You Go Girl!

I know this topic is so three months ago, but everyone else in the comic blogosphere has weighed in on it, so I figure I should too.

As you can probably tell from the title of the post, I heartily support the Amazonian ambassador's decision to use lethal force against Maxwell Lord. Given the circumstances (the imminent and enormous threat of a mind-controlled Superman), it was the only rational thing to do. Even Max himself said (truthfully -- he was entangled in Gaea's Golden Lasso at the time) that the only way to stop him was to kill him. Diana didn't have any other choice, so she did the heroic thing and slew the monster.

Ah, but in the DCU, "heroes" never kill. They "always find another way." Sorry, but that's garbage. It's morally cretinous for anyone, much less a self-appointed guardian of society, to vow that they will never use lethal force regardless of the situation. I've argued this point before, but I'll happily do so again.

In the pages of Infinite Crisis #1, Batman and Superman both give Wonder Woman nine kinds of hell for killing Maxwell Lord. Batman tells her that she "doesn't belong here" among the ruins of the Watchtower and in the company of the Justice League while Superman outright calls her a murderer. Big bad guy Mongul later calls all three of them "pathetic" after Superman prevents Wonder Woman from executing him. He's two-thirds right.

Let's start with Batman. For a vigilante who operates waaay outside the law, takes great pleasure in brutalizing criminals, and routinely violates the privacy rights of the guilty and innocent alike by way of clandestine electronic surveillance, he has a lot of nerve chastising Wonder Woman for her supposed moral shortcomings. But at least he doesn't kill.

Though I have to ask why. Batman doesn't care about criminals' rights, doesn't believe they can be reformed (and considering the 100 percent recidivism rate of Gotham's criminal element, I can't blame him) and knows that they'll be back out on the street before next year's Jeph Loeb maxi-series. It's an endless cycle. The bad guy kills a bunch of people. Batman beats him up. The bad guy goes to prison or the looney bin. The bad guy breaks out, and the cycle starts all over again. Of course Batman could bring the whole thing to a screeching halt by simply killing the bad guy rather than handing him over to a fatally flawed criminal justice system that has never brought a single criminal to justice. But Batman would never do that because heroes don't kill.

Now on to Superman. As a practical matter, Superman's vow against killing makes a great deal more sense than Batman's. His powers give him that luxury. He doesn't have to shoot a mugger to disarm him. He can just snatch the gun away at superspeed or melt it with his heat vision. Superman also has the legitimate expectation that once his opponents are behind bars they'll stay there. Finally, Superman has to rely on a certain degree of public trust in order to be most effective. Trust that would undoubtedly be undermined if he were to make a habit of slaying his enemies in combat.

Good reasons all. Yet there are a number of cases where Superman's absolute prohibition against killing has cost the lives and livelihoods of innocent people, and it's at that point that his precious moral code degenerates into pathetic moral vanity. Speaking of vanity, allow me to quote from myself as an illustration:

In Action Comics #719 the Joker poisoned Lois. The cure, and this was devilishly clever of him, could only be obtained by injecting him with a lethal dose of the anti-toxin. To save Lois Superman would have to kill the Joker. For anyone but Superman, this wouldn’t be much of an ethical quandary. Exchanging the life of an innocent woman for the life of a murderous psychopath – the same one who had set this plan into motion, no less – is an easy bit of moral calculus to figure. Superman should certainly find it unpleasant and regrettable that he was forced to kill the Joker, but that should not stop him from discharging his moral obligation to his fiancée. Of course, Big Blue refused to kill the grinning madman. Then he had the audacity to say that he was doing it for Lois’ sake! “If I’d killed the Joker, you would have had to deal with it, too. Knowing I’d killed for you… I knew you wouldn’t want that, you wouldn’t want to… live with it.”

Lois would have died if the writers hadn't conveniently written Superman a way out by having it at all be an elaborate prank on the Joker's part. Superman would have let the love of his life die so that the Joker -- the Joker! -- could live. But at least he wouldn't have become a murderer. At least he wouldn't have crossed that uncrossable line and "become the very thing he's fighting against." Because we all know that anytime a police officer uses lethal force to subdue a violent criminal, he invariably ends up becoming a murdering psychopath himself. The same with soldiers in wartime or with a homeowner who successfully kills an intruder in order to protect her family. Such men and women couldn't possibly be considered heroes. After all, they kill people.

Of course I don't blame Clark or Bruce for their ill-considered moral codes. It's the nature of ongoing superhero narrative to keep raising the stakes and to keep bringing back the same villains again and again. Nobody wants to see Superman beating the bad guys to death on a regular basis, yet drama dictates that he constantly be put in situations where lethal force is the only real viable option. This puts the onus on writers to produce deus ex machina endings (Like the Joker's "prank" cited above.) in order to insulate Superman, Batman and the rest of their costumed clan from the logical consequences of their absolutist morality.

The true crisis at DC Comics -- and Marvel for that matter -- is a structural one. The very nature of an ongoing shared universe leads inexorably to stories like the one I've discussing for the past thousand words or so. Heck, even the Hardy Boys had their "grim and gritty" period.

My solution? Abandon the shared universe concept entirely and embrace "Hypertime" as a publishing model. But that's a post for another day.