The Collapse of The Billionaire Hero – A 2026 Comic-Con Panel Discussion

Ken and Pat brought Tangential Giants to Comic-Con 2026 with a take that could get you uninvited from a Wayne Enterprises gala: the billionaire hero is an outdated plot point.

Show Notes

Why the math stopped working

Readers used to take “rich guy uses his fortune for good” at face value. Then everyone got a crash course in how money works. People now understand wealth, housing, debt and inequality in a way that’s hard to unlearn, and a hero who solves Gotham’s problems with a checkbook starts to look like the problem. The good billionaire only works if you don’t think about where the billions came from.

The panel’s argument is that readers have noticed, and they’ve stopped identifying with that hero. The evidence is on the shelves, where the rich heroes keep getting rewritten.

Absolute Batman is the loudest example. Bruce Wayne has no mansion, no butler and no Wayne Enterprises. He’s an engineer with a day job, and the book is a hit: it had sold through more than 3 million copies worldwide by the end of 2025. Scott Snyder has said he and Nick Dragotta never expected anything like it. prhcomics

Absolute Green Arrow is the sneakier one. Oliver Queen keeps his money, but DC pitched him as a billionaire standing up to the other billionaires. Look at what that pitch admits. The good billionaire can’t just be good anymore. He has to be at odds with his own class to stay believable. thepopverse

Kareem’s cameo

Kareem couldn’t make it to San Diego, so he sent a video intro instead. He plays the CEO of an evil corporation that is, in his words, about to go private.

It’s the best thing that happens in the first five minutes, and it fits the topic more neatly than he probably planned. We aren’t a little bit sorry.

Marina Sharpe on power, which is not the same as money

Marina Sharpe takes a stretch in the middle of the panel to break down how power gets shown through female characters when men are the ones writing them. She also covers why readers misread it so often, and why the writers sometimes do too.

It matters for the billionaire argument because comics love to treat power and wealth as the same thing. They aren’t, and once you pull them apart the old billionaire hero looks a lot thinner. If you only have time for one section of the video, make it this one.

The question that stuck

Ray-Anthony Height then asked the one everybody kept chewing on: who is Batman without the money?

Nobody had a quick answer, which tells you how much of the character we’d built on the bank account.

On the panel: Ken and Pat of Tangential Giants, Marina Sharpe, Ray-Anthony Height, and Kareem by video from his evil headquarters.

What we covered:

Why the billionaire hero is an outdated plot point
How readers’ understanding of finance, wealth and inequality changed who they identify with
Rich heroes being rewritten and reimagined, with Absolute Batman and Absolute Green Arrow as the evidence
How power gets written through female characters, and where it gets misread
Power versus wealth, and why comics blur them
Who Batman is without the money

Keep reading

Why DC’s Absolute Batman isn’t rich (Popverse). Snyder on why the money turned out not to be a required part of Batman.
The blue collar Dark Knight of Absolute Batman (Popverse). A reader’s essay on what Batman does when he can’t throw money at Gotham.
Bruce Wayne, Hero of the Working Class (DC). How class runs through the series.
Absolute Batman Just Achieved An Astonishing Milestone (/Film). The sales story, plus a podcast’s argument that money is the book’s real villain.
The Absolute Batman Effect (PRH Comics). How the book’s momentum is pulling in newer readers.
DC is rebooting Green Arrow as a billionaire standing up to other billionaires (Popverse). The original Absolute Green Arrow pitch.
Interview: Jeff Lemire Talks Green Arrow (Comic Vine). A reminder that this isn’t new: Lemire planned to strip Oliver of his father’s company and his wealth back in 2013. GameSpot

The Collapse of The Billionaire Hero – A 2026 Comic-Con Panel Discussion – Tangential Giants Podcast

Ken and Pat brought Tangential Giants to Comic-Con 2026 to talk about money, which is a strange thing to do in a building full of people who just spent their rent on variant covers.The panel gets into the simple observation: Absolute Batman and Absolute Green Arrow are both doing huge numbers, and both are books that make the billionaire part of the hero feel a lot less like a given. So is that readers getting tired of the rich guy in the cape, or are we reading too much into two good comics? We didn’t fully settle it, but we got somewhere interesting.Kareem couldn’t make it, but he sent over a video intro as the CEO of an evil corporation that is, as he puts it, about to go private. It’s the best thing that happens in the first five minutes, and we’re not even a little bit sorry.Marina Sharpe has a stretch in the middle that’s worth the whole video on its own. She breaks down how power gets shown through female characters when men are the ones writing them, and why it so often gets misunderstood by readers and sometimes by the writers themselves. It changes how you read the money question, because power and wealth are not the same thing even though comics love to treat them that way.Then Ray-Anthony Height asks the one that stuck with everybody: who is Batman without the money? Nobody had a quick answer, which tells you something.If you’ve got your own answer, leave it in the comments. We’ll be reading them, and probably arguing with each other about them later.#TangentialGiants #ComicCon2026 #SDCC2026 #AbsoluteBatman #AbsoluteGreenArrow #ComicsPodcast #BillionaireHeroes #DCComics #ComicBooks