Pure nerd-bait below. You’ve been warned.

(Why? Let’s just say that DC Universe Online didn’t quite work out for me, and as a consequence, the Batman question has been like a splinter in my brain.)

Last week I noted a little essay debating whether or not it would be possible for someone to become a real-life Batman. The piece, written by Mark Hughes, concludes “probably no.” The reasons are as follows:

1) Timing: It would take at least 10 years of training in combat and criminology to achieve a minimal level of Bat-competency, meaning that you couldn’t start your career until 28, at the earliest. You’d then need to work as a cop for at least 3 years to understand cops and robbers, putting you at 31.

2) Resources: You’d need to amass a fortune and buy a hideout, such as an old missile silo.

3) Crime-stopping: You’d almost never be able to stop crime in progress, because that’s like finding needles in haystacks, particularly when you move by foot.

4) Bat-technology is no match for guns. You’d get cut down, even with body armor.

That’s all me paraphrasing. Here’s Hughes’s actual description of the logistical problems with being Batman:

By your second week, you are getting unhappy that 90% of the crimes you’ve even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid who you saw punch a lady and take her purse, but you can’t really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk… in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there’s a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it’s YOU he’s after. Great, you have to let the kid go so you can run down an alley and climb up a fire escape to the roof to get away.

Yet for all of this, I’m not quite sure I buy it. Let’s stipulate that no, you or I could never become Batman–but that’s because the hardest part of the equation is the resources. Someone born to money–and not Mark Zuckerberg money, but a fortune, say, in the $100 million range–would have a real chance at being Batman. Because the second part of the equation is that a potential Batman would have to be an emancipated minor from a very young age, with access to said fortune. (And would have to have born with a surfeit of natural intelligence and athleticism. But we’ll leave that for now.)

My alt take on how it could happen is actually pretty close to the Bruce Wayne founding mythos:

You’d need a young-ish boy with access to a lot of money, no real adults around to run his life, and a very early desire to take on the Batman project. This would allow him to begin training in both the martial arts and industrial chem to the exclusion of all unnecessary schooling (no wasted time on health class or JV soccer). Once our boy is grown, he’d need some particularly exotic DIY skills to he’d be able to build/repair his suit. And he’d need enough cash that he could buy certain kinds of information–he’d need a pretty vast network of CI snitches to avoid having to do so much grunt detective work.

So we’ve gotten out Batman to a certain level of plausible completeness. The next question is how he would actually find, and fight, crime. Hughes is correct that running from roof-top to roof-top chasing purse snatchers is a non-starter. A real-life Batman could never plausibly fight street crime. But he could fight organized crime. At low-level, you could see Batman dismantling open-air drug markets like we saw in The Wire: He comes at night, terrorizing a look-out or two one night, then a signaler the next, working his way up the chain.

At the higher-level, there’s no reason Batman couldn’t target specific criminal organizations, going after mafia guys where they live and work, quietly. No need for massive pitched battles and gunplay: No man is protected 24/7, a real-life Batman would do lots of non-cape surveillance, waiting to find when the button men or captains were vulnerable and then, again, working his way up the food chain until he got near the head of the organization.

So in answer to Hughes’s question then, should be a qualified “yes.” There is a small pool of people who could, under extreme circumstances become Batman. And while they couldn’t do the Justice League version of the character, they could become something reasonably true to the character’s mythology.

I mean, if you care about that sort of thing.