Quote Originally Posted by Reddish Mage View Post
Your asking me to give the history of quite a number of Batman’s rogues and compare that to several of Iron Man’s and Mr. Fantastic. That’s quite a feat.

Joker doesn’t just threaten the city, he has threatened genocide, and joined up with Lex Luthor to threaten both Gotham and Metropolis.

Bane comes from the country of Pena Duro and has caused wars there. He has cross paths with Ra’s Al Ghul and King Snake and been involved in world spanning plots. To say he doesn’t “even threaten the whole town” is a gross diminishment of his capabilities.

Penguin’s earlier stories include stealing a lethal drug from Ra’s Al Ghul and using it to blackmail the entire city. He also has the capacity to threaten the entire city and wreak large-scale mayhem

Ra’s of course, is another frequent rogue, if not one of the top central rogues (just look at how tangled the Batman family tree is with his). He controls an international society of criminals that control world events. He’s also immortal born centuries ago and has used that centuries to build the league of assassins.

The capabilities of these villains are clear in the comics and the new movies and DC TV shows are consistent with the scale of the mayhem they can unleash. Perhaps the older TV shows you watched downplayed their immense capacity for destruction.

This is not to say every plot is an existential threat to the city or the world. The best and most memorable Batman comics revolve around threats to him personally, his family, and his legacy, but the DC continuity have long established that Batman rogues are capable of world-scale threats.

Iron Man’s rogues don’t always threaten the world. Justin Hammer wants to get a leg up on Tony Stark’s business and is willing to murder to get there, but his goals is essentially to gain a competitive advantage, not bring ruin upon the world. Obadiah Stane is a similar character, often up to industrial sabotage and espionage (and threatening to kill Iron Man) but not usually bent on breaking the world.

Blizzard and many other of Iron Man’s rogues are usually recruits for these sorts of missions. Note however, Blizzard can also be found attacking the Avengers on occasion.

Madame Masque has that international crime background that wouldn’t be out of place for a Batman villain. She gets involved with Stark by committing crimes against his organization.

Iron Man and the Fantastic Four regularly battle world-spanning threats (the F4 face their share of galaxy spanning threats as well, which is a whole new step on the scale of villain reach). However, that doesn’t mean that sometimes the villains aren’t seeking destruction on the small scale, often against the heroes themselves or things important to them.

Iron Man’s villains are going to tend to have an international aspect to them, and the F4 villains may tend to be of alien origin, but that is the stage on which these comics are set, not an indication that these villains are necessarily more powerful than say, one of Spiderman’s villians (who are likely to just threaten Manhattan).

Batman’s villians may not tend to have Superman levels of strength or speed but they are quite capable of threatening the world all the same. They do so quite frequently in the solo comics. That is why they don’t miss a beat when the Batman’s rogues cross over and act as villians in other comics or as Justice League level threats.
All of these things would matter if we were talking about defeating schemes and plots. But the discussion is about who he"fights". And his combat is almost exclusively street level and henchmen. A major element of his villains is that almost none of them pose an actual physical threat.