A few years back, I began rereading my Justice League of America books. As I don’t binge, I’m currently midway through Joe Kelly’s run (I have a lot of JLA stories), but my topic for today is an arc I reread a couple of years ago, Mark Waid’s “Tower of Babel’ four-parter. While I enjoyed Waid’s run, this one is a royal mess.
It starts off well. A mysterious adversary targets the League with threats tailored to their individual weaknesses. They disable Flash by triggering superfast epilepsy. They trap Wonder Woman in a hallucinatory battle that could potentially exhaust her to death (one thing I didn’t like about Waid’s run is his view of WW as a warrior who glories in battle). Kyle, the artist, goes blind, which makes it impossible to visualize constructs for his ring. Aquaman becomes water-phobic (a trick that an old issue of Super-Friends handled better) while Martian Manhunter’s skin explodes in fire when he moves. And so on.
Who’s behind it? As you’ll gather from the cover it’s R’as al Ghul, but this is only Step One. His Step Two is a neural scrambler that kills our ability to understand anyone else’s language. With communication impossible, chaos, catastrophe and war are on the way, after which Ra’s imagines he will rebuild a kinder, gentler world in the ruins (for the record, I’m with Anarky: if after 600 years of experience Ra’s can’t think of a better solution to the world’s problems than “kill half the population,” he’s not the person we want in charge).
Then comes the big twist: the disabling attacks he’s using are ones Batman came up with. After the Silver Age 
crossover event had a group of supervillains take over the League’s bodies, Batman compiled a list of “how to take down my teammates” plans for the next time it happened. Ra’s hacked his computer, found the ideas and put them into action.
Like the title of this post says, that’s exactly how I’d expect Batman to screw things up for the JLA. It’s been canon for a while that he’s a natural field leader, a brilliant strategist who knows exactly what each hero needs to do when things get bad. In one issue of JLA: Incarnations, we see him join the League when they’re a disorganized rabble and make them into a cohesive team.
But that’s bullshit. Batman isn’t a natural anything: his skills are the product of years of determined, obsessive training starting in childhood. One skill I can’t imagine he ever trained to develop is leading a superhero team in combat. His life plan never included team-ups (as that Incarnations story shows).
The whole “Bat God” shtick of the past 30 years or so makes that unacceptable: he has to be the best team leader the League could ever have (Rock and Fury could probably take lessons from him). I think, though, that “Tower of Babel” is a far more likely scenario, where he creates a train wreck by playing a lone hand. But even by that standard, he should not be this stupid, or this vicious.
Certainly the core idea makes excellent sense. The Justice League has had a long history of being turned to the dark side. Enslaved by petty crook Pete Ricketts.
Transformed by the Alien-Ator. Enslaved by Felix Faust.
Enslaved by Brain Storm.
Plus fighting evil counterparts of themselves in Justice League of America #s 13 and 19, plus the Crime Syndicate in #29-30.
So if Batman had told the team “Look, we’ve all had experience fighting versions of ourselves. Every one of us should be thinking of how we’d defeat the rest of the team if we were the last one not taken over. Preferably non-lethal. Do not blow this off!” I’d say that would be a smart move.
But that’s not how Batman went about it: he simply sits in the Batcave crafting his own plans and hoping his teammates 
are thinking the same way. Never suggests they follow his lead. Never considers he could be the one possessed or turned evil, even though it happened in Silver Age.
It doesn’t look like he even thought about making his takedowns non-lethal either. Wonder Woman and Aquaman face threats that could have killed them; the fourth issue says flat out that Bruce designed the fire attack on J’Onn to be lethal. That doesn’t make sense at all — as Waid put it in Kingdom Come, Bruce Wayne doesn’t want anyone else to die — but that’s what the story shows us.
In the aftermath of defeating R’as, the League treats what Batman did as a breach of trust. Nobody points out it’s a breach of common sense, and positively murderous. If they really dealt with how bad a judgment call this was, it would kill the Bat-God image, and make it hard to ever justify keeping him on the team again.
Bat-god my ass.
#SFWAPro. Covers top to bottom by Howard Porter, Brian Bolland, Murphy Anderson #3 and Jim Aparo
frasherman: “Bat-god my @$$.”
(chuckle) That was funny. lol
I haven’t read Tower Of Babel in ages, and might never again. It’s just not a fun period for me.
I’ve forgotten about a lot of it, but some of it stuck with me for being so bad.
Oh, and the ending for me – where they boot him from the League for doing something they don’t like. I kept thinking ‘I’m constantly being told not to judge others, to forgive everyone else, to put up with behaviours that I consider immoral; but now that it hurts your feelings, suddenly it’s a problem?’
“Kyle, the artist, goes blind, which makes it impossible to visualize constructs for his ring.”
Apparently, I’d forgotten this. I take it you mean he can’t create constructs and control them, because I know I can visualise things with my eyes shut.
“Enslaved by petty crook Pete Ricketts.”
Is that where Uncanny X-Men #111 got its cover idea?
The rationale was that Kyle’s constructs are tied to his visual imagination so he couldn’t work them with his eyes shut down (score one for Hal Jordan’s Big Green Fist approach to constructs!).
That is an interesting cover comparison, you’re right.
Yeah, I figured that rationale, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. My visual imagination works better with my eyes shut than with them open – less interference.
I can see that he couldn’t guide a Big Green Fist (or, with Kyle, an anime robot horse) toward the correct villain that way.
If only the comic writer worked with some kind of visual artist ever…
If I remember correctly, the issue is not Kyle being incapable of visualising contructs, but not being able to use them efficiently. I remember Flash and WW being attacked in Kyle’s appartment, and Kyle lashing out, making some constructs.
That’s what I was thinking. That makes so much more sense.
Still better than the Batman issue (I’m not sure which series) where he defeats Green Lantern by wrapping the bat rope around GL”s wrist.
I mean, given that they all nearly died and it would have been because of their friend, I think it extends beyond that their feelings were hurt. But it’s been so long since I read that story, and maybe your right and they went, “we aren’t angry because you devised strategies to kill us, we’re.mad because you did it behind our backs”. As an aside, didn’t sometime in Geoff Johns ‘ run batman gave Superman the plan to beat him(batman) if he ever turned evil? Now that I think about it, given that we’ve had two successive.runs in the past five years where batman had to take down a mind controlled league, I don’t think you could really tell tower of babel today, batman taking down the whole league is just the new norm. It’s become the new version of why would Superman need a team since he’s so powerful, but now it’s just because of the “Bat-God” effect
The Scott Snyder story where Batman keeps a battlesuit on hand that can take down the entire League was just … well, bad even for Scott Snyder.
I don’t remember the Johns’ thing you mentioned, probably because there’s a lot of Johns’ past decade I’ve skipped.
And yes, they do frame it very definitely as an issue of trust, nothing more. It’s the perennial problem of having a series character do something that deserves exile, but then he’d be out of the series, so we’ll just handwave it.