Cynicism!

This essay contains major spoilers for Dark Joker: The Wild , Batman Bloodstorm, and middlin’ spoilers for The Nail.

My esteemed colleague Alex Knapp has a post in which he links to an essay on Consequentialism that discusses The Batman’s refusal to kill the Joker and frames it in the ideals of The Batman’s relationship to Gotham’s legitimate authority.

I am pleased that man’s reach exceeds his grasp, don’t get me wrong, but this seems very much an idealized justification for something far more insidious. Before we get into the justification, though, let’s look at all of the times where The Batman *HAS* killed the Joker:

Dark Joker: The Wild , Batman Bloodstorm, and in the JLA story The Nail… just off the top of my head. (“But those are Elseworlds titles!”, I hear you point out correctly. “Yes, they are. I’ll get to that.”, I rejoin.)

Now we also have to take into account that, pre-code, The Batman *DID* kill people. He killed them, like, all the time. Throwing them off buildings, strangulations, guns (yes, guns!)… which leads us to the question: So why doesn’t The Bat kill the Joker?

It’s pretty easy to put the blame on the Comics Code Authority, of course. You don’t want to show the hero as doing anything particularly wicked in a kiddie book. Hey, have The Bat hand Joker over to the authorities. Problem solved! Until, of course, the 70’s and 80’s when we get to the days of the “dark and gritty”…

Which brings us to a guy who was a pretty big seller on the other side of the fence: The Punisher. Great character, right? Great concept. Except… week after week after week after week he kills folks. So put him up against the Mafia. Great! He can plow his way through nameless mooks, kills a handful of lesser “made” guys, and, at the end of the story arc, kills the Capo. Woo! Good story! Now we need another one. So what do you do? You have Castle move down to Jersey and do it again. Great! That gave us a great six issues! Now we need six more. So have him go back to New York City and kill one of the Four Families. Great! Now we need another! This, as you can see, can get repetitive. What we need is someone who can stand toe-to-toe with Castle, right?

Kingpin? Jigsaw? Well, the problem with each of those is that Punisher kills people. Like, all the time. Like, all the time all the time. So he fails to kill the Kingpin once. Okay, no biggie. Get a sniper rifle and take the Kingpin out from a rooftop. Oh, that failed? Okay, no biggie, get some charges and blow up a helicopter. Oh, that failed? And so on and so forth. Eventually you have to either portray Punisher as a loser who can’t kill a guy or you have to have Punisher kill the guy to end the story. Jigsaw isn’t a nemesis as much as a running gag. Sure, you can have Punisher not find the body once or twice. Sure, you can have the Big Bad sacrifice an underling. But, eventually, you’re stuck with the limitations of what makes Punisher so enticing in the first place: Unlike the other heroes, Frank Castle actually kills his enemies.

Which brings us back to the Joker. He’s a great character that you will pay good money to see Batman fight again and again. He’s got such great potential that you’re pretty sure that the next 25 years will have as many pretty sweet Joker stories as the last 25 years. And, I’d wager, you’re looking forward to paying good money to read or watch them (I mean, hey… if you got to this point of the essay…).

And DC knows this. What is the best way to make The Batman a compelling character who doesn’t fall into the trap Frank Castle fell into?

Give The Batman a code against killing. Now you can write Joker stories until doomsday (no pun intended). If something awful happens and you need to write (or read) a story where Batman finally says “the risk is too great to let Joker live, given the 15 elementary schools he blew up the last time he got out”, you always have the option of Elseworlds.

The reason Batman can’t kill the Joker is because of you, dear reader. At the end of the day, the reason the Joker still lives is, as they say, because you demanded it.