Well, you’re not seeing him at his best. And I’m not sure he had any say in what they did with The Joker.
They DID emphasize Batman’s detective skills in a bunch of stories from the 1950s.
Shoot, in the present unreality, Oranganus, the candidate, didn’t get his face makeup removed, nor made shoeless (and liftless), stood in front of height background, and get the smirk slapped off his face in Atlanta.
Lobo, the Vigilante, Jason Todd/Red Hood, and a few others are all in the DC universe- so just have one of them terminate with extreme prejudice.
This is a major plot point in Kingdom Come. Without spoiling, new superheroes emerge who are much more violent and willing to kill. This makes thing much much worse.
Sure, if it gets out of hand. But killing the Joker- at least the later mass murderer Joker- is a solid idea.
Not one Gotham City police officer has ever given in to the temptation to shoot the Joker in the back of the head and make up some b.s. story? I think the Joker’s continued existence is itself the sickest joke he’s ever pulled off.
Maybe. But the definition of “out of hand” will vary from person to person. So will ideas on how to keep things from getting out of hand. If it is good idea for a superhero to kill the Joker. who else should they kill? What stops them from killing people who should be allowed to live?
Well, In the real world, there is such a thing as capital punishment.
Yeah, there is. Many people and quite a few governments think capital punishment is already going too far. Besides which, the Joker is repeadtedly found not guilty by reason of insanity and shipped off to Arkham.
Maybe if Batman would stop persecuting the mentally ill and violating their civil rights, people like The Joker would feel more inclined to seek the professional help they need and be less motivated to commit anti-social acts. The real crime in Gotham is vigilantism and its made worse by police collusion, allowing free rein to a rich, emotionally damaged maniac to cavort about at night in fetish gear and harass ordinary decent citizens. Putting an end to Batman’s fascist oppression (and the Wayne crime family) is the easy solution to the problems of law enforcement in Gotham City.
Yes I think on the issue of “Why don’t they just shoot him?” the bond films and similar action movies are the clearest examples.
For me, I completely check out of a movie any time that:
- The bad guys behave like they know the hero can’t die, by setting up unnecessary, elaborate steps before they can kill him/her
- The hero behaves like they know they can’t die. e.g by voluntarily walking into an environment where anyone can, and should, shoot them in the back, but it’s all part of the plan and not a suicide mission
I’m not saying all fiction needs to be of the “everyone can die” variety, but writers have to do better than plot armor.
Perhaps the best example was the time someone sensibly tried to snipe Batman from a distance dead-center to the chest:
Batman then shows the small but dense armor plate his bat-symbol is made of and remarks “Why do you think I go around with a target on my chest?”
Which is why I don’t blame Batman for not killing the Joker. It’s not his job. He’s really pushing things just by being a vigilante even without escalating to being a freelance executioner.
The ones at blame in the setting is the government that neither manages to keep Joker imprisoned - someone who doesn’t even have superpowers to complicate the task - nor kills him when it can’t otherwise stop him.
There’s a real life example of this but in the bad way.
During WW2 American tanks and vehicles had a big bright American star on the direct middle of the sides to help friendly recognition.
They had to stop doing this because they found enemy anti-tank gunners would aim at that star as an aiming guide, and only realized this when they found destroyed American vehicles with a bullseye right in the middle of that star.
Why is it always, “Batman should kill the Joker,” and never, “Superman should kill Lex Luthor,” or “Spider-Man should kill Doc Ock.” There’s a lot of heroes who don’t kill, but for some reason, Batman’s the one who constantly catches shit for it.
It’s easy to forget, I think, that while comics about Batman fighting the Joker have been around for ~80 years, in any given Batman comic book, it’s always been ~5-7 years since Bruce Wayne took up crime fighting. It’s not physically possible for every story over that near-century of publication to fit into a time frame that’s about half a decade wide.
I figure that, in any given “contemporary” Batman story (one that’s not set in “Year One” or in the future) the Joker has attempted about three major supervillain schemes prior to the current story. Which three can change depending on the needs of the current story, so everything’s still technically “in canon,” just not all at the same time.
Because some recent Batman films have shown the Joker as a sociopath wanting to commit mass murder. Lex usually just wants to be president or Emperor. Mind you sure, both Doc Ock and Lex have been also shown to be villians wanting to kill mass numbers also, but those Batman films are recent and popular. And most people know the films, and I have to admit with the DC universe getting tangled up with “alternates” all the time, it is hard for the reader to keep track- Hell, there were also Superman versions who were villains.
Given that Nightwing is canonically a former Robin, I take Batman to have been in operation about fifteen years. I’d say he’s about forty but physically much younger thanks to one or more rejuvenations he lucked into. He’s very much a senior hero given that he’s seen newer heroes and villains crop up in his tenure.
Hey, I just wanted the cops to wash his face and take some usable photos of the guy they arrested for tearing up Lower Wacker Drive.
Recently it’s been a meme that Superman really, really doesn’t like the Joker, and in fact Superman is much closer than Batman to losing it where the Joker is concerned.
There are other options. Batman could ask Green Lantern to stick him in a sciencell. And if he escapes from there, put him in the phantom zone.