Yes, if they have other, equally valid options and still chose to shoot people just because it’s easier.
With Superman’s powers and Batman’s skills, they should never need to kill. The equivilant would be a cop shooting a little old lady who’s using a walker and is jay-walking.
Fenris
(courtesy of Brunching Shuttlecocks) Why doesn’t Lex Luthor use his smarts to develop minoxodil (or his money for a hair transplant)?
Brian
Although the second reason didn’t come into play until after his injuries at the hands of the Reavers, before which he could repeatedly teleport without ill effects (and over long years of conditioning (in Excalibur) he improved his endurance, and I seem to recall that it was fixed at some point but I don’t remember how), and he refrained from using his powers lethally just because he’s a good guy (and deeply religious). A better tactic than 'porting high up in the air with his opponent would be to simply grab their head in both hands and 'port several yards away, a variation on which tactic was used to good effect by the Nightcrawler of the Age of Apocalypse.
Additionally, teleporting vertically (both up and down) was always more taxing on him, which was explained as being due to teleportation perpendicular to the magnetic force lines (or something) being more difficult. Which is also why his max range for teleporting due north or south is farther than for long-range diagonal 'ports.
Geek much? 
The very first Bizarro appearance was “The Battle With Bizarro”, Superboy #68 (1958). Smallville resident Professor Dalton creates a “duplicator ray”, which turns out to produce imperfect duplicates. Superboy is accidentally exposed and Bizarro (with the distinctive white angular complexion and mangled grammar, though with a normally-aligned chest “S”) is created. At one point, Superboy finds his duplicate lying motionless and finds he has “No pulse! And my x-ray vision shows his lungs aren’t breathing any air!” It turns out Bizarro was only sleeping and it’s natural for him not to breathe or have a pulse.
This Bizarro is killed by Superboy in an explosion, which miraculously restores vision to a blind girl whom Bizarro has met. This premise was copied for Bizarro’s first post-Crisis appearance, when his destruction restores the eyesight of Lucy Lane, Lois’s sister.
Why didn’t Superman just take all the world’s nuclear weapons, bundle them up in a big cargo net, and throw them at the sun?
I’d always thought Nightcrawler had some kind of demonic ancestry and his teleportation was actually his opening a rift to Hell (or whatever mythological equivalent) as a sort of short cut (similar to the spell Dimension Door for all you D&D’ers), and then re-entering our plane wherever he wanted.
It always irked me that beings with the ability to control energy rarely seemed to come up with anything more creative than shooting energy blasts or forming a cage.
And the psionicists. Apparently in the comic world telepathy is only used to read minds and save money on cell phones.
As an aside, this issue is harder than hell to find at a reasonable price (reasonable=“one I’m willing to pay”) It’s one of the few key Silver-age issues I’m missing.
And the later wacky Bizarros were created by Luthor attempting to duplicate the ray that he remembered from his youth in Smallville.
Fenris
Not in some situations. There have been several stories where Batman and Superman have refrained from killing due to their ethics and it has turned out to cost innocent people their lives.
You mean he made a perfect copy of an imperfect duplicator?
Wow, cosmic.
Lumpy:
This notion was winked at in the latest issue of Tom Strong:
Paul Saveen: I’ve just discovered liquid phlogiston! If we threatened to burn down the city with it, they’d pay us thousands!
Tom Stone: Maybe. But if you offered it to the city as a cheap heating source, they’d pay you millions.
Art Vandelay, Architect:
It might also help their cause if they didn’t refer to themselves as H. superior. That’s always bugged me: “We believe we’re better than you; why do you hate us?”
For the matter, why did Magneto refer to his first group as “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?” Evil? Huh? I guess you skipped your classes in Marketing 101, Magnus.
Because the risk that Hollywood might be inspired to make a really bad movie with that premise is just too great.
Regarding mutant powers as employment opportunity: Dazzler used her powers to turn sound into light effects to create light shows at her concerts. Guido/Strong Guy used his super strength as a personal bodyguard. And Random was a mercenary. Havok once dispatched him in mid-battle by writing a check.
Regarding Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: IIRC, some member of a more recent BoEM incarnation (that included the throwaways Thornn and Phantazia) explained that they chose to keep the “Evil” part as kind of a statement. Not that they’re truly evil but that they were given that stigma by society blah blah blah.
So are his eyes solar cells, or “inter-dimensional apertures”?
In reference to the OP:
Why don’t they just show some degree of consistency in the comic books?
The following was taken from the “Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe” (circa 1984) concerning just what Cyclops’ eye beams are:
*Known superhuman powers: Cyclops possesses the mutant ability to project a beam of concussive, ruby-colored force from his eyes. Cyclops’s eyes are no longer the complex organic jelly that utilizes the visible spectrum of light to see the world around it. Instead, they are inter-dimensional apertures between this universe and another, non-Einsteinium universe, where physical laws as we know them do not pertain. This non-Einsteinium universe is filled with particles that resemble photons, yet they interact with this universe’s particles by transferring kinetic energy in the form of gravitons (the particle of gravitation). These particles generate great, directional concussive force when they interact with the objects of this universe.
Cyclops’s mind has a particular psionic field that is attuned to the forces that maintain the apertures that have taken the place of his eyes. Because his mind’s psionic field envelops his body, it automatically shunts the other-dimensional particles back into their point of origin when they collide with his body. Thus, his body is protected from the effects of the particles, and even the thin membrane of his eyelids is sufficient to block the emission of energy. The synthetic ruby quartz crystal used to fashion the lenses of Cyclops’s eyeglasses and visor is resonant to his minds’ psionic field and is similarly protected.
The width of Cyclops’s eye-blast seems to be focused by his mind’s psionic field with the same autonomic function that regulated his oriinal eyes’ ability to focus. As Cyclops focuses, the size of the aperture changes and thus act as a valve to control the flow of particles and beam’s relative power. The height of Cyclops’s eye-blast is controlled by his visor’s adjustable slit. His narrowest beam, about the diameter of a pencil at a distance of 4 feet has a force of about 2 pounds per square inch. His broadest beam, about 90 feet across at a distance of 50 feet, has a force of about 10 pounds per square inch. His most powerful eye-blast is a beam 4 feet across which, at a distance of 50 feet, has a force of 500 pounds per square inch. The maximum angular measurement of Cyclops’s eye-blast is equivalent to a wide-angle 35mm camera lens field of view (90 degree measured diagonally, or the angle subtended by holding this magazine’s pages spread open, upright at 9.5 inches from your eyes). The minimum angular measurement is equivalent to the angle that the thickness of a pencil would subtend at 4 feet (3.5 degree, about a quarter of an inch viewed at 4 feet). The beam’s effective range is about 2,000 feet, at which point a 1-inch beam has spread out to 10 feet square, and then has a pressure of .38 pounds per square inch. Cyclops’s maximum force is sufficient to tip over a filled 5,000 gallon tank at a distance of 20 feet, or puncture a 1-inch carbon-steel plate at a distance of 2 feet.
The extra dimensional supply of energy for Cyclops’s eye-blast is practically infinite. Thus, so long as Cyclops’s psionic field is active (which is constantly), there is the potential to emit energy. The only limit to the eye-blast is the mental fatigue of focusing constantly. After about 15 minute of constant usage, the psionic field subsides and allows only a slight leakage of energy to pass through the aperture. Cyclops’s metabolism will recover sufficiently for him to continue in about an additional 15 minutes.
Special limitations: Due to a brain injury, Cyclops is unable to shut off his optic blasts at will and must therefore wear a visor or glasses with ruby quartz lenses that block the beams. *
I have entirely too much time on my hands.
Well, it’s not demonic, it’s a mutant power. And his ancestry is pretty well established: Mystique is his mom (I wonder if they’ll allude to that in the movie, seeing as how Alan Cumming is about 20 years older than Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), and some unidentified schmoe is his dad, unless they changed that part. But he does traverse through another dimension. Dark-something. Several other Marvel characters use the same stuff. It’s the reason it always smells bad after he teleports – a little bit of the other dimension slips through with him, and it smells like sulfur and brimstone.
A bit more on Nightcrawler’s history.
He’s a devout Catholic, at one point even entering the ministry, so he’s pretty dang far from demonic (unless you’re Jack Chick).
As for Mystique being his mother and younger looking, they covered that in the comic a few years ago and said that her ability to shape shift reset her genes or something, which causes her to never grow old.
Why don’t criminals in Gotham City work only on cloudless nights.
Think about it.
More like a cop shooting an old lady with a walker who keeps escaping from prison to murder people!
The reason Batman and Superman don’t kill is because they have ethics different from your own. They feel that killing is wrong in all but a few circumstances, such as a guarantee (not high probability) that the perp will kill again, and if such a definitive situation does not present itself then they feel that they do not have the authority to take another’s life (Superman has killed BTW).
Most people who question this ethos seem to working from a utilitarian standpoint of ethics. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this, however utilitarianism isn’t exactly an ethics system that holds up any ideal but “greatest good”, and all actions that work for that are by definition good. IOW, effect, not cause is important.
Batman, Superman and most other super-heroes however are working from an idealized ethics where certain behaviors are wrong no matter what the results are. If you take another’s life and there cannot be shown to be a direct correlation to that saving your life or that of another then you have in fact committed murder (most ethics systems like this have an out for killing during war and occasionally capital punishment, but those are separate issues). In this situation it’s cause, not effect, that’s more important.
An ethics system such as I sketched out above may seem stupid and/or counter-productive to you, but it’s helpful to remember that the majority of religions have ethics systems that work precisely along those lines. Super-heroes may have their history in vapid stories where they fought random mad scientist #638 who is trying to rob a 7-11 each month, but the people writing and creating them were usually intelligent, thoughtful people who would not allow their character to perform an action that was anathema to them, and the end result is characters (even at their conception) that are far more complex in motives and reasoning than a casual glance will reveal.
When you ask why Batman or whoever doesn’t kill it’s kind of like asking why the Pope doesn’t condone abortion: it’s fundamentally against his beliefs.
Yeah. Kinda like that. Judges and juries decide on penalties. Cops arrest people using the minimum necessary force. Batman and Superman = Cops not judges and juries.
There are whole series built around the “Superheroes decide to be judge and juries” theme and many of them have been interesting but they serve to reinforce the fact that Judge and Jury are not what Batman and Superman are.
Fenris