Jul
23rd
2014
Seventy-five years ago today... · 11:49pm Jul 23rd, 2014
...a man possessing the intellectual ability of the average gnat when it came to foreseeing the consequences of his own so-called moral code began a career of taking mass murderers and placing them in a situation where they could basically escape at will and kill even more people, at which point he would catch them and temporarily place them back in the cardboard prison so they could do it all over again, only with even more victims.
Hey, it kept him non-gainfully employed. And everyone was happy. Except for all the murdered people.
So happy diamond anniversary, Bruce.
You @#$%ing idiot.
Is there something I missed?
Actually Jake R informs me that the first issue of Detective Comics to feature batman came out in MAY of 1939, not July.
So DC just picked an arbitrary day.
I do wonder sometimes why the villains are allowed to live. But then there would be no more comic
Thanks, I laughed pretty hard at this.
2310416
Tis the Joker Immunity, my dear friend.
2310416
The typical comics universe runs on the power of Marketing.
Also because with the typical luck of the average hero (who is, by corporate rule, never allowed to have a happy life), killing any villain would result in their returning from the dead with enhanced powers, allowing them to kill even more people. Just to punish the hero for a moment of common sense. Because when Marketing runs a little low on juice, we switch to Sadism.
Think and die. Or in this case, think and other people die.
2310404
Typical. However, constantly rewriting their own history is pretty much what they do...
2310399
Nothing of consequence.
You can't pin the blame on Wayne. Sure, he has more than his share of issues and problems of his own, but his 'no-kill' code isn't one of them.
He can't be judge, jury and executioner. Because that way lies a far scarier villain than any that threatens Gotham now. The REAL problem is that, after four or five attempted reformations, no jury just sentenced the Joker to a nicely state-sanctioned appointment behind a woodshed with a revolver and one bullet. I've never seen anything that says that Batman was against capital punishment, just capital punishment carried out by himself alone without any checks or balances.
You know, I wrote a blog post about this sometime last year, then never posted it.
So now I posted it.
2310457
If we're going fictional, we can create a character who can pull it off. (And for some of us, occasionally have.) However, I won't argue that the Gotham definition of insanity defense needs a rework. Immediately. And so will never see one.
Of course, any jury which tried to do anything would mysteriously die. And no one would ever be tried for it. Because Marketing. And if I recall, the one time the clown was actually sentenced to death, it was a frame job and Bruce got him off...
2310508
Well, yes. But you're trying to condemn a fictional character for what are effectively meta-fictional reasons beyond their control. I maintain that Bruce's strategy is sound. He's just playing against a stacked deck.
Yes, we can create a character who can execute criminals in the street and never get it wrong, never overstep their personal code in a fit of rage, never become something worse than that which they're fighting against.
That character's name? Mary Sue.
2310471
I have been resisting the urge to openly translate 'take back (insert nation and/or cause here)' for a long time. Because in a lot of speeches, it basically emerges as 'I know we've got more weapons.'
Remember the atrocity committed against us last time which will excuse the atrocity we're about to commit. Huzzah. Actual atrocity now optional.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20111_the-6-most-brutal-murders-committed-by-batman.html Dude, for a person whose moral code is to not take a life. He's taken a ton of lives. Some in ways that make a regular Joker murder scheme look like a humanitarian peace effort.
2310525
Or Euthanatos. No one said it was supposed to be easy, even in fiction -- or that the burden didn't add up. It can be done without going Mary Sue. It's just a lot harder.
ETA: I am not advocating wholesale slaughter. I'm just having an allergic reaction to seventy-five years of escalating body count with no end in sight. Yes, to a large degree, it's a fight against the rules of his universe. But as Bad Horse noted, given enough time, those rules make the heroes into idiots.
Batman?
And well, I agree that he should have been putting down rabid dogs. That's why I love Rorschach.
I have to side with Eakin on this one. This isn't so much a problem with Batman's strategy as it is a problem with the mentality of the writers and the scope, scale, and structure of the medium.
2310525
Also, Frank Castle
2310557
2310525
Or Scourge: http://marvel.com/universe/Scourge_of_the_Underworld
See, DC Universe needs ( 2310868 ) Punisher. But even better, MLP has Luna.
This is more an issue with the way they sell comics, I think. Each issue comes out roughly a month after the previous and the stories continue until continuity gets so fucked up that the writers collectively throw up their hands and decide to start over. This means that death can never happen to major characters, or last when it does happen (Superman wasn't dead for very long, after all). This means that most superheroes need a "no-kill" rule because of the sheer number of chances they generally get to execute their enemies. Personally, I think comics would be better off as graphic novels, with a clear beginning and end where characters can die and other things that would dramatically change the story, since they would be reset when the next version came out.
2310557
To be fair, Grant Morrison is the only guy who considers all of those seventy-five years canon. The slate's been wiped clean a few times, for better or worse.
Actually I think Squirrel Girl is the best Mary Sue to show in Marvel.
2311245
That's funny that you mention Squirrel Girl as the best example of Mary Sue in Marvel when they have at least three other characters whose power is NOT dying.
Wolverine
Deadpool
Mr. Immortal
I think we need to be honest with ourselves here. If given the choice, any one of us would happily become Bruce Wayne.
But none of us would want to become Batman. Because dressing up like a giant bat and haunting the night is for suckers.
2310416
No story can run indefinitely and remain the same story. Thus the soap operas turn more and more implausible until they are finally canceled; and the long-running superhero comics go through the motions time and time again, or until the next reboot that sets things up anew but without anything fundamentally changing.
I'm not a fan of either soap operas or long-running superhero comics, incidentally.
At the very beginning of his career, in 1938, the Superman stories had no supervillains for him to fight. Instead, he fought against corrupt city officials and union reps, bad bosses, traffic trouble (yes, traffic trouble), and the horrible war-profiteers who wanted the US to foolishly involve itself in Old Europe's endless wars. In the beginning, the most important thing about Superman was that he was a reporter, constantly rooting out hidden corruption to make Metropolis a better place to live.
When Superman encountered his first ever supervillain, the Ultra-Humanite, several of the things he had fought against in previous issues were retconned so that the Ultra-Humanite had been responsible, as part of his plan for global conquest. No longer were they ordinary human problems with ordinary human causes and solutions, but the result of diabolical outside forces who actively wished harm on humanity.
As a publishing strategy, this worked great: supervillains presented an endless pool of new story ideas, and allowed the publishers to strip away all that inconvenient political awareness from the character, and turn him into the archetype of blandly inoffensive goodness has endured the changing pop-culture landscape of the last 75 years, and is now an immortal institution that nobody can bring themselves to just drop already.
As literature, though... not so good.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Ultrahumanite1.jpg
2311245
When the character is a joke character, it's a little hard to justify them as a Mary Sue. That's like saying Pinkie is a Mary Sue because she can run as fast as Rainbow Dash can fly, can seemingly teleport like Twilight but without magic, has limited precognition, plans ahead beyond any conceivable scope, and has her own personal hammerspace, ignoring that all of those things are used purely for comedic effect.
Well, in the early days, it was different.
static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/batman_earlyinstallmentweirdness_8700.jpg
In any case, as has been noted, Batman can't kill his villains any more than the Professor could've built a raft, Discord could've replaced the Mane Six's brains with kumquats, or any Bond villain could've just shot him. Because then the story would end before its appointed time. Sure, from a diegetic standpoint, Batman's no-killing policy has led to an enormous indirect body count. Extradiegetically, there's no alternative. His rogues gallery is too well entrenched for the formula to switch to a "villain-of-the-week" model.
Applying real-world logic to the worlds of stories is a dangerous task. Done right, it's deconstruction. Done carelessly, it's a headache.
2340639
In the case of the mass murderers which many comics villains wind up turning into over the course of their careers, we would normally go to this argument.
"You can't prove the death penalty never stopped anyone from committing murder."
"True. But I might be able to prove it prevented them from committing a few more."
(Except comics universe, so they all come back from the dead and commit a few hundred more.)
But Gotham just keeps on putting them in the same prison of wet cardboard, where they have blackmail on every guard and had their henchmen design the so-called security upgrade. Escape, kill, repeat.
You'd think at some point, at least one genius attorney would have moved for a Change Of Imprisonment Venue.