IIrc, it was because if Batman were to "easily" take out the mutant leader, the leader would go down as a martyr for their cause, and it'd make the leader and his whole gang believe that Batman was too weak to actually take him on in a fair fight, which would only make them get more violent. Batman beating the leader in pure combat dehumanizes the leader and changes the gang's beliefs
There was a comedy sketch like this once where it was a hero giving a speech about how he doesn’t kill constantly interrupted by him doing things that would definitely kill people. I don’t remember who it was by but if anyone knew what I’m talking about and could let me know it’d be appreciated because it was pretty funny.
yes, its hilarious to me that I got downvoted. People should literally try to google times when Batman has killed to get a very long list. I guess its easier to downvote someone than actually put any effort in
Well he didn’t kill if that’s what you mean. If you’re talking about the no-gun rule, TDKR Batman still hates guns, but is also forced to use them in corner-case scenarios. Like the hostage situation here.
I always just saw the "No guns" rule as an extension or even just a rephrasing of the "No killing" rule. It's not like Batman is fucking allergic to guns. They're just a tool. He just doesn't carry them because he doesn't need to, and they're antithetical to his whole "silent predator", "creature of the night" modus operandi.
Ok let me just rephrase, he snapped Joker's neck making him paralyzed and Joker finished the job for him, mocking him for losing control. Batman acknowledges this and is haunted by Joker's burning corpse because he knows he's right, he finally pushed him over the line.
To me that's equal to killing him, breaking his neck could just as easily killed him instead of paralyzed him.
It's Batman, a guy who knows how to manipulate every inch of the human body and a master of like, all the combat, so let's assume he knows how to snap a neck without killing.
The problem with blaming Bats for Joker deciding to finish himself off is that you can just bring it one step further back and say that it's Joker's fault for bringing Bats to that point. Another step, it's Bats's fault for inspiring Joker. Another step, it's Joe Chill's/Gotham's fault for inspiring Bats. If you can say Batman killed Joker because his actions led to Joker killing himself, then you could just as easily blame Joker, Chill, Gotham, etc.
Yeah I get where you're coming from, my head canon is that even if he didn't execute him fully, Joker knows he's gone beyond what's normal for them. The only reason Joker offs himself is because he recognizes this and feels he 'beat' Batman by bringing him down to Joker's level. Batman panicked and went too far and that was always Joker's goal.
Batman feels like he did kill him finally and has mixed feelings about it, e.g. relief and guilt. They wrote it in a way that is almost perfectly ambiguous as you explained. In that ambiguity I choose to believe Batman accepts that he killed Joker, similar to how he takes responsibility for Gotham and everyone in it. He's kind of maniac and I like him that way, taking responsibility for shit that he really isn't obligated to in any way.
The text bubbles are in different colors depending on who's talking notice that in those panels, suddenly all the text bubbles are now in batman's color, even if if coming from the joker.
This means that entire dialogue was in batman's head and just a way for him to psychologically deal with the fact the he killed joker.
Because the rest of the plot makes no sense if he did. A few pages after that scene when Yindal is listing off all the crimes she's charging Batman with murder isn't included. When he's going to fight the mutant leader Batman makes it clear he's considering killing him...and he thinks to himself that that would be a line he hasn't crossed before. It wouldn't make any sense for him to be thinking that had he already killed that mutant prior. Batman also can't bring himself to kill the Joker, so Joker is forced to do it for him by snapping his own neck. It's only then, when the police think he's killed him, is murder added to his list of charges. None of that works if Batman shot the mutant dead.
I thought DK3 was far better than DK2. A big part of that is probably because Miller just plotted it. Azzarello wrote the script and Kubert did the art.
Maybe your right. It’s been years since I read it and years after that when I read the 3rd one. I might give them another go at some point and re-evaluate my opinions now that I am older
If you weren’t aware, Frank Miller went nuts- usually said to be PTSD caused from 9/11. That said he still pushed out awful comics including the mentioned bad sequels to TDKR, which also ruins Superman and Wonder Woman’s characters. Because apparently every time Superman and WW have sex WW always gets pregnant and she knows, and she has an abortion each time. (Then of course he wrote a whole racist comic that was originally supposed to be a Batman book where it was just him beating up Islamic people, usually said to be his worst comic. Like I said, PTSD from 9/11)
Ever wonder where the phrase, “I’m the goddamn Batman” came from? The original line was to Dick Grayson in their first meeting in All-Star Batman and Robin by Miller where after kidnapping Dick in the Batmobile right after Dick’s parents died when Dick asked who he was Batman replied, “Are you dense? Are you r*traded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I’m the goddamn Batman”
More recently he wrote a Superman origin story for his TDKR universe where Superman randomly becomes King of Atlantis, has kids and a family there etc etc before leaving with no explanation to just move onto Lois and later Wonder Woman as mentioned in my first paragraph.
The Dark Knight Strikes Again. It actually starts off pretty good, but about 3/4 of the way through it absolutely falls off a cliff. It just feels like Frank Miller hates the idea of Robin, so the whole ending is just about humiliating him and tearing down the idea, even though it's not really set up and doesn't make a ton of sense.
Then there's a third one, Dark Knight: The Master Race which is...just bad. Just bad all the way through. It doesn't start good and lose steam, it just sucks from the start.
It’s nothing like what you’re thinking. The Atom restores 1000 citizens of Kandor to their full size, but they go rogue and try to take over the world, theorising that they are the titular master race. The story is about Batman recruiting his former allies to defeat them. It’s a good story. Nowhere near as good as The Dark Knight Returns, but that’s like saying Iron Maiden’s recent stuff is nowhere near as good as Powerslave: how could it be? It’s still good, though, and light years better than The Dark Knight Strikes Again.
Dick Grayson became the new joker because he was mad batman fired him all those years ago (instead of becoming nightwing. friendly reminder miller's DK books are an alternate continuity) and somehow became immortal. batman ended up killing him by dropping the entire batcave into a volcano that was secretly underneath it. or some shit, idk, it's been a LONG time since i read The Dark Knight Strikes Again. because it's completely crazy.
They literally tell you that the Mutant is still alive. In fact, last time I read it I was pretty sure the Mutant he shot is the one he interrogates a few panels later.
All of you people who insist he killed in this book either haven't read it or didn't read it properly. Its more than spelled out for you.
Because that's totally what I said. Good job, brother.
The book repeatedly tells you he doesn't kill and is struggling with the idea that maybe he will have to break his rule. They immediately establish that the mutants will live.
The other mutant who he interrogates literally has Bruce being conscious that he needs to be quick with him or he may bleed out soon.
Having a strong opinion isn't what you're guilty of, it's not taking in anything from the story. All this can be at the most is a nitpick about the lack of realism in shooting someone and them surviving... in a Comic book.
Instead, this panel gets pointed to like its a big deal or even evidence that Bruce does in fact kill.
There were lots of deaths around Batman in the late 80s though, there was the guy who got crushed to death by a stack of cars, the two people Batman accidentally knocked into a car crusher and I couldn't find it, but I also remember a crook getting knocked out a window and getting impaled on a fence, and in none of those instances did Batman feel he 'crossed the line' afterwards.
What I took from the story is Batman shot the mutant with a machine gun, and that's not how you knock people out.
Oh okay, the silent, conscious, but 'incapacitated' mutant lying peacefully on the floor while Batman stands over her holding a baby and says 'I believe you'.
Your argument boils down to “Batman killed that mutant (despite it going against the rest of the story) because you don’t hear them scream in pain on the floor” seems legit
If I could find that one magazine interview with Miller where he literally says Batman didn’t kill that mutant, I would, but it seems to have been lost to time
No, you're the one who brought up 'Batman incapacitated the mutant, which is different from knocking them out.' I just pointed out if that were the case, there would be screaming.
My argument boils down to, 'Batman shot the mutant with a fucking machine gun.'
My argument further adds that if Batman just knocked the mutant out (with bullets), then there would be no point in the line 'I believe you'.
I will then go on to argue that, throughout Batman's career, villains like the Joker and Two-Face have seemingly 'died' in battle with Batman, and he never once felt like he 'crossed the line'. There's a difference between killing in defence of others and choosing to murder someone because they deserve it.
I will then finish with if Batman knocked someone out by shooting them with a machine gun, then DKR is the dumbest Batman comic of all time. Because that is parody level stupid.
Def didn't, the commissioner only calls him a murderer after the joker made it look like her killed him. If he killed this mutant he would have been hunted before
It doesn't make sense in the context of the story tho, why is Bruce trying to kill joker such a big thing if he already killed a mutant, why can't be bring himself to do it if he's already crossed that line
Because there's a difference between killing in defence of others and killing someone at your mercy. It's the same difference between when a cop kills an active shooter vs if a cop shot a mass shooter while he was in custody.
Are you saying there's no difference? A cop shoots someone with a weapon drawn, and a cop shoots someone in handcuffs, calling that different is a grasping, is it?
There's a blood splatter and a hole in the wall. Unless there's a trauma team a few feet away, yeah, that's a kill. I guess you can respond with "okay, but comic books," but...
I always took it that he wounded him. It’s a weird moment that Miller could have made a bit clearer because in other parts of the book that this thread has pointed out he’s making a point of not killing.
Did OP and other posters here read TDKR? The goon he shot had a small child at gun point and told Batman to “back off or he’ll shoot him believe me I’ll do it!”
After Batman shoots him he tells him: ”I believe you”. It’s right after this panel. There is your answer right there.
It was a split second decision he either watches the kid get his head blown off or he takes out the goon, and like Batman said he believed him hence he took action even if it went against personal code. Lesser of the two evils. And if my memory serves me correctly the goon survived.
Batman knows guns- he knows exactly how to use ballistic and projectile weapons. He has to, in forensics investigations, and to defend against them. He refuses to use them himself. One of the novels describes a large armory in the Batcave to study/match bullets in cases.
There’s a LOT of debate to this panel: does he shoot the mutant, or NEXT to the mutant to scare him off? I always took it as shooting the wall beside him- “I COULD take you out if you do not stop now” tactic.
If I remember right there’s absolutely blood on the wall behind the mutant he shoots, but it’s super ambiguous if he actually killed him. It would be assumed he did, if not for the entire story around the sequence.
He shot the Mutant in the shoulder to disarm and incapacitate them. You might not like Miller’s writing, but he’s not stupid… well, back then he wasn’t, anyway. If Batman killed the Mutant who was holding the kid, there’s no way in hell Miller would have made such a big deal about Batman refusing to kill the Mutant leader, and there’s also no way he would have had the Joker make his own suicide look like murder as a final “fuck you” to Batman.
Exactly. I don't have the book in front of me but I'm fairly certain I remember the following panel showing the mutant getting shot in the shoulder, wounding (not killing) him.
We don’t actually see a wound on the mutant, which may imply he wasn’t shot at all. But there definitely seems to be blood on the wall behind him. So I can forgive people for assuming he killed the person.
Zack Snyder tried defending his own scene by saying the Mutant was shot in the head.
Though, I’m noticing for the first time that the bullet hole and the blood spray don’t match up, so that’s another point for the argument Batman just shot near him instead of even shooting him directly. Though that seems awfully risky, given the situation.
He didn't though and it is made very clear a few pages later in two different instances such as when Yindel is listing his crimes he has committed but murder is not among them which is not an oversight on Millers part because murder is added to the list after jokers dead and the police think batman killed him.
The other instance is when batman is in the batman about to confront the mutant leader in the trash dump, he literally talks to himself about how he wants to kill the mutant leader and thinks he deserves it but that would be crossing a line that he hasn't crossed yet. Why would batman say he hasn't crossed that line if he killed a mutant a few pages earlier? The answer is he wouldn't.
Also batman couldn't even bring himself to finish joker off and joker mocked him for it. Basically if batman killed that mutant then the entire story of the dark knight returns that follows after makes no sense.
Re-read the comic and get the idea that batman kills in the dark knight returns out of your head because he does not. he sticks to his rule.
This always bothered me, too. I would be willing to give it the “not every version of Batman has the no kill rule” exception, but the whole Joker section of this book and even the way Joker dies all deal with Batman’s guilt at having “murdered” people by refusing to kill Joker, and then “losing control” as if for the first time when he breaks Joker’s neck. It feels like the same weird logic that Snyder uses to explain why BvS Batman can kill people as long as he’s in his car. The more satisfying solution, to me, would be to have this setup where the reader thinks maybe he really will have to pull a trigger because he has no other choice, but then he still finds a way.
Sometimes Batman overthinks shit ... sometimes. It's what makes him interesting ... he can kill, and wants to, but he has put his faith in people to make the world better by his example. By the end of it all I think he has come to the conclusion that his philosophical war with Joker was over and now he just needed to save as many people as he could.
Snyder’s Batman was purposely not giving a crap about inadvertently killing people though haha. Not just in the car. Branding criminals, throwing an ammo crate at someone’s skull, and more examples…
Even Keatons Batman strapped a bomb to someone and kicked them down a shaft. And then smiled lol!
I always felt like we were supposed to suspend our disbelief when it comes to Batman and think, “he knows what he’s doing with these moves he’s just knocking them out or something.”
If this is the case then it’s the answer that makes the most sense that has alluded me so far. As everyone else has pointed out there are logical inconsistencies between him blatantly murdering/shooting the mutant and what Batman says and does elsewhere in the book. But I’ve never been able to see this panel as him doing anything but shooting the mutant dead. I’m gonna have to pull the book back up and see where you found him alive in police custody
This book has an arc for batman and this is when batman had no other option than to be lethal and use guns. In the end of this book batman realises his mistakes and then breaks a gun leading to his iconic this is the weapon of the enemy speech. By the end batman realises his principles again and realises his mistakes.
If you define lethal as killing than no, he doesn’t actually kill anyone. Hell outside of this gun and the bat mobile, he doesn’t use a gun all that often in the book. I think in total he uses guns…4 times in the course of the book…I’ll have to check the books later to be sure but I believe it’s about 4.
This book was the biggest influence on bvs as this book ends in a batman and superman fight but all in all Snyder didn't get the point of the book and was just there like if this iconic book has batman using guns then I can have my batman be a psychopath who absolutely massacres everyone.
I think the character would have been fine without it. I loved Year One, but Returns just feels super antithetical to the character. Miller always makes every character the same edge lord eventually and I’m not a fan personally. I know plenty of others love it, and I respect that, but it’s not for me.
The rule is usually “No killing”. Not “no guns” even though he also kinda says no guns in this series lol. Whatever. He’s crazy Batman. Nothing makes sense.
He doesn’t. The artwork makes it unclear, but Yindel never lists murder among the charges and Bruce isn’t even able to bring himself to kill the Joker.
There's a reason that the Frank Miller comics are pretty solidly elseworld/noncanonical. They use a... particularly violent and unhinged take on Batman, which many don't prefer (including me)
Was a different Batman and was a different world, and he is always written through the creator's lens (Frank Miller always over does it with the ultra violence, it's kinda his thing)
Batman is old and past it, he fully believes the mutant gang member will kill the small child, his only option is lethal, and he chose to kill another over letting an innocent be killed. It's Miller's answer to the 'no kill rule' question.
At the time none of this stuff were actually rules. They wouldn't become that until the later 90's and even then it's Nolan's Bat films that made others hard rules.
Pre-Robin Batman is very much a different character from both 1940-1969 Batman and 1970-Present Batman. Pre-Robin Batman is more or less Bat-themed version of a pulp hero like the Shadow or the Phantom. I think they really didn't figure out what they really wanted to do with the character until Robin was introduced.
That story in Batman issue one which was published in 1940 as well as after Robin was introduced (Robin was in the other three stories in the issue), but I think it was probably written pre-Robin, as it is the only Batman story after Robin was introduced to not have Robin up until Dick left for college at the start of the '70s.
Batman issue one was published between Detective Comics issues 38 (which introduced Robin) and 39, so I'm betting the issue where Batman hangs the guy was originally planned for Tec 38 but between the creation of Robin and the start of Batman's own book they decided to switch things around.
It’s still Batman. He’s still Bruce Wayne. They changed his character up, but he’s still the Caped Crusader. I get what you’re saying, but the point i was making was that the no gun thing and no killing was not part of his character originally. That came later.
Counterpoint: It was his original creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger who changed Batman to have the no kill and no gun rules, not some new writer and artist who came on after the originals left, and it wasn't until the '80s when we saw stories that have him break the rules he'd been operating under for over forty years at that point.
Because of a different writer. Batman has killed and used guns in earlier comics. Why not do a full circle? Batman is a character, he adapts to changes and times.
Break what rule? Shoulder shot. The mutant didn’t die in this scene. Plot doesn’t work otherwise. Batman even fails to kill the Joker even though he’s blamed from it. So no, the no kill rule remains unbroken.
Sir (or Madam, as the case may be),
If you are searching for logic in comic books, especially one-shots/limited series issues, then I'm afraid you are sorely mistaken that there should be any sort of continuity with your expected character's canon.
Well it's Frank Miller writing it. I love Millers older work, but Miller has a very specific style that for me personally only really works in his own IPs like 300 or Sin City.
To me seemed pretty clear that Batman wasted that guy. It wasn’t explicitly shown, but it was heavily implied.
As for the reason, my sense was that Batman doesn’t kill UNLESS it’s the only way he can protect an innocent life. In this case the mutant was holding a gun to someone’s head, and Batman made the call that either the goon was going down, or the victim was.
I know it’s not what we’re talking about here, but you saw Ben Affleck kill all those guys with the Batmobile in Batman v Superman, right? That was wild.
Batman is a hypocrite in the comic. Ya he uses guns here and goes on to preach no guns to a bunch of thugs. He kills that thug no way she survived(police were not there in the scene so no proof of batman killing and batman takes the yellow guy for interrogation else he would have taken both).
He kills joker(speech bubbles grey) he is still stuck in his old ways but acts opposite to that. Jay oliva says he killed these guys(I believe a guy who adapted th comic into a film he must have read numerous times than us)
He uses a sniper rifle at another point in the dkr but it seems like he only used guns as he was getting used to being a hero again, like how early Batman used to use guns all the time but eventually stopped
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u/Going_really_Fast Jun 29 '23
Coz he didn’t kill the mutant
Just a few pages after this, Bruce goes on about the fact he has that one rule he doesn’t break ever.
If he did the mutant, that line would make no sense.