It takes deep pockets to be the Batman!

Fighting crime, bringing the bad guys to justice, and owning the night doesn't just take insanity and a single-minded devotion to justice. It also takes a really huge amount of cash. According to Darren Hudson Hick, author of Batman Unauthorized notes, becoming the Dark Knight would run about $300 million, not counting the cost of the Batplane, Batcopter, Batboat, and the Bat insurance premiums, which are likely to be through the roof.

Although Hick notes that some items, like the Batarangs and smokebombs, would be fairly cheap, he claims that the Batcave would run approximately $3.5 million, the Batmobile would run another $2 million, and the Bat computer would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $290 million. Other incidentals would include the costume ($50,000), ten years of martial arts and criminology classes ($137,000), and a DNA analysis machine ($365,000).

Now as a one-time comic books geek and a once-and-future literature geek, I absolutely love the deus ex machinae that comic book authors use to fill their texts. On the most ridiculous end, there's Superman's apparently endless array of powers, the Fantastic Four's almost infinite potential, and the Hulk's incredible stretching purple pants. On the more realistic end, we have Batman and Tony Stark, both of whom have seemingly bottomless pockets. In the context of comic books, this means that these heroes can overcome almost any problem through the application of a huge amount of dough.