There’s a city in Turkey named Batman that has recently drummed up some press in the area for a rash of unsolved murders and a severely elevated number of female suicides. Hüseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman needs money to face these issues, so when it was suggested to him by a reporter that he try to pull some money from the Western world’s Batman, he thought it’d be a great idea to sue someone.

Thing is, he’s suing Christopher Nolan, the only Batman filmmaker to make a movie without the name “Batman” in the title. Batman is not suing DC Comics, who own Bob Kane’s Batman character, nor are they suing Warner Bros, who owns all Batman’s film appearances.

The genius points go to Hüseyin Kalkan today.

From hurriyet.com.tr:

“The royalty of the name ‘Batman’ belongs to us … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us,” Kalkan told to the Doğan news agency. Batman is a centuries old city, taking root in the Neolithic age but becoming significant when oil was found in the region at the end of 1940s. Almost a decade before that, Batman was created as a comic hero. Kalkan is going to sue Christopher Nolan, the director of the latest Batman movie “The Dark Night,” not DC Comics, the creator of the superhero.Mayor Kalkan, speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News and the Economic Review, said last year foreign media picked up on Batman and the city’s increasing suicide rates among women. He said a columnist asked why Batman’s mayor did not sue the movie Batman for royalties while struggling with economic problems. “We found this criticism right and started to look for legal possibilities of a case like that,” he said.

Meanwhile, local newspaper Batman Çağdaş alleged yesterday that Batman residents living abroad cannot use Batman as a title for their business, leading the municipality to think about the royalty rights of that name.

Meanwhile, the name of a local region cannot be registered as a brand name, said lawyer Vehbi Kahveci, head of the Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights Commission of the Istanbul Bar. Also having overseas clients, Kahveci said “Batman” and his image is registered all around the world. The Batman Municipality missed the period in which they could object to the registration decision for Batman’s name as a superhero, according to Kahveci.

This is an interesting issue, but one that will be mocked simply because they chose the wrong person to sue. Nolan must be laughing in his pile of Dark Knight money right now.