Daredevil vs. Punisher (No Spoilers!)

Cafe Society
1

So I watched the new Daredevil. It’s quite good so far. Predictably, there is a lot of debate between Matt and Frank over the ethics of violence and killing of criminals. This debate has already been covered at length in their various comics, and others, so I don’t mean to reproduce the entire thing here.

The point I wanted to raise is this: Daredevil’s side of the argument hinges on claiming the moral high ground in that he doesn’t kill his enemies. This is a pretty common point for most comic characters, although it has been progressively relaxed since the CCA’s influence has faded.

I don’t find it realistic or convincing. Characters like Daredevil and Batman repeatedly deal out violence that would be lethal in real life. It is impossible to conceive that out of all the criminals that get punched and knocked down, not a single one of them suffers a subdural hematoma or a broken neck. In the same episode that Matt preaches the virtues of his nonlethal methods, he gets in fights that, in real life, would leave a half-dozen people with life-threatening injuries.

And the funny thing is that these shows are not oblivious to this fact. I get that comic books exist in this sort of Hollywood medicine world where people are made of rubber and there’s no real difference between a concussion and an afternoon nap. And yet there was an episode of Jessica Jones where a traumatic brain injury was a pretty significant plot point.

So the point of my argument is this: By all logic, even a superhero that limits himself to punching bad guys would still result in a surgical ward full of quadriplegics, brain-damaged vegetables, and unintentional corpses. And if we were allowed to see the results of this, we would see that the real difference between Matt and Frank is nonexistent.

2

I don’t doubt that many of DD’s opponents end up seriously injured. And perhaps some die. But he doesn’t *try *to kill them. That’s a pretty big difference. If you beat a criminal to stop a robbery, and he dies because he had a dodgy heart, that’s morally not the equivalent of shooting them in the face, IMHO.

3

There’s a middle ground here, which is disturbing in the same way that Chihuahua’s objection is, but at a lower level: Daredevil’s beatings would lead to permanent low-level physical trauma. Permanent TMJ pain; loss of teeth; loss of cervical mobility; permanent shoulder pain after dislocation.

Yes, some of his beat-downs would actually be fatal. But far more of them leave permanent damage.

Now, comic books traditionally overlook both of these. In the comics, people are just punching bags, and when the punching is over, they might have a few bruises, but otherwise, give 'em a week to heal, and they’re fine. It’s as if nothing ever happened.

Given that world-building premise – then Lobohan’s response is stronger. Daredevil isn’t trying to kill, but the Punisher damn well is. That makes a huge different in the perceived morality.

On the other hand…sometimes not killing is very hard to justify. Every time, at least every time after, say, the tenth time, that Batman put Joker in the asylum, only to watch the Joker escape again and kill several people, Batman’s excuses for not killing the Joker seem very hard to admire.

In anything like “real life,” Gotham City, and the state, and quite possibly the Federal Government, would have passed “Joker Laws” long ago, where someone who has [killed, been locked up, escaped, killed again] repeated more than ten times, is subject to a fast-track death penalty.

If someone like The Punisher is possible, the Joker is already dead.

(Of course the fault is in ourselves, we the readers, because if the writers actually did this, comic book sales would decline!)

(“Pum! Justice is Served” only applies to lame-o ninth-string weak and dorky villains.)

4

A standard thing in almost all action-themed fiction is the idea that humans can take a much more severe beating than they can in real life, and still function. Not just superheroes, here: John McClane running barefoot through broken glass should have been crippled for life - or at least needed months of physical therapy before he could walk again. In Die Hard, he’s slowed down for, like, half a scene. Even further back than that, Sam Spade was regularly getting cracked over the head and knocked unconscious, and would still revive in no worse a state than, “Kind of groggy.” After three or four books of that, he should have been having trouble remembering when his birthday was.

Comics, which ultimately are an outgrowth of the same pulp fiction serials that gave us noir detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, operate under these same basic principles. Batman is, explicitly, a human with no super powers. But he routinely shakes off physical beatings that should have put him in the hospital, if not a wheelchair. And he’s got a rouges gallery of similarly resistant villains. Humans in comic book universes are simply tougher than real humans.

Of course, every now and then you get a story that requires someone to be physically incapacitated for some span of time. There was an X-Men comic in the '80s, where Professor X is ambushed by some anti-mutant bigots, and he takes a blow to the head that nearly kills him. He’s healed by this other mutant, but he suffers a sort of brain damage that gradually kills him the more he uses his telepathy. But you look at other comics, where “Professor X has traumatic brain injury” isn’t a significant plot point, and you regularly see people taking blows to the head with no more consequence than being out of action for a short period.

Ultimately, you have to accept this as part of the fiction. Yeah, sure, given the number and severity of the beatings he hands out, realistically, Daredevil must have killed at least a couple of guys. But we’re also explicitly told that Daredevil has never taken a life. So, that has to just become another part of your suspension of disbelief. If you can swallow that a kid can get hit in the face toxic waste, and get superpowers out of it, you’ll also have to accept that he can beat five guys unconscious in a brutal, bare-knuckle fight, and all of them are basically okay a few days later.

5

Someday, I want to write a comic about a dentist who specializes in superheroes. Think how many comic panels there are of someone getting punched in the face, and a tooth is visibly flying out of their mouth, and contrast that with how few recurring superhero characters have mouths like an Appalachian meth addict. Somebody out there is making bank fixing Bullseye’s teeth for him.

That’s really more of a problem with the sliding time scale that comics use, rather than their depiction of violence. Batman’s been in continuous publication since 1939, but officially, he’s only been a superhero for “about five years.” Even all the stories that are still officially in continuity, can’t really all be in continuity, because there’s just not enough time for him to have done all that.

So, my fanwank is, while there’s a hundred stories out there about the Joker escaping from Arkham, in any given Batman comic you read right now, the Joker has only ever broken out of Arkham maybe three times, tops. Which three of his hundred escapes “count” for that particular story doesn’t really matter - it’s just enough to establish that he’s hard to keep locked up, but not so many that it justifies summary execution.

6

Grin! Excellent point. We’re getting hyper-compressed/hyper-extended dramatization of events. In the same way, Jessica Fletcher didn’t really solve 260 murders, and Columbo didn’t really solve 65 murders. And the starship Enterprise didn’t have a garish, eerie, dramatic brush with death once a week for three years.

So… Okay. I will (grumbling) have to give that one.

Although it is vaguely amusing, in the Marvel continuity, that people living in New York have become a bit blasé about, “Oh, yawn, another alien invasion.”

7

The OPs argument seems to go that:

If people fought cinematically-beautiful hand-to-hand combat all of the time.

Then someone would get seriously hurt.

But I feel like this argument for realism is bypassing and letting slide a similarly grievous point (which my above phrasing may have pointed out).

In reality, people wouldn’t fight like they do in comics. There is no need for martial arts masters to patrol the streets and enter into all-out hand-to-hand duels on a regular, daily basis. Most crimes/criminals don’t call for it, nor do most fights play out like that - particularly not in the modern world, where people have guns and knives.

Fundamentally, what is Daredevil even trying to accomplish? If he doesn’t want to kill criminals, then presumably he wants to put them in jail. How does beating up a criminal put them in jail? Police have these devices of conveyance that they can use to carry the criminals to jail. Police also have these devices of restraining, that they can use to encumber criminals so that they don’t have to be comatose to be safely around. Where’s Daredevil’s police cruiser and handcuffs?

Fighting criminals doesn’t accomplish anything. A real vigilante would, then, seemingly want to use illicit means to collect information on bad guys. Actual video and recordings probably couldn’t be used in court. If he knocks some guys out and puts a bunch of video and tape recordings of the crime sitting next to them, I doubt that most of the evidence would be accepted in court. So really the best a vigilante could do would, if he really wanted to stop crime, would be to send in tips to police for where to find evidence, if the criminals ever did anything that could be seen in plain view or ascertained in a simple stop and question.

Any vigilante who isn’t doing that, who is wandering around without a car, without handcuffs, and without a warrant, you really have to assume has no genuine desire to put criminals in jail. He really just wants to beat on people.

If you want to prevent criminals from committing crime, simply going and beating on them may or may not work, but if that’s your goal, you’re not going to be trying to knock them out - like we see in the comics - you’re either going to try and restrain them, so you can torture them, or you’re just trying to lay a good ol’ fashion country justice beatdown on them. And then the goal wouldn’t be to knock them out, it would be to find ways to keep hitting them so that it hurt a bunch but wasn’t likely to kill them.

I suspect that most people who gave good ol’ fashion country justice beatdowns didn’t care too much about whether the victim survived. It may well have caused a lot of quadriplegics and deaths, but presumably that wasn’t the goal and most of the punches would have been targeted to keep the person in good health.

But it also wouldn’t look like a cool, cinematic hand-to-hand duel. It’d just look like a big, really accomplished fighter laying a beatdown on people who can’t properly defend themselves. I don’t think you’d enjoy watching that sort of thing on TV but, by process of elimination, that’s the closest possibility for what most superheroes (like Daredevil) are trying to do. Try filming a superhero who works like that, and I think you’ll lose your viewership pretty quick.

8

Dude, the rest of us would just have to live with the humiliation of a typo like this. You’re a mod, you have superpowers. Use them for good!

9

This reminds me of a discussion borne out of an X-Men story where most of the team has been captured, and Storm, Wolverine and Nightcrawler have to sneak into a fortress/city to free them. There’s a guard outside the only entrance they find; Wolverine says “I got this,” and the next panel just shows a reaction shot of Nightcrawler and Storm with the “SNIKT” sound effect. The panel after that just shows Wolvie shoving the body out of sight while the other two try not to look at it.

“Wolverine murdered that guard!” came the outcry. “And…?” came the reply. “The other X-Men have been captured, are about to executed, and the three don’t know where they are or how long it’s going to take to find them. They can’t just tie up and gag the guard - they don’t have a rope or a gag, and even if they did, he might get lose. Deal with it. And besides, what do you think Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos were shooting at all those Nazis - rubber bullets?”

Wolverine later justifies his outlook in a great speech relating to his background as a soldier and cover operative. “If a man comes at me with fists, I’ll meet him with fists. But if he pulls a gun - or if he threatens people I’m protecting - then he’s crossed the line.”

10

Of course, Wolverine is invincible, so he can use that sort of discretion. Others might not be.

11

Yes, as time goes on, I find it harder and harder to suspend disbelief of the idea that people can keep punching people and leaving them incapacitated for unspecified amounts of time without serious consequences.

12

Someone once told me that action movies were a genre a lot like musicals, except that instead of periodically breaking out into unrealistic, highly-choreographed song-and-dance numbers that advance the plot, they periodically break out into unrealistic, highly-choreographed shoot-and-punch numbers that advance the plot.

In a musical, nobody would be able to sing in unison without rehearsing, and everyone would be astonished to see random schmucks join in a chorus line, and there’d be no music. We (okay, musical fans) accept all that unrealism as the price of admission.

Action fans have our own stuff to accept. If you can’t accept the Rule of Plot-Based-Injury (that is, a wound only incapacitates you if it’s a plot point), you’re no more going to be able to enjoy an action film than you’d be able to enjoy a musical if you won’t accept the idea of spontaneously breaking into a song with partners who also know the words.

13

That always bugged me about Wolverine, and characters who fight with a sword. They’re obviously slashing their foes in ways that would be deadly, but the effect is they’re just thrown backwards and knocked unconscious like they got hit with a stick. If they were just hitting people with the flat of their blade, it would look different and really, why would you even bother with a sword if you’re just going to hit people? Archers too. They’re constantly shooting people with arrows but the arrows only stick an inch in and aren’t deadly.

14

Well, it is a comic.

15

I can’t ever go back to the time when I automatically accepted brutal violence in stories as non-lethal or even non-permanently-maiming. I have to actively willingly suspend disbelief again every time now. Sometimes, like with Die Hard 4, I just don’t even bother trying to believe this shit but what the hell?

The number of high-stakes events in the lives of these characters now boggles my mind. How can Columbo solve so many murders, much less so many celebrity murders, and nobody’s ever heard of him? Well, better shove that aside and just enjoy the show. I also have to actively push away concerns about the amount of PTSD people would be dealing with from just one or two of the kinds of deadly encounters we take for granted in adventure stories. Holy shit, these people should be emotionally crippled. You don’t just shrug that shit off and everything’s back to normal.

Yeah, willing suspension of disbelief is great stuff. It makes the magic happen. But for me it gets to be a taller and taller order every year.

16

Outside of the Silver Age and early Bronze Age comics, that’s never really been a problem. Wolverine’s been plenty stabby since the beginning. This is from X-Men #96, the second issue with Wolverine on the team. They were careful about what they showed on panel in the beginning - Comics Code was still around, and all that, but by the eighties, Wolverine was just a straight-up murder machine. And not just Wolverine. Do a search for “Marvel Comics impaled,” and there’s tons of people with swords being jammed through their torsos. (And tying things back to the topic of the thread, nearly all of them are still alive.)

The television cartoons were a different matter, and Wolverine’s usually been hilariously nerfed in those. “I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do is waving my claws around vaguely before I pick you up and throw you at a wall.”

17

Like the Fabulous Sun sword that can turn steel into slag, but against humans just sort of knocks them around. Hey, that planet was supposed to pass between the Earth and the Moon in 1994. I’m seriously beginning to question that cartoon’s credibility.