I Don’t Have To Save You: 10 Times Batman Has Killed

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... 10) Punches Crook Into Acid Vat - Detective Comics #27 Every Batman fan knows the most commonly given origin story for the Joker. While foiling the Red Hood's attack on the Ace Chemicals factory, Batman accidentally causes the crook to fall into a vat of acid. This, of course, turns him into the infamous Clown Prince of Crime. In Batman's early days, however, things were a bit different. Back then, there was no ambiguity to the act - the Dark Knight would straight up punch people into vats of acid. And they wouldn't even come back as supervillains. They would just die a horrible, painful death. At least, that's what happened in the Caped Crusader's first ever appearance in Detective Comics #27 back in 1939. The way the event is framed doesn't suggest that Batman was intending to push the crook into the vat, but he definitely doesn't feel bad about it. "A fitting end for his kind," he soullessly quips. 9) Snapping A Criminal's Neck - Detective Comics #30 We've seen the move dozens of times across Batman's history. The crook goes after the Dark Knight with a gun, but our hero is too skulking and cunning for them and swoops in from out of nowhere, disarming them and saving the day. A version of that scene appears in Detective Comics #30, but the result is very different. Mikhail, the henchman of the villainous Doctor Death, pokes his head out of the window in an attempt to locate Batman. In classic Caped Crusader style, he unexpectedly swings down from the roof and... snaps the guy's neck with his foot. Or, as the caption colourfully puts it: "There is a sickening snap as the Cossack's neck breaks under the mighty pressure of the Batman's foot." Nowadays, Batman would simply kick the crook's gun out of his hand, as would be the obvious move here. But nope, the hero had a craving for some neck-snapping back then. In terms of sheer needless brutality, this might just be Batman's most shocking kill of the Golden Age. 8) Hangs A Mental Patient - Batman #1 Even when Batman got his own solo comic series, he still didn't give up his murderous ways. For example, we give you this shockingly cruel killing of pretty much an innocent. In Batman #1, Dr. Hugo Strange has turned the patients of his mental hospital into marauding "monster men." Though these are simply people with psychological disorders who've been experimented on, Batman shows no remorse for the monster men. He first guns down the truck holding them in order to stop them from reaching the city and then strings up one that's escaped with rope from his Batplane. And the rope is tied around his neck... Yup, Batman straight up strangles a (monster) man to death. Was there a way to neutralize the threat instead of death? Totally, but early Batman was clearly the kind of guy who just liked to go for the most permanent solution when faced with a problem. 7) Bricking Up KGBeast - Batman #420 Let's fast forward in time to 1988. By this point, Batman had been a non-lethal hero for many decades. At first, the enforcing of the new comics code of conduct in the 1950s softened the character and then his now traditional no-killing rule was established. During the late eighties, however, comic book creators started to put the dark back into the Dark Knight once again. Take this shocking scene from Batman #420. When battling KGBeast in the sewers, Batman decides that he cannot beat the Russian supervillain in a straight-up fight and so takes drastic action. With his knowledge of Gotham's sewer tunnels, he tricks KGBeast into a sealed-off room and barricades him inside before cooly walking away. Later on, it was retconned that Batman had gone off to tell the authorities where to find the criminal. We're not buying that, though. The clear intention of the original comic is that Batman is leaving his enemy there to die. As the caption that voices Batman's internal monologue says, "sometimes you have to ignore the rules." 6) Strangling The Joker? - The Killing Joke Alan Moore's The Killing Joke graphic novel completely redefined the rivalry between Batman and the Joker. In its presentation of the pair being two sides of the same coin - they have both suffered "one bad day" which irrevocably changed them - it's impacted on just about every on-screen adaptation of the Joker ever since. One other innovation it potentially made was having Batman actually kill his greatest enemy. Throughout the story, Bats warned Joker that their fight can't go on forever and one will eventually kill the other. At the end of the book, Batman comes to arrest the villain after his most despicable scheme yet - paralyzing Barbara Gordon in an attempt to drive Commissioner Gordon mad. Instead of fighting, Mr. J tells Batman a joke about two insane asylum inmates (who clearly represent Bats and Joker). After a moment, the Dark Knight and the Clown Prince of Crime laugh together at the joke. But then, as the 'camera' draws away from them, the laughter stops. It's a long-held belief by fans that Batman has finally killed the Joker here. The sudden halting of the laughter, and the ominous final silhouette of what looks like Batman grabbing the villain by the neck, seems to confirm it. Moore has admitted that he didn't intend to imply this, but that hasn't stopped fans from reading it that way. 5) The Joker And Various Henchmen - Batman/Batman Returns One time when the Dark Knight definitely kills the Joker is in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie. In contrast to the comics of the time, Michael Keaton's Batman isn't afraid to kill when necessary, or when he just plain feels like it. In that way, this Batman is a pretty faithful version of the Golden Age character. At the big climax in Gotham Cathedral, Batman casually kicks the Joker's henchman back down the storeys-tall stairway to their deaths. Then, when the Joker himself is escaping on his helicopter, Batman catches his leg with a batarang and pulls him down, thereby meeting a messy end on the pavement below. This is a surprising development, but it does sort of fit with the reinvented storyline of the movie, in which Batman wants revenge on Joker for killing his parents. What's really shocking though is this moment from the following movie, 1992's Batman Returns. When Penguin's henchmen are terrorizing Gotham, one clown-faced crook is planning on setting off a bomb. Batman catches him but, instead of switching the device off, he presses the bomb into the henchman's chest and pushes him off the bridge. He then stalks off into the night as the poor guy gets blown to smithereens. Oh, and I forgot the creepiest part. Batman smiles at him as he sends him to his death. Are we sure this isn't Joker in disguise? 4) Ra's Al Ghul And The League of Shadows - Batman Begins Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy generally keeps to Batman's no-killing rule, except in the infamous moment in Batman Begins. As Ra's al Ghul is trapped in a crashing tram car, Batman tells his former mentor: "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you." Er, I'm pretty sure that still counts as killing him, Bats. Or at least, it's manslaughter. While this scene is vexing enough, there's actually another instance of Batman ignoring his own rule earlier in the same movie. When Ra's orders Bruce to kill a local criminal, he refuses. So, in retaliation, Bruce starts a fight which ends with the entirety of the League of Shadows burning to death. So, in order to not kill a man, you ended up killing dozens? Hey, you're the World's Greatest Detective, Bruce, if it makes sense to you, we'll go along with it. If you think about it, and if you subscribe to the view that Batman's responsible for these deaths, then Christian Bale's Batman might even have a higher kill count than the more outwardly overzealous Michael Keaton. 3) Burns Criminals Alive (While Having Sex With Black Canary) - All-Star Batman & Robin Frank Miller practically invented the modern image of the gritty, violent Batman in his classic The Dark Knight Returns. While that story is acclaimed, Miller doubled down on the less savoury aspects of Batman's character so much over the years that he eventually became a parody of himself. Take this ridiculously appalling moment in All-Star Batman & Robin, for example. When battling a bunch of crooks, Batman decides the most humane way of dealing with them is by setting them on fire with a molotov cocktail. To make this scene even weirder, he then has sex with Black Canary - still surrounded by their burning enemies - complete with their costumes on. All-Star Batman & Robin is full of some of the most insane Batman moments ever committed to page - yes, this is the same series in which the hero decreed that immortal line: "I'm the goddam Batman!" - but this one really takes the biscuit. Not only does he needlessly slaughter these people, but he apparently finds it sexually arousing as well. 2) Death To Darkseid - Final Crisis #6 Unlike the rest of this list, which is mostly made up of Golden Age tales, movie adaptations or out-of-continuity comics, this new example of Batman killing someone was actually 100% part of the usual DC comics canon. In Final Crisis, Darkseid is once again planning universal conquest. Of course, with a team consisting of super-powerful Kryptonians and Amazons and whatnot, the one who engaged him in a fatal stand-off was... the mortal Batman. Deciding that this situation was important enough for him to ditch his no-guns rule, Batman shot Darkseid with a Radion Bullet (which is fatal to New Gods). Unfortunately, Darkseid's Omega Beams caught him in the crossfire, killing Batman (well, he later revealed that it just sent him back in time, but whatever). This is a hugely interesting moment as it claims that if Batman has to decide between his moral code and to ensure the safety of Earth and the universe, he'll decide to break his personal ethics to save the world. 1) Everyone In The Warehouse - Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice The most recent incident of Batman getting all trigger-happy occurred in 2016's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. While practically everyone agreed that Ben Affleck was actually an inspired choice to play the Dark Knight, the presentation of the character in the movie rubbed a lot of fans up the wrong way. Taking inspiration from The Dark Knight Returns, it depicted a Bruce Wayne who employs ultra-violent tactics against his enemies due to the trauma of his past. Apart from mowing people down in his Batmobile, the most notable example of this is the warehouse fight scene, in which Bruce does a favour for his new pal Superman and saves Martha Kent from Lex Luthor's henchmen. In a hugely impressive, if controversial, sequence, Batman... the appropriate word would be... destroys the criminals, with most of them ending up dead. If they did make it out alive, they probably suffered from either life-changing or critical injuries. In short, this scene makes both Michael Keaton and Christian Bale's versions look like saints. Even neck-snappy Golden Age Batman would be afraid of him.

I Don’t Have To Save You: 10 Times Batman Has Killed

8) Hangs A Mental Patient – Batman #1