We all know the legend of Batman and how he came to be, right? Due to the trauma of losing his parents at such a young age, Bruce Wayne swore to protect the city of Gotham but would never use a gun or take a life to do so.
Except, of course, in over 75 years of history spanning various media, that rule hasn’t always held up and Batman has murdered enough people to make the Joker blush. And we’re not talking about more violent alternate Batmans, either. For instance, Azrael or Thomas Wayne in the Flashpoint universe. No, Bruce Wayne himself has broken his own ethics and killed a lot of folks over the years.
And he’s inventive, too. Batman has murdered his enemies in a variety of fun and creative ways across the decades: punching them over a precipice, strangling them to death, starvation, oxygen deprivation, snapping their neck… You name it, the Dark Knight has probably tried it out on his foes.
Encompassing the character’s beginnings in the Golden Age of comics through to his gritty phase in the 1980s to his rare recent lapses into murder, these are 10 of Batman’s most brutal and shocking kills. Let’s run through them in chronological order…
