No. He had files on how to disable each of them. Batman doesn’t kill.
Not directly. One could argue that he is responsible for deaths of most of the Joker’s victims, though, because of his refusal to kill him.
Hmmm…could you lay (warning! OMACS Project/Infinite Crisis spoiler!)Wonder Woman’s killing of Max Lord at Batman’s feet, since it’s unlikely that any of it would have happened without Brother Eye
I don’t give Batman the benefit of the doubt there. I don’t see how his plans can include “Making Aquaman afraid of water” and “Use fire-producing nanobots on Martian Manhunter” and then claim that they weren’t lethal.
I lay that and a shitload of other deaths at his feet. IMHO, if you look at it from any sort of objective point of view, Batman is one of the biggest VILLAINS in the DC universe.
I was about to post the same thing, and might add that the "freeze Plastic Man and then shatter him’ bit was also more likely to kill than not. Admittedly, Ra’s might not have bothered with Batman’s plans for Plas, as that’s a fairly obvious way of handling him.
The red kryptonite he created for use on Superman was, I’ll admit, clearly intended not to be lethal. But given that he could just as easily set up red-sun projectors, it seems that Bruce’s plans were as sadistic as they were anything else.
Which makes it all the more hypocritical that he was one of the ones to give her a hard time on it. You created the situation in the first place, Bruce!
I used to really love Batman. Now I really hate him – at least the comic book version. I don’t understand how he has any allies as he’s currently characterized, and he makes any book he appears in painful to read. I recall, some months back, when he impressed Firestorm into the Justice League, and I was dying for 'Storm to just turn him into a turnip or something.
He’s a civillian who captures criminals and hands them to the police on a silver platter, and you’re faulting him for not being the executioner, too?
I’ve felt this way for years now. I guess some readers must really like it for them to have run with it so long, but I started seeing Batman as a supervillain who happens to be friends with Superman pretty much right after the “protocols” thing, and his behavior since then didn’t give me any reason to revise that opinion.
The problem with Batman (well, one of them) is that at no point can he be written to accept a situation where a hero kills a villain, because there will certainly have been a point in the past where that same acceptable reasoning applied to the Joker or someone else. Even as in the case above, where Max Lord himself said “Unless you kill me, i’ll just take control of Superman again. Killing me is the only way that will stop that”, Batman can’t be written to have any kind of acceptance at all, which necessitates that he’s going to be a vast idiot every now and again.
I disagree. On the one hand he could have a simple epiphany; on the other hand they do reboots all the damn time. In one of these reboots they could simply have him back off from his utterly unreasonable stance. It’s entirely stupid for him to be as violent as he is and to refuse to recognize that killing is sometimes necessary.
I can see where, on a practical level, Batman would be very chary of killing. He’s much more of a vigilanted than Superman is, and he needs to give Gordon wiggle room for not arresting him. But to say that no super-hero should ever kill in battle is just stupid, not least because it implies that he thinks that any soldier or cop who kills in the line of duty is no better than the the criminals he fights. He may just be crazy enough to think that, but it’s not appealing.
The really ridiculous part is the tightrope they’ve had Batman walking the last couple of decades (post-Silver Age). Ever since about the mid-80s, they’ve been making Batman into this dark, obsessed, violent vigilante (“they” being the editors at DC and certain writers (Miller, I’m lookin’ at you)), but at the same time they feel that they need to keep him firmly on the side of the angels. Even in the apocryphal “Kingdom Come” Batman was a no-kill anti-hero, even though he practically had all of Gotham City under direct surveillance and law enforcement by robot proxies.
Batman never kills? What about the time he bricked the KGBeast up behind a wall? What did he suppose would happen?*
*Although as it turned out, that wasn’t the end of him- no thanks to Batman however.
Retconned. From Wikipedia:
Which, of course, completely destroys the reasoning for locking him in that room in the first place, but there ya go.
Now, see, I’d go the other way with Batman. A Batman who kills isn’t a character who I would ever read or support.
What I’d really like to see is a return to a Batman who’s more of a lighthearted adventurer and detective who one wouldn’t expect to be a murderer at all, and who actually likes and respects his friends in the Justice League rather than sitting around thinking of ways to kill them.
That’s basically what they’re doing in the new Batman: Brave and the Bold cartoon, and it’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s difficult to ascribe a psychological motive to a fictional character whose had dozens of different writers but I think Batman’s main motive is fighting death not crime. He was traumatized by his parents’ deaths and we wants to prevent anything like that from ever happening again. It just happens that his parents were killed by a criminal so he targets crime. If his parents had died of a heart attack, he’d have become a doctor. If they had died in a car accident, he’d have become Ralph Nader.
At some point, he has to see that the Joker keeps escaping from jail and killing thousands of people. At some point, that becomes his responsibility.
This is actually dealt with directly in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. Batman even says something about “all the people I’ve murdered by letting [Joker] live.” As a result, Batman decides he has no choice but to break his personal code by killing the Joker. And he *almost *does it.
Regarding the “no killing” code in general, I always thought it was just a personal decision he made for himself rather than an all-encompassing belief that killing was never justified by anyone at any time. Batman knows he’s technically a criminal, and his no-killing code is his way of keeping himself from crossing the fine line between “masked hero” and “psycho vigilante.” Nevertheless, as many of the comics (like DKR) demonstrate, some in Gotham don’t buy this excuse.
There was a story a few years back—somewhere around the plague/earthquake stuff (or was it later, in the much missed Gotham Central) where some cops were griping that the biggest problem with Batman is he didn’t let THEM use lethal force either. There was a story with, say, Joker. A cop had him in his sights and was going to shoot the Joker from behind. Batman batarangs the gun out of the cop’s hand. The cop ( rightly) bitched that it’s easy for Bats, who doesn’t have to worry about due-process, miranda rights, police brutality charges, civilian review boards and such to take a “no guns” position, but cops don’t have that luxury.
There was another bit where Jason Todd (post-Reality Punch) has set up a Mexican stand-off with the Joker: Batman can shoot Jason or Joker or do nothing in which case, Joker gets killed. Bats chooses to shoot Jason rather than actually let Jason deal with the situation.
The “no killing” rule is fine, if you’re dealing with '60s and even early '70s Batman villians who kill only rarely, if ever. But once you’re dealing with guys who have a 3 or 4 digit body count (Amygdala, Zzazz, Joker, maybe Two-Face, certainly KGBeast), it stops making sense. Killing is the last resort? Fine. No killing even to save civilian lives? No.