Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, son of Elton John and David Furnish, filed suit shortly after his eighteenth birthday against his fathers for the sum of 1.5 million dollars.  The suit claims that Furnish-John’s adolescence was not “enough like Batman’s,” and that this fact prevented him from having an adequately angsty youth.

“Batman isn’t fabulous,” Furnish-John stated in his sworn affidavit presented before a California district judge today. Furnish-John’s statement continued:

He wears a lot of black, sulks in a cave, and fails to grasp the larger moral connections between himself and his arch nemeses. I spent my teenage years avoiding polyester blends, swimming in crystal clear diamond-encrusted endless wave pools, and failing to grasp the larger moral connections between champagne and sparkling wine. It hasn’t exactly been rough for me.

The plaintiff argues that to live a normal teenage life, one must be subjected to enough hardships for adequate bitterness to manifest. “When one of your dads keeps his ever-growing collection of brightly colored sparkly sunglasses in your closet, it’s hard to see the world as out to get you,” Furnish-John stated.

Everything about my life is sheltered and privileged. I got laughed at the other day when someone said they were going to look at Facebook, and I asked who the publisher was. Batman would know what Facebook is, and would probably use the notes feature to share surly haikus about his ambivalence toward Alfred. If Batman had been slapped on the cover of Us Weekly forty-five seconds after he was born, held in the arms of two perfectly normal, perfectly gay, perfectly alive parents, he sure as hell wouldn’t be as somber as he is today.

Furnish-John’s legal representation said in an official press statement that his case is strongest when one considers his relationship to his fathers. “Batman didn’t have a dad, and it tortured him for his entire life. Everything he did was motivated by the loss of his father. His overblown sense of self-worth, insatiable desire for vigilante-style justice, and taste for muscly black leather outfits all scream I lack a father figure!” The same cannot be said for the plaintiff, who appears to have an abundance of fathers rather than a lack of them.

Instead of hydraulic grappling hooks in every room, I had pianos. Instead of the tormented voices of my long-dead parents in my head, I had a chipper southern English accent and a Canadian slight vowel drawl. How can I be expected to live a normal childhood and want to grow up to put the Joker in prison for good if his purple and green tuxedo ensemble isn’t all that perplexing to me?

Both parties are willing to settle out of court, although Furnish-John insists that he will not accept any deal that does not include a collection of titanium Batarangs and a crippling inability to be in a normal relationship with a woman.

–Katie Sisneros