User:DruryWalker63



Killer Moth. Villain's hero. Or gangland guardian, if you're into alliteration.

Batman and Killing
The following comes from my discord server, "The Extensive Batman Doesn't Kill Server": In order to actually discuss Batman's morality and its origin, we need to actually go back to the origin of Batman himself. Batman was created in 1939 shortly after the success of Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman. The success of a comic book hero like him had meant National Allied Publications and Detective Comics, Inc. (which would later merge into National Comics, which itself would later known as DC Comics) wanted another character like him. Bob Kane came up with a rough concept of a character named "Batman", which he would later show to Bill Finger, who would flesh out the character in terms of design and character. After first being advertised in an ad in Action Comics #12, Batman finally made his debut in Detective Comics #27.

The Batman that appeared in Detective Comics #27 and the next few years was in fact very different than the one we'd come to know. Besides not having the Batmobile, any gadgets, Alfred, an explained occupation, or anything else like this, Batman had no moral code. This is in part because at the time, Batman was not particularly meant to be all that original. There was no need to introduce fancy gadgets or unique relationships when Finger and Kane could easily base their hero off other pulp heroes from the era, such as Zorro, the Phantom, the Shadow, Dick Tracy, the Black Bat, and even at times inspiration was drawn from heroes such as Flash Gordon and Batman's predecessor, Superman. Batman had nothing original on his own, and had almost nothing to stand out alongside the other heroes from the genre. But regardless of this, the idea was fresh and managed to recur as a story series, alongside the many other heroes who were spotlighted in Detective Comics. But since this is about Batman's moral code, it's worth analyzing how the character viewed killing at the time. Within his first scene, Batman was already depicted as willingly killing his enemies. Batman encounters two hired killers, knocking the first thug unconscious and then throwing the second one off the building. Although at first glance it appears as if this could be an artist error, the 2nd panel after confirms that Batman indeed kill him and shows us a panel of his corpse. Batman would then make his way to the home of the main antagonist, Alfred Stryker. He took down Stryker's butler and criminal accomplice, Jennings, by knocking him unconscious, but defeats Stryker himself by knocking him into a vat of acid.

This was generally the case for early Batman stories. Although Batman rarely would kill all his opponents mercilessly, he had no problem regularly taking life and at times outright murdering enemies. This would all change by Batman #1 however. In one of the four stories, Batman was shown, alongside killing enemies in many other violent ways (some of whom were mere civilians transformed into monsters, with Batman still choosing to kill them despite having the cure), Batman decides in order to get to one of the Monster Men he would later hang, he would utilize machine guns on the Batwing to gun down the two thugs transporting him.

Although neither Finger or Kane saw a problem with this scene, Batman editor Whitney Ellsworth did. He was disturbed by the violent nature of Batman's killings and, given the large child fanbase gained by the introduction of Robin, felt a gun-wielding hero was a bad role model. He demanded Batman never be portrayed as killing his enemies with guns, which only shortly after would Bill Finger expand into never killing his enemies at all. We would get the first mention of Batman's moral code in Batman #4, in which Batman is shown using a gun and sword non-lethally. Although Batman's moral code would later become clearly defined, this was not in fact the end of Batman being portrayed as a killer. On very rare occasions Batman would still take life, with singular examples in 1943 and even later on in 1948, the last year where he would ever be shown to kill. So technically speaking, Batman was still a killer, he just no longer was as kill-happy as he was prior. The technical debut of our first non-lethal version of Batman would be in Batman #103, the first Silver Age Batman comic. Now, once could say "but the Silver Age isn't canon anymore either, so what makes it any more valid than the murderous version of Batman from the Golden Age?". Well, the thing is that, generally speaking, DC operates under the basic logic that their universe began in the Silver Age, and that all versions afterwards were merely caused by timeline changes (save for the New 52). By all accounts it was the same universe, but the history had been slightly altered. Now, contrast this with the Golden Age. The Golden age versions of these characters were not wiped out by the new timeline, but instead placed by DC into another entirely different universe, Earth-2. So, in other words, the Batman we see in Batman #103 is a completely different character than the one in the first 102 issues or any other comics that took place prior to Showcase #4, the first appearance of the Flash and canonical starting point of what most fans consider the mainstream DC Universe. By all accounts, claiming Batman was a killer for the actions of the Batman in those stories was the equivalent of stating that Barry Allen was a killer because of the lives taken by Jay Garrick, the original Flash.

To sum things up, this would be the point where DC finally got a handle on Batman as a character who would never take a life and has never killed, which is the one who would later appear in the next 6 or so decades of comic canon.