KMC Forums - Google fights!

You have to understand that Batman (and Superman) are icons. They have been there since the dawn of comics, and will be there long after Wolverine loses popularity.

Especially Batman.

Even after the comic industry almost financially flopped (after financial speculators, many of them who never read comics, flooded the market place and squeezed it) the only comics that were selling were Batman and Spawn. Everything else (including Superman, which is why they tried killing him to garner interest), and virtually everything in Marvel, almost came to a standstill. But Batman was still chugging along.

That comic is extremely adaptable, and part of this is because he is 100% human. He comes from a time where heroes were written as human (eg Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and in 1936 the Phantom et al). Basically normal men, usually with great fighting skills and zeal, and normally wealthy and of a higher class, but who decided to fight for those lower in social stature than themselves.
Thus Batman came up in 1939 (Superman had come out as a DC comic a year earlier). The two, Superman and Batman, were basically separate threads. One following the earlier format of normal men with strong wills, and the other going along the lines of super-powered mythology.

However today Batman is basically the only major hero who still continues the 'normal human' route. There are others, eg Nightwing, Robin etc, but all of those are Batman affiliated.
Everything else is composed of super-powered heroes.
For example take Marvel. They have zero MAJOR human heroes. Not even one!
And even border-line humans like BlackPanther and Captain America have enhancements that give them peak powers, and others like Doctor Strange are magic users. None of those really fall into the same category as the Batman.

The only non-Batman affiliated pure-human character is Lee Falk's the Phantom.

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The Phantom has been around longer than even the Batman, and for all intents and purposes was one of the characters Batman was based on. And by the way the Phantom is one of the greatest comics out there, and one that (like the Batman) has always been in circulation since the start.

Anyways, the saving grace of Batman is the he is human. And this is the factor that will ensure that there is always a Batman comic in the future. The reason is even when a time comes that people think having characters with 'adamantium bones' and 'healing factors' is silly there will always be a cord struck with a character that is as human as the reader.

That is called survivability.