Have you ever daydreamed of an alternate reality in which Batman saves saves Austrian Economist Ludwig von Mises’ works from Nazis? So has Paul Pope, American comic book writer/artist, who turned that idea into a popular comic book story for DC Comics (The Berlin Batman, The Batman Chronicles #11, 1998 DC Comics). Pope’s Batman is “someone born into an overarching police state; someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes… pretending to be Nosferatu.” As Pope reveals in an interview with aintitcool.com, “My roots are pretty strongly libertarian, for lack of a better term — I don’t know what else to say. I think at the heart of it, it’s just suspicion of power: I’m not that keen on people having power over other people…I think bureaucratic systems tend to create this sort of cover-your-ass mentality. That doesn’t apply simply to governmental structures, but also to corporate structures and probably to religious structures. I think there’s a lot of stagnation and waste that happens.”