive to speak of his raw talent in VERSATILITY, not aim. That is a very important trait to the overall effectiveness of any superhero and really defines the sum of all of Green Arrows advantages, versatile in how many fronts he fights the war on crime (behind the hero scenes, on the hero scenes, behind the mayors desk, behind the billionaires mansion) 5) Conner Hawk: I apologize, I did misread my own source, I though there was a reference to him beating batman in martial arts. Although it did say he went toe to toe with lady Shiva and the comic was written by author chuck Dixon for the pure purpose of establishing him as one of the world’s greatest martial artist. In a fight between the two one could make a case Conner could go toe to toe mimicking batman’s moves and even win after adaptively using them against him, and even some of lady shiva’s tricks that he might remember from his battle with her. Of course I don’t have to prove he can beat batman cause this debate is not about a fight between the two. Its about who’s a better vig. Now for just one new argument 6) Comic Cannon: You naively put a huge focus on the sourcing in this debate. Problem is comic sources can have tricky effects on a debate even if its about the comics. Every auther change tends to change how they write the degree that a character is any particular way. One man writes him up to able to beat the whole justice league with ease quickly, the next he cant beat superman, even with kryptonite (right away), and if you try to figure out how old batman is using comics as a source, your head might explode with the contradictions (k) my point is I want you to take note that while I source comics to show you where I’m referencing a trait or event in the DCU, the sources I gave that have the most weight are the non-comic ones because they give weight to proving a point I was making for my case. (a) http://www.quitterbook.com... (chapter 4) (b) http://ftp.iza.org... (c) http://dc.wikia.com... (d) http://www.umaryland.edu... (e) http://bible.org... (f) http://bible.cc... (g) http://dc.wikia.com... (h) http://en.wikipedia.org... (i) http://dc.wikia.com... (k) http://www.therealbatmanchronologyproject.com...