Superheroes Can’t Kill, But Not Because Of Morality
So I’m following this discussion about Should Superheroes Kill. The whole thing started with Chad Nevett reviewing the most recent issue of Marvel’s New Avengers, and saying
I hate superhero comics for pretending that letting villains live is somehow the morally superior thing to do, because it’s not. You know what the morally superior thing is? Knowing when killing is the moral thing to do. In their lifestyle, just killing is immoral and never killing is immoral. They’re both extremes, neither of which actually attempt to fit into the reality of the situation. Should they kill every mugger ala the Punisher? No. Should they kill Norman Osborn when the chance arises? Um, yeah. Even it means Peter Parker whines like an infant for two weeks.
The lovely and talented Esther Inglis-Arkell has a more nuanced take (and, in my view, the ideal solution):
The subject matter of comics has gotten more dark, the shock-tactics more extreme. We went from bank robbers, muggers, and invading starfish to villains burning pregnant women to death, murdering people’s families, and trying to blow up the entire earth. Meanwhile, the heroes are less flexible than the situations they find themselves in. The bad guys can do anything, the good guys are constricted. Not killing has almost become a talisman that lets us know the heroes are still heroes. (And of course, the heroes are bound by the fact that we need the villains to return for more stories.)
This pull between the truly evil villain and the curiously rigid hero causes a lot of fans frustration, and I can certainly understand it. However, I don’t think the solution to that is more killing, even if it is well-written. I think we should go the other way.
More bank robbers. More drug runners. More art smugglers. More mad scientists with misunderstood but rampaging creations. More nuisance criminals like the early Riddler. More money launderers. More bizarre (and non-sexual) kidnappers.
Less brutality. Less parodic violence. Less sexual assault. Less ‘this time it’s personal’. Less crimes that need to be resolved with a death.
David Brothers, meanwhile, backs up Chad’s original point:
But, to pretend that heroes should never kill, while their enemies continually up the ante and stack atrocity on top of atrocity and shoot past irredeemable and on into genocidal… you start to notice the guy behind the curtain. That’s when you realize just how the sausage is made and start caring less and less. Black Adam has millions of deaths on his resume. Vandal Savage destroyed Montevideo. Deathstroke’s blown up Bludhaven, and, along with Cheshire, nuked the capital of Qurac. Mongul destroyed Coast City.
At some point, you have to weigh your peace of mind and so-called moral high ground against thousands upon thousands of lost lives. And sometimes… it’s worth the sacrifice.
And that’s why the hard-line HEROES DON’T KILL is childish to me. It’s applying a black and white morality to a situation that doesn’t fit it any more. Back when Spider-Man was created, Doc Ock was killing people mainly by accident. Green Goblin just wanted to run the mob. Now? Now villains completely undercut the hero by simply existing, and every time we get one of the “I’m better than you, I don’t kill” scenes, or the scenes where the hero fights hard to save a villain’s life so that he can sleep soundly at night… well, I roll my eyes.
And here’s where I come in, because if you’d asked me before I started thinking about it, I would’ve argued that, dude, of course superheroes don’t kill. They’re superheroes. But that thinking is born out of my gut feeling about superheroes in general, which is confused and contradictory but says, on some base level, that they’re fantasy characters created for children and should be approached with not only a childlike sense of wonder and imagination, but also a childlike morality. Esther’s entirely right; superheroes shouldn’t have to deal with the question about whether it’s the morally right thing to do to kill their mass-murdering nemesis of the month, if only because they shouldn’t have nemeses of the month who mass-murder.
But that’s not the comic worlds we’re reading about, anymore, is it? Both DC and Marvel have significantly darkened down, despite claims of a planned lightening of tone (Is it just me, or did both Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis come with promises of them being the end of grim and gritty for awhile?), and Marvel in particular has gone almost parodically all-out to create a world where everything is wrong and psychopaths are in charge of law enforcement, raping and pillaging anything they want. And in these circumstances… I have no problem with superheroes killing.
Well, some superheroes. Wonder Woman killing Maxwell Lord? Completely made sense, and doesn’t diminish her character at all unlike, say, Batman killing the Joker would (Because Batman holds himself up to a ridiculous moral standard and was created out of death to prevent death). And here’s where I end up defending Brian Michael Bendis, somewhat surprisingly, because it makes perfect sense that Spider-Man would argue vehemently against killing any villain, even the one responsible for the death of his girlfriend; he’s a character guided by a morality set in stone when he was a kid, following the traumatic death of his father figure. Of course he thinks killing = bad. Having him argue the point with other characters doesn’t seem to me a sign that the comics or genre or readers are stuck at age 7 – or even actually arguing that heroes don’t kill, for that matter – but that the character is. And that’s something else altogether.
Of course, there’s a real reason why superheroes don’t kill, and it’s got nothing to do with morality and everything to do with licensibility. Good luck selling Super Hero Squad when you know that someone’s going to declare outrage that everyone on there is killing folk over in the “real” Marvel Universe…
Related posts:
Various comics have addressed this issue. Action Comics 775 pits Superman against a parody of The Authority.
It’s a celebration of traditional superheroics over dark edgy nonsense, but it feels forced. One thing I took away from this comic – though I may be reading this into it – is that superheroes have to hold themselves to a higher standard of restraint because of their power. Killing (at least unpowered opponents) is trivially easy for them, and if Superman killed routinely then the entire population of earth would feel as though they were living in a cage with a tiger – a concept well-explored in Irredeemable and Miracleman. By dressing up in bright colours and showing immense restraint, the ubermensch resembles less a vengeful demigod and more of an approachable, inspirational figure.
Another argument is the escalation argument, which appears here in Batman & Robin #5.
The ‘crime fits the punishment’, meaning that if Superheroes kill, the villians will be comfortable raising the stakes too. This is an excellent argument, or it would be if the writers didn’t continually have the villians up the ante regardless.
This argument doesn’t really work when the Joker kills people for laughs already; when you’re dead you don’t really care whether your murderer eats your face afterwards or just leaves you lying there wearing a rictus grin. But it would be a plausible explanation in a setting where heroes were willing to kill villians who crossed the line, and where villains knew this and didn’t push their luck, both sides understanding the unwritten rules of the game.
A similar argument, also from Grant Morrison in JLA Confidential #3, is that killing simply wouldn’t work. This is funny because it’s both true and turns the idea of what constitutes a ‘realistic’ attitude on its head: In a comic book universe, it’s not unreasonable to expect a villain to come back from the dead as easily as he escapes from jail.
Possibly the strongest argument I’ve seen, though, comes from an issue of the New Mutants which I can’t now place:
“Sometimes, in battle, people die. But murder, Illyana? For any reason?”
It’s a little strange that people suggest it’s unrealistic for Batman to not kill the Joker in cold blood, simply to prevent him from committing any more murders in future, when in real life doing so would be blatantly illegal. If our society doesn’t think it’s necessary to execute people without trial, why should comic book society?
Granted comic book villains are often worse than any real life murderer and seemingly immune to incarceration, in which case it might be more plausible for the fictional USA to have extra capital offenses just for them – a specific body of law against blowing up cities with deathrays.
But to return to the point, when the police shoot an armed robber in the face they aren’t doing it to kill him, they’re doing it to stop him. If they kill him in the process, well, too bad. The same even applies in warfare – all the killing is purely incidental to destroying the enemy’s ability to fight.
Superpowers often (though not always) make it easier to take foes alive. A bulletproof cop could simply walk up to an armed robber and slap the cuffs on him, and wouldn’t have as much excuse for shooting him in the face.
I think this is the standard most heroes are actually held to. I’ve read plenty of comics in which supervillains died or appeared to die during fights. Slitting throats may not be acceptable, but causing the villain’s power armour to explode with him inside it is usually considered fair play.
On the other hand, the Simonson run of the New Mutants involved Illyana teleporting people into hell for an indefinite period of getting humped by demons, while the other characters told her this was good and preferable to simply shooting them in the head, because that would be murder, which is wrong. Simonson always did seem to have a tenuous relationship with the concept of right and wrong.
Regardless, I think this latter standard explains why Collossus can break necks and still come across as a hero, while Arno Stark forcing a man to submit to extrajudicial execution by threatening the life of his granddaughter comes across as creepy and ‘edgy’ at best, and brazenly villainous at worst.
Well, now I definitely have to expand my views in a longer post…
Though, I hate bringing up business reasons for not doing something only because those are reasons we’re all aware of — and tolerate, at best, most of the time. They also run counter to the internal logic of many stories, so should be kept in mind as the ultimate ‘real world’ reason for certain actions, but I like to avoid them when discussing certain topics — they’re the trump card to every discussion: “Yeah, that’s all well and good, but it won’t happen because company A will lose money…” Takes the fun out of it, honestly. (And that’s not directed at you specifically, it’s just something that’s come up a lot in this discussion…)