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Post by kirby101 on Aug 20, 2022 8:40:47 GMT -5
Yeah, Batman letting the Joker continue his rampage is ludicrous on one level. But outside of protecting someone when the Joker is in the act of harming them, what right does Batman have to take a life? He is not a law officer, he has no more right to kill someone because they are "bad" than I do. Same goes for almost every hero. The Punisher is rightfully a criminal al for what he does. In that case, and I know comics have to have different rules, it makes no sense for the Joker not to have been given a lethal injection. True, depending on what State. But at least a Super Max in solitary. Not Arkum over and over.
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Post by Cei-U! on Aug 20, 2022 9:46:42 GMT -5
This is where I think the MCU got it right: the heroes do kill, almost always out of necessity. We get "We don't trade lives," not "We don't take lives." And, as seen in CA:CW, there are consequences to their actions, including forcing the Avengers to renounce their vigilante status and accept UN oversight. The DCU movies, by contrast, go way over the top, with a bloodthirsty Batman completely oblivious to the destruction he causes and a Superman so wrapped up in his own problems that he fails to detect a bomb that kills hundreds including a chamberful of Congressmen. Yechh.
Cei-U! I summon the saturday morning musings!
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Post by zaku on Aug 20, 2022 9:52:57 GMT -5
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Post by Calidore on Aug 20, 2022 10:40:05 GMT -5
Yeah, Batman letting the Joker continue his rampage is ludicrous on one level. But outside of protecting someone when the Joker is in the act of harming them, what right does Batman have to take a life? He is not a law officer, he has no more right to kill someone because they are "bad" than I do. Same goes for almost every hero. The Punisher is rightfully a criminal al for what he does.
I think this was given as Batman's rationale also. He's a vigilante helping people and law enforcement by capturing criminals. It's not his place to permanently "solve" the problem of the Joker, but society's and the system society has created and can change. Instead, society does nothing and blames Batman.
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Post by tarkintino on Aug 20, 2022 13:37:12 GMT -5
Unfortunately we always fall back into the same problem, that the authors have created a completely unrealistic world where prisons or the death penalty cannot stop criminals from committing new crimes. This is anarchy, it is not a civil society. And in my opinion this leads to another problem, that the world of superheroes comics is unrealistically too similar to ours. And it is not about super-science or magic or the like, but about the attitude of the people in general towards the law and the management of justice. If a citizen risks his life every week because a supervillain who is supposed to be in prison is on the loose, well, I assure you that after a while the aforementioned citizen would happily embrace the most fascist of governments if he promised him safety. The expected outcome would have society living under a system where they would end up with limited rights and harsh punishment, all in the name of control and "freedom" probably leading to the kind of superhero factions / revolt seen in What if? #44 ( "What If Captain America Were Not Revived Until Today?" from April of 1984), where some superheroes fully joined the government acting as its licensed enforcers. How that story was greenlit is a mystery, since his adventures--both in the Timely comics, the retconned 1960s WW2 stories and the aforementioned Madame Hydra fight had him killing. The only period where he was not openly taking life was in various stories written shortly after his revival in '64, but again, that changed depending on who he had to kill.
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Post by zaku on Aug 20, 2022 13:51:04 GMT -5
The expected outcome would have society living under a system where they would end up with limited rights and harsh punishment, all in the name of control and "freedom" probably leading to the kind of superhero factions / revolt seen in What if? #44 ( "What If Captain America Were Not Revived Until Today?" from April of 1984), where some superheroes fully joined the government acting as its licensed enforcers. But even without going to the extremes of a fascist government, they would probably vote for someone who promises not to put serial killers in an asylum with revolving doors!!! I think that even the most liberal person in the world would say enough after yet another massacre of the Joker.!!
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Post by Dizzy D on Aug 21, 2022 2:42:18 GMT -5
Lots of things to answer to here, so I'm not gonna use quotes. But thoughts on various things stated so far:
- Death and guilt will hit many people differently, so Mockingbird feeling guilt over not preventing the death of Night Rider, rings true to me and addressing it with a "he was bad, so she shouldn't feel bad" missing a lot of nuance in itself.
- Captain America picking Wolverine for the Avengers, so the Avengers would have somebody who was willing to kill also ignores the backstory of a lot of Avengers. Thor and Hercules have body-counts that dwarf Wolverine's (all those giants and trolls sure seem sentient, sapient beings to me). Black Widow, a professional assassin, would not bat an eye to shoot somebody she thinks deserves it. Avengers don't kill, except when they do and they do it a lot.
- I have no problem with certain superheroes refusing to kill at all. Some people just don't have it in them to kill and that's fine. More than fine even.
- Once it becomes whether it's realistic or believable that somebody like the Joker would not have been killed by now. Comic books worlds resemblance to the real world will always be a thin veneer; no law system is ever prepared for the crazy things that go on in comics and you get weird things like Slott's She-Hulk (which I liked up to a point until Slott decided to try to tackle some serious issues and fell flat on his face) where they were still working with the legal system as it exists in the US. How does a legal system account for shapeshifters, time-travel, dimensional travel, clones, mind-control, demonic possession and various other forms of magic and superpowers? Chris Claremont getting Magneto off the hook for his crimes during the pre-Claremont X-Men issues because " the rejuvenated Magneto was not old enough to have committed those crimes" which was just accepted by the judge without any question in a world where Captain America, Namor and Thor were running around in public, was another of those misguided attempts to selectively apply realism that fall apart on even the least critical inspection.
- Whether this would result in everybody just simply supporting the death penalty with no question also seems highly suspect, especially in a world where death seems to be a resolving door and the worst of the worst death just means returning with demonic powers in a few months. At least in prison you're keeping an eye on them. Also the judicial system should be focused on rehabilitation and not punishment (but that's my personal opinion).
- Speaking of the Joker, as unbelievable as all his escapes have been, I find it even more unbelievable that any henchman would still be working for him. Henchman no58 who gets a shopping list from the Joker that contains 100 gallons of bleach and vinegar would nope out after knowing what happened before the last 57 times.
So all in all, the Mystery Science 3000 mantra applies: Don't think too much about these things as everything falls apart immediately.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,051
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Post by Confessor on Aug 21, 2022 4:40:45 GMT -5
On a side note, you have to remember that the whole "superheroes never killing" thing was the product of a different time and a more deeply religious society than we have today. With "Thou Shall Not Kill" being one of the 10 Commandments -- which are obviously the basic tenets of Judaism and Christianity -- there was no way that any good Christian or Jewish comic writer in the '40s, '50s or '60s was going to write a superhero character aimed at kids who was also a killer. Especially after the introduction of the Comics Code Authority.
Breaking one of the 10 Commandments was not something good people did. Everybody writing comics in the early-to-mid 20th Century would've been raised in a society that believed this and had learnt it from family and the church growing up. Only the bad guys murder people. Not good guys.
And you see this same "the hero never kills" trope in old Westerns too. That's why you get such ridiculous things as having a cowboy hero shooting a pistol out of the bad guy's hand in order to capture him. It was deemed important and morally right for the hero to capture the bad guys without bloodshed. Same thing goes for superheroes in comics.
The character parameters and moral codes of the likes of Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man etc were created half a century or more ago and have essentially remained unchanged as they were carried forward into our modern era. However, since the mid-20th Century, we have become a more secular society on the whole and, as a result, we have seen the rise of the anti-hero in films, books, comics etc. We now regularly see characters who will kill the bad guys if the situation warrants it. That's why the default "heroes don't kill" position seems more obviously unrealistic to us today than it would've in, say, the 1950s.
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Post by SJNeal on Aug 21, 2022 13:45:26 GMT -5
For me, nuance lies in the situation.
For instance - I was perfectly ok with Mockingbirds actions (still am), but had this been Wonder Woman I don't think I would be. And yet I was ok with WW solution to the Max Lord situation in Infinite Crisis. It depends on the threat level and the stakes.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 21, 2022 14:01:22 GMT -5
On a side note, you have to remember that the whole "superheroes never killing" thing was the product of a different time and a more deeply religious society than we have today. With "Thou Shall Not Kill" being one of the 10 Commandments -- which are obviously the basic tenants of Judaism and Christianity -- there was no way that any good Christian or Jewish comic writer in the '40s, '50s or '60s was going to write a superhero character aimed at kids who was also a killer. Especially after the introduction of the Comics Code Authority. Breaking one of the 10 Commandments was not something good people did. Everybody writing comics in the early-to-mid 20th Century would've been raised in a society that believed this and had learnt it from family and the church growing up. Only the bad guys murder people. Not good guys. And you see this same "the hero never kills" trope in old Westerns too. That's why you get such ridiculous things as having a cowboy hero shooting a pistol out of the bad guy's hand in order to capture him. It was deemed important and morally right for the hero to capture the bad guys without bloodshed. Same thing goes for superheroes in comics. The character parameters and moral codes of the likes of Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man etc were created half a century or more ago and have essentially remained unchanged as they were carried forward into our modern era. However, since the mid-20th Century, we have become a more secular society on the whole and, as a result, we have seen the rise of the anti-hero in films, books, comics etc. We now regularly see characters who will kill the bad guys if the situation warrants it. That's why the default "heroes don't kill" position seems more obviously unrealistic to us today than it would've in, say, the 1950s. You also have to look at the fact that the two highlighted characters have gone through some significantly different permutations. The earliest Batman was directly influenced by the heroic pulps (The Shadow in particular) and didn't really have any compunctions about killing. It's been a LONG time since I've read the earliest issues of Captain America Comics, but the idea that a soldier in World War II would have issues with killing the enemy is pretty silly. Yes, there were conscientious objectors, but Steve Rogers was not one of them. The moral codes were developed for various reasons, mostly owing to pressure from outside sources.
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Post by badwolf on Aug 21, 2022 18:02:13 GMT -5
In comics, of course, characters often return from death anyway. Which is a big headache for the life insurance actuaries. And you could be serving out a murder sentence, but the victim gets better. I don't think you should be able to appeal based on your victim resurrecting. Reduced to pain & suffering, perhaps.
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Post by impulse on Aug 22, 2022 11:11:14 GMT -5
Yeah, Batman letting the Joker continue his rampage is ludicrous on one level. But outside of protecting someone when the Joker is in the act of harming them, what right does Batman have to take a life? He is not a law officer, he has no more right to kill someone because they are "bad" than I do. Same goes for almost every hero. The Punisher is rightfully a criminal al for what he does. To play devil's advocate, some states have very loose castle doctrine/self defense laws where a citizen is authorized to use deadly force to defend themselves from mortal harm, or, if they placed themselves in someone else's shoes and would feel the same, would still be justified to use deadly force to defend the other person as if it were themselves. In that case, if there a similar law in Gotham Batman could technically rely on that defense when the Joker is on a spree. Yeah, Batman letting the Joker continue his rampage is ludicrous on one level. But outside of protecting someone when the Joker is in the act of harming them, what right does Batman have to take a life? He is not a law officer, he has no more right to kill someone because they are "bad" than I do. Same goes for almost every hero. The Punisher is rightfully a criminal al for what he does. In that case, and I know comics have to have different rules, it makes no sense for the Joker not to have been given a lethal injection. This is basically the crux of all of it. Superhero comics all but necessarily make no sense if you try to apply a real-world interpretation and you have to just kind of go with it if you want to enjoy them.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 22, 2022 11:18:26 GMT -5
I agree with that last sentence, impulse. And I try do to that, pedantry aside. In my life, I have occasionally had thoughts about how there’s no way superheroes could possibly have the number of adventures they have had in one lifetime. Yes, I get that comicbook time and real time are different - and that a year’s worth of Spidey adventures from our perspective might equate to only 2-3 months from Spidey’s perspective. But he has still had a LOT of adventures. A few years ago, I read that there had been something like 17,000 Spidey stories (or was it 14,000). If we divide 14,000 by 365, which is of course the number of days in a year, then, give or take, Spidey has been having adventures for 38 years. Goodness knows what the score is for Superman and Batman. Superheroes would have to be having adventures daily. But I get that those are the rules, and you don’t think too hard about them. A little different from what we’re discussing, of course.
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Post by impulse on Aug 22, 2022 11:33:48 GMT -5
driver1980, Not to discourage discussions like this because they are interesting! Here's my little made-up-on-the-spot attempt to win a no-prize. You know how there is theoretically an infinite number of alternate universes, some with major differences from our own and others with just a few? Maybe some of these comics show adventures from some of the alternates that are virtually identical to ours with the exception that Spider-Man fought a different goon on a different day in versus another. There we go! DC gets around it by just rebooting the continuity every so often.
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Post by Ozymandias on Aug 22, 2022 14:05:51 GMT -5
It seems to be about extremes with nothing in between. We either get Scenario A (“I will not kill, and I will not even let a character die by inaction”) or Scenario B (“I took out an enemy combatant/terrorist, and now I can’t look in the mirror”). Where’s something in between, with a little more nuance? You have nuance right there: "B" is very close to "A". The other extreme would be one of those guys in the 90's, who'd just off you for looking at them funny.
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