So why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?
Is it proof how weak willed he is that he really believes if he crossed the line once to stop a man who's beyond redemption and will just keeping killing and being a threat to his friends and family. He'll cross that line again in circumstances that aren't as extreme?
Don't put this on Batman, it's the courts that have failed us here.
why doesnt Superman kill Obama'
>No kill rule is a relic from a hyper conservative "think of the children!" time period
>Comics still treat it seriously
I mean for fuck's sake, even most modern collections of children's fairy tales have restored the traditional violent endings (e.g. Hansel and Gretel killing the shit outta the witch) but comics need this absolutely bizarre form morality.
I unironically enjoyed Injustice. Fight me.
The real reason? So they don't have to come up with new, interesting villains and can just keep bringing back the same one over and over again.
they can do that if Batman was a murderer too. They worked the no kill rule too much into his character.
Because if they kill the Joker it becomes harder to re-use the Joker in the future. Not impossible, this is comics after all. But more difficult.
Writers like having iconic villains on a carousel so that they can just use them whenever they want and slap them on the wrist so they can escape again later.
This is especially bad for heroes like Batman because the Bat is one of the big, iconic heroes that everyone pushes and everyone wants to work on. I have read more separate versions of Batman's origin story than there are movies currently in the MCU. That's how overexposed he is and how often they rewind the clock on him so they can repackage all of his villains again.
If superheroes were allowed to move forward and STAY moved forward instead of being caught in an eternal hell of status quo and sliding timescales, then the Joker would be allowed to die. But we don't live in that era of comics, so the Joker has to be kept on the table. And that means Batman can't kill him, so its best to make that intentional rather than making Batman incompetent.
I thought he couldnt kill him because he fears what his outlook would be without him. Wasnt it a thing were he did kill him and he gets depressed.
But in a sense it makes Batman look incompetent regardless even if its the word of god aka DC that doesn't allow it to happen.
I like how they do it with The Flash and how is Rouges have rules they must follow since otherwise nothing would stop Flash from going back in time to play on their mother's uterus's like bongo drums to abort them.
It's a shame more comics don't have that sort of dynamic.
Because then they wouldn't be able to use him in anymore comics and people would stop buying them.
Isn't there an elsewhere story where Batman finally says, 'fuck it' and kills all his rogue's gallery? Then goes on to slaughter crime across the planet?
Everyone is finally happy, all except Batman.
>thinking murdering is a good thing
are you a fucking psychopath?
Killing Joke
Europa
End Game
Dark Knight Returns
At this point? We are about one or two story arcs away from Batman being unable to kill the Joker because of that one night of passionate lovemaking on the roof of Gotham PD back when they were young orphans looking for companionship.
People have gotten way too wrapped around their own axle in making the Bat and the Joker deeply connected and dependent on each other, to the point that it gets really really gay sometimes. Writers keep pushing that there is literally no one alive more important to Bruce than the Joker is, and the Joker feels the same way about the Bat, and they should really just both retire and go adopt a kid and share an apartment in Metropolis.
Batman's never happy anymore anyway, what's the fucking difference
Batman is a thrill seeking rich drama queen that doesn't have the balls to do the one thing that matters. Sometimes I remember that he's the most popular comic book character and I wonder what that says about comic fans as a whole.
There is such a thing as a mad dog that needs to be put down. Sometimes someone is so far gone that they are a danger to themselves and others, and they always will be.
The Joker passed that point years ago. Its simple math, every time the Joker gets free people die. Often times a lot of people. And as past experience has show, he cannot be reliably contained. He has escaped confinement in various institutions multiple times.
Killing the Joker isn't murder, its a civic duty.
>I think we should arrest people who commit crimes
>Kidnapping is wrong!!!!
From an in-universe perspective, because Batman is afraid if he kills one bad guy he's never going to fucking stop and this is borne out pretty well in every elseworlds where Batman kills. Also, it's likely the GCPD's willingness to turn a blind eye to his activities is based on the fact they know he won't kill people in his vigilante actions and they can't keep doing that if he starts going executioner on people. Really, it's the system's fault that the Joker is still alive, because Batman keeps on handing him over to them and they keep on fucking that up somehow.
Out-of-universe, Joker is too iconic to ever be killed off forever and the current model, ridiculous as it is, is still more plausible than the Joker coming back from the dead fifty-six times, which just draws attention to the fact comic book death is utterly meaningless.
Yes.
They should come up with some stupid bullshit science excuse like joker's madness was created by a parasite that gets into your brain and causes your skin to turn white and tighten your facial muscles so it always looks like you're smiling and causes insanity as it eats away at the victims brain.
Of course then people would complain why couldn't Batman contain the parasite after he kills Joker.
Then why did Batman adopt it prior to the comics code?
>absolutely bizarre form morality.
Oh so you're an edgelord. Well if we kill all of humanity then there can be no crime right?
They aren't a good character if they just go around murdering everyone who commits a crime. Some may deserve it but it's a slippery slope between killing one villain and killing them all.
So did today's Injustice come out yet?
Yes but no one wants to storytime it since our normal guy died a month back
He killed him in Endgame barley a year ago, people still complain.
>Oh no all these murdering psychopaths have been killed! How horrible!
Said no one ever.
Don't people realize that the phrase "slippery slope" is the name of a logical fallacy?
Did the Injustice story time guy actually die, or is that a meme? I've seen it said a few times. Will someone story time for his memory?
Same reason why Frank Castle doesn't go up against supervillains. You take the kid gloves off for one villain, the other villains take the kid gloves off for you. Ultimately, a lot of Batman villains treat their interactions with him as a game; the moment he breaks the rules and tries to go all Mack Bolan is the moment the mob and supervillains stop pussyfooting around.
>Oh no a murdering psychopath is on the loose who can see and hear you anywhere on the planet and punch your heart out of your chest at any time
>Said everyone everywhere
ftfy
If someone posts the injustice story time, I'd be willingn to share nudes of an ex dressed as Catwoman.
'CAUSE... I really don't know why. We all know Tumblr will bitch about "teh dearth penality" or something, DC employees don't want to deal with that bullshit every issue. Then there's the fact that the Joker sells issues by sheer presence alone. Killing their most popular villain will cost DC quite a bit of money in the long run, so he stays. In universe? The GCPD is held back by Gordon (even when he's standing on a big rig doused in oil, full of hostages, holding a match, in clear target range for the SWAT team), the Joker mostly stays in Gotham so the JL just let's Batman take of it, Batman won't because MY PARENTS ARE DEAD.
So basically; the character is too popular to off, forcing the writers to come up with increasingly bullshitty excuses, not helped by Tumblr practically holding a stranglehold on the comics industry.
Then there's the fact Batman is a chump compared to the glory of the Shadow.
But isn't the fact that Joker is such an unpredictable force and threat to not only the city, but them too a reason for villains to look the other way if Batman did kill him?
Also it's not like his rouges haven't tried to kill him in the past.
>Will someone story time for his memory?
no thanks, I like being alive
The problem is that the Joker really isn't all that special next to any other Bat-villain or the Gotham mobsters. If he kills the Joker then he has no moral reason not to kill Ra's, Talia, Poison Ivy, Riddler, Harley Quinn, Bane, Penguin, or Black Mask.
Why doesn't Batman break every bone in the Joker's hands and feet then? Pop his eyes?
In theory, he could recover, in practice it is just as likely as him rising from the dead. Which is what DC would do if he was finally killed. That's what Lazrus pits are for baby!
>Also it's not like his rouges haven't tried to kill him in the past.
It's the difference between believing you have a tactical advantage and fearing the slippery slope argument so much that you exhaust ALL your resources towards killing your enemy so that you can stay alive. Most villains will take lethal potshots at Batman, sure, but if the unspoken agreement of "I will never try to kill you" is ever violated the rogues will not hesitate to use all their power (and even team up) to make sure Batman dies before he can kill them.
Going to tell me how all those people you listed just kill people for shits and giggles?
It's like asking why do characters in shitty japanese shonen series just keep getting incrementally more powerful every season with the same "a new -more- powerful badguy has just shown up and all of the things I learned last season no longer work!"
It's an integral component to the very simple structure that comics have to use in order to recycle important characters. These characters are all incredibly marketable and have lots of fans so they can't afford to actually kill them off and move the story forward, so it's just an endless loop of throwing them in jail, they get out of jail, batman throws them back in jail, they get out of jail etc... Comics are not a medium for telling compelling complete stories. It's a perpetual storytelling method and as a result you have to suffer these very obvious mechanisms.
What happens in this weeks Injustice? Is it just another cutscene from the game?
He wants to save anyone he can.
He has tried to, mutiple times. Either read comics or accept the kind of genre you've invested yourself into cause it aint changing an it aint new.
If comic books were reality than every single one of those villains needs to die ASAP. Superman needs to just put holes in their skulls with his laser beams all in a row. In the comics these people can't be held in jail because they constantly break out and they aren't simple murderers, rapists, and thieves but people that want to kill others by the hundreds and thousands, so they all need to die.
In the real world in civilized countries prison break outs are insanely rare, and it costs more to execute a person than it does to throw them in a hole for the rest of their lives so the death penalty doesn't make sense for keeping people safe because those people aren't getting out anyway, it doesn't make sense financially because its more expensive, and it doesn't make sense morally since western culture is majority christian and killing is forbidden. The only people that are hard-on pro-death penalty are the psychopaths that just want to see that eye-for-an-eye vengeance taken to its extreme when it is far from the logical choice given present circumstances.
Yeah, you'd think that Joker's biggest problem would be the other villains, not Batman.
All together between the start of the Nu52 and Endgame we got about three years total without Joker and I'm pretty sure only Snyder was using him during Death of the Family and Endgame. Really all they need to do is use him less and it stops being such an asspull.
Motivation is really only a mitigating factor at a very intimate, and low body count, level.
A: Batman does kill people. But he needs supervillains for self validation.
Because Batman is fucking mentally ill. He adopts a stupid rule because to combat street level villains who consistently break out or avoid incarceration he dresses up as a fucking bat and jumps around in the night instead of just heavily investing in city security infrastructure.
>the bat is a symbol that scares people
except obviously it's not working when Gotham is consistently shown to be the shittiest and most corrupt city in America. Also half the Bat-family doesn't even bother using the Bat symbol so it's not even like it works as a unit symbol.
Batman doesn't kill because he was scarred as a child by the murder of his two parents. It's not to uphold an ideal or because it's at all what separates him from the criminals (who can still be criminals without killing anyone), it's because he's actually got a problem in the head.
>thread has gone this long without any Gordonposting
impressive
...
>shittiest and most corrupt city in America
Third shittiest
Second if you don't count Bludhaven
>Joker
>murder
No one should kill isis at all should they?
Shut up, casual.
You can't sell the product, aka superheroes, without good villains. Once you've got a villain the readers like, it's easier to keep him alive, than to invent new ones. Killing a villlain would require good writing to reuse them in a meaningful way. Good writing is hard and/or expensive, so the companies stick to the no killing rule.
Is he wrong? Tell me, if he kills the Joker why shouldn't he kill Penguin and Twoface and Ivy and Croc and Bane? They've all proved eventually to e repeat homicidal criminals, should he not end them how he does Joker?
Why should this one psychotic clown need special attention but not actual assassins and crime bosses? And therein after Batman has killed most of the criminals in Gotham why should the law show leniency towards a vigilante practicing mass homicide? Because the narrative says he's the good guy? That's not how the law works, he'd be hunted down. Otherwise if he's given special exceptions you get your Red Hoods with vendettas or thrill seekers picking off crooks to get their kicks.
By all means the Joker should be executed, assassinated or just fatally injured by his own antics but Batman does not need to kill him. Bruce is already giving plenty to his backwards city, if they don't want to move forward that's not his shit.
Bats actively protects Joker from being killed, thats what Under the Hood was about, not home now to post the page, Jason badically put it as, Bruce didnt have to do anything this time, Jason would kill him himself, but Bruce stopped him and got him killed again as expected with the Joker.
>mum slippery slope.
Call me when one of the other villains you listed nukes metropolis and immediately goes 'oh well you got me, now scamper off while I figure out how to escape again to kill some more!'
>they should really just both retire and go adopt a kid and share an apartment in Metropolis
that's exactly what should happen
I wish I could find that screen cap, I was sure I saved it, of the well argued point that it's the fact that they keep making the Joker needing killing rather than Batman not killing him that's the problem. It only feels like he needs to kill the Joker because they keep playing an arms race with the most fucked up Joker they can think of because that's what fans, apparently, want. But they also want the Joker around, so they can't just kill him off, because then they have to keep bringing him back, which even further cheapens the already piss cheap concept of death in cape comics.
Then there's the problems of Gotham just locking Joker, and people like him, away rather than just executing them. But again, they can't kill him because readers want him around.
Ultimately, more so than other discussions about the specific retardation of cape comics, this issue very much can't ignore the real world editorial reasons for it. You can't just say "Batman should just kill the Joker" and more than you can say "Batman should age over time and retire or get killed." Both are completely anathema to the way modern cape comics work. Superman didn't kill the Joker, some alt universe Superman that doesn't need to play by the usual rules killed the Joker of that universe.
I have vaguely been wondering whether the current "there are three Jokers," as further stupid as that is, is somehow being set up to solve some of these problems.
>quoting shitty comics that even the writer admitted were bad and fixed them in the animated version
Jesus I thought the "Sup Forums doesn't read comics" was just a meme.
>that's what separates me from them
Note that Bruce never contests that he's a criminal. He's an old white guy so he thinks that obfuscating company accounts and clearly participating in large scale tax evasion is fine.
See, the reason he doesn't kill is because he thinks killing is for thugs. Killing is for brown people and niggers. Batman is above that. He uses his money to beat up criminals on the street because that's what gets him off.
We got a year without Joker at the start of the Nu52 and almost two years without him following Death of the Family.
That green suit looks like a bad edit.
>three non-canons and one where the joker is literally immortal
ok
He wasn't immortal in Endgame.
Batman literally beat him to death, stopped him from getting away and reaching the healing stuff and then collapsed the entire cave on him.
He killed him.
and then joker is going to come back in Rebirth wow
You think that it wouldn't be enough to make him snap? You're talking about the same guy that had one traumatic event in his life and it fucked him up so badly that he dresses up like a bat 23 hours a day.
>why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?
>he did
>yeah but now he is back so it doesn't matter!
what do you people expect?
>unironically
If it's such a civic duty then why has no one else done it? Why are you pinning the blame on one person instead of the whole town then?
Disgusting
Why don't they just pass the mantles on to new characters whenever the old one dies?
Only Batman is big and strong enough to gape the Joker.
Is it really edgy to point out that Batman is killing more people than he's saving because he refuses to just shoot Joker.
Can someone PLEASE post those pages where Bane and someone else save a baby and when they ask his name he says "Batman saved your baby?"
I can't find it anywhere and I don't know what it's from.
The pages you are looking for where Bane saved the baby are from Gail Simone's Secret Six.
It's funny because pretty much every one of Batman's villains have been redeemed at one point, except the big J.
Riddler and Harley Quinn were essentially good guys in the Dini run.
Two-Face found sanity again for a while.
Penguin hasn't been a really evil guy for a long time. He'll still feed you to the fishes if you piss him off but he's not really a mass murderer.
Bane had been somewhere between ambiguous to good for a long time, especially the Secret Six run.
Poison Ivy is now a good guy, I think?
Freeze is just a depressing dude. They made him eviler when shit52 launched but I don't think that version of him had been seen ever since.
Catwoman fucks Batman. Talia evil fucks Batman.
So if you think about it, Batman's "no-killing" thing is justified mostly, because many of his villains have shown that they can reach a level where they don't really deserve a bullet in the head. The Joker is really the only one that doesn't fit this bill.
I think everybody would be better off that way
Really, why would anyone outside of another speedster even attempt to go against the Flash? "we're bad guys who have to follow a strict set of rules because the moment we step out of line we will cease to exist." Why don't they go to Metropolis and cause trouble there? Superman is just going to throw them in jail if they kill someone.
Guys it's fine. If he kills the Joker now, he's technically only killing 1/3rd, so barely any damage done, right?
>Killing Joke
He didn't kill him. Moore said so.
>Dark Knight Returns
He made him a quadriplegic. Joker killed himself after that.
>Europa
>End Game
Dunno about these.
>Superman handing a gun to Batman.
B-But Superman is bullet-proof.
Kryptonite bullets?
It's just the funny imagery. I can already see the Superdickery subtitles about it.
>that cover
Completely rigged.
Anyways, it's not about the morality. It's about the MERCHANDISE. They can't sell their joker t-shirts, coffee mugs, lego sets, action figures, buttons, stickers, backpacks, binders, pillowcases, coasters, or motherfucking condoms if their cash-cow character is "Dead forever."
The real tragedy isn't that Batman won't kill a character. It's that the death of that character is ultimately meaningless, since an endless string of new writers and new artists will just wish him back to life and pull the reasoning out of their ass coughlazaruspitscoughcoughparalleluniversescough and the status quo reigns again.
I don't read any DC or Marvel comics shit, because they don't fit my criteria of what I'm willing to invest myself in for a story: They don't have a beginning, because they constantly rewrite the specifics of those beginnings, and they don't have an end, because they need to keep the moneytrain running forever.
Capeshit fans baffle me, since they seem to be content consuming this endless "Middle" of the story, where nothing is final and every victory is just another flat note in an endless drone of mediocrity.
>Because if they kill the Joker it becomes harder to re-use the Joker in the future. Not impossible, this is comics after all. But more difficult.
You know what Id like to see?
Id like to see Batman get in someone's face about why he doesn't kill the joker with the following logic
>Kill the Joker? When has that ever been a solution for our villains? Have you not seen the world we live in? If I kill him, you know he's going to somehow come back as a magical cyborg demi god or possessed by Parallax or become the new Specter. Is that what you want? A Joker with magic alien zombie cyborg powers? I didn't think so.
>Really, why would anyone outside of another speedster even attempt to go against the Flash?
Some people appreciate a challenge
Batarang in the fucking eye.
honestly all Batman's villains are talented people that deserve more to live than random talentless people
>killed him in end game
>there are now 3 instead of one
The vampire trilogy had this happen, and no one was happy afterwards.
So do you kill Harley and everyone who helped him as well? Most of these guys need a large crew and middlemen for these schemes and that also makes them responsible right?
I know you guys like to mock the slippery slope argument but that's a lot of people to kill every time you drop A Penguin or Twoface. You think Gordon and the citizens would cheer that on?
>So do you kill Harley and everyone who helped him as well?
Harley yes
Not the guy who willingly gave Joker a nuke? The transporters? The doc that did the surgery on Lois?
Why do they get off since it wouldn't work without them?
Ok. I'll bite. The reason at this point seems purely meta. Joker's continued existence is justified by his popularity outside the comic, not Batman's refusal to kill within the comic. That's pretty much it. There are a host of justifications for it--Batman doesn't kill, someone else would assume the mantle, etc. It would make more logical sense for someone within the universe to kill Joker. We know Batman won't because muh code, and that's fine. The real question is why NO OTHER PERSON--HERO, VICTIM, VILLAIN, OR VIGILANTE has killed the Joker while he was locked up in Arkham "revolving door" Asylum.
Remember in Hitman when Tommy was getting Defenestrator out and all he has to do is tell the doc it's for a good cause? Arkham is exactly as easy to get out of, or into, as the author demands.
Tl;dr because Joker is popular and profitable, nothing to do with story or character. Also, someone else should have killed him by now. Not for nothing, but Frank would have put an end to that shit years ago. Which is why Frank has a very very small list of returning villains, forcing authors to tell the same story with minor variations again and again. To my great joy and amusement.
After reading more posts, I like what lot of people are saying in support of the no-kill rule and how it's used to strengthen Bat's character rather than lampshade the Joker's continued existence. Would also love to see Batman go off about how if Mistake J died he'd just come back worse. Makes you wonder what it would be like if Batman and Joker had an Animal Man style meeting with an author. "The two of you are the way you are because people enjoy watching you suffer. Batman, you will probably never know peace or have a loving stable relationship. Joker, you'll never have a true sense of your origin or identity, and we'll make you aware of that from time to time just to twist the knife in a little more. So long."
A better question is: why doesn't Batman just paralyze Joker from the neck down? Knock his ass out, do a little snip snip on his spinal cord at the cervical vertebrae, dump his tetraplegic clown ass at Arkham, and remove him from the equation while still upholding his "no kill" bullshit?
I'm gonna go off topic and say how much I love watching frank kill other peoples villans. I love in the Rucka run when he fucking murdered vulure 2.0 and he killed black talon (whom the avengers struggle with) before black talon could even finish his evil speech.
The Punisher is such a cringy character.
Let's hope you grow out of your teen mentality sooner or later.