10 Times Batman Was A Total Jerk‏

8. The Whole Spy Satellite Thing

Just to recap: Identity Crisis is one of the worst stories DC has ever published, and is one of the few occasions where it was Batman who was the victim of some jerky behaviour, rather than the other way around.

Amongst a bunch of other gross stuff, the Dark Knight's Justice League buddies got the magician Zatanna to wipe his memory of some bad stuff that happened. It took a few years but Bruce Wayne, who has a pretty big brain, finally managed to recover not only the things he'd been forced to forget but also that it was his supposed mates who had done the mystical amnesia thing in the first place. As you can probably imagine, he wasn't best pleased about this. Still, his response was a little out of proportion.

Realising he couldn't trust his superhero pals not to engage in a conspiracy to mess with his brain using magic, he used a bunch of that sweet Wayne Enterprises dough to fund a huge surveillance satellite called Brother Eye. The sort of surveillance satellite that the NSA have (wet) dreams about, what with its semi-autonomous artificial intelligence allowing it to spy on and collect data on anybody it deems fit, and its state-of-the-art cloaking device making sure nobody would ever find it.

At least that was the theory, but we'll get into that in a little while. In the meantime let's just settle on what a huge betrayal of trust and totally creepy move it was for Batman to make a satellite that could not only keep tabs on all his superhero friends, but everybody in the world. Remember the moral outrage when the whole Edward Snowden thing happened? This is like that, times a thousand, and enacted not by a country but by one crazy dude in a Bat costume. What a jerk.