Coding Failure

Soon after he was introduced in Detective Comics #27, Batman gained an important part of his moral code: No killing. Traumatized by the murders of his parents when he was just 8, young Bruce Wayne made the eradication of crime his lifelong mission. But he understood that if he included lethal measures in that mission he would become what he fought, so even though his great skill would make it easy to do so, he will not eradicate crime by eradicating criminals.

This has been a keystone of Batman through his long history -- despite the mayhem and death wrongdoers may inflict Batman's goal will always be their apprehension and imprisonment. Even his singular arch-enemy, the Joker, can't push him to break this code.

Recently, a trial with the DC Universe streaming app has let me read a lot of Batman comics, something I hadn't done in probably 30 years. The art form has developed quite a bit in that time frame, offering audiences more realism in both character and dialogue. We've also seen waves of what's derisively called "grimdark" rise and fall. The word describes how writers and artists, aiming for realism and authenticity, use darker storylines and anti-heroic characterizations to get there. The talented ones succeed but the majority fail, meaning we get simplistic and unrealistic stories that don't even entertain. Some creators can't even really manage the gritty and dark very well, offering readers panel after panel of grimaces, gravity-defying breasts and gore and calling it "mature."

Batman's tragic origin has pretty much always made him a character on the dark side of things, with the Adam West era a major exception. So while he has had some relatively lighter periods, he has mostly tended towards grim. What I noticed in scanning the years of Batman stories I had missed was how his colorful Rogues Gallery of villains had darkened considerably. Some newer villains weren't really criminals at all, just variants on the Hannibal Lecter hunter-of-humans sociopath. They didn't pull off heists or try to amass control of criminal enterprises -- they just killed people in whatever ways the writer's imagination and remaining minimal restraint of the publishing house would let an artist draw.

More than a couple of the existing villains morphed along those lines as well, the Joker being one. He was no longer a deranged criminal who indulged his insanity by littering his crimes with clown themes or patterning them after practical jokes. The Joker had never been shy about how many bodies he would leave in his wake in order to make his score -- in one issue of his own comic he had designed a trap to clog an important traffic bridge with dead motorists to delay law enforcement response time while he stole money. In an early Batman comic, he painted out the white line of a highway at a cliff's edge curve and painted in a new one that sent a bus over the side so he could loot the passengers' bodies.

But in the years since Tim Burton's first Batman movie and Frank Miller's landmark The Dark Knight Returns miniseries, Batman series writers have moved the "Clown Prince of Crime" into someone who's obsessed with Batman himself. His crimes aim to gain Batman's attention or somehow strike at Batman's ethical code or torment him, or to kill for killing's sake. Michael Caine as Alfred in The Dark Knight movie describes him best as a man "who just wants to watch the world burn."

Sometimes a story makes the conflict between Batman's code of not killing and the Joker's code of always killing (after a little bit of maiming) clear, but the end of the tale always winds up with Batman refusing to cross his line despite the Joker's heinous acts. As I read some of the development in this direction, it occurred to me that by making the Joker focus on Batman and the relationship between them, we've been pushed into a dead-end. Batman's code may save him from crossing over to some dark side, but it has sentenced hundreds of people to execution at the hands of a man who could have been stopped (speaking "in-universe" fashion, of course. DC knows Batman-Joker confrontations mean sales and they aren't about to kill that off just because they've painted themselves into a plot-hole corner).

A few panels from a more recent Batman story illustrate this. Writer Tom King had been leading up to a marriage between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle, who is also Catwoman. The Joker's obsession with Batman manifested as anger at not being chosen "best man" in Batman's wedding and murdering an entire wedding party, guests included, in order to draw Batman to the church. Batman finally confronts the Joker, who takes the sole survivor, the bride, as hostage before "accidentally" blowing her brains out, complete with an aw-shucks, "'Cause I suppose I just did" and an "Oops." "Hey you guys?" the Joker asks plaintively. "Any of you alive? I need a hostage so Batman won't punch me."

Aside from the grotesquerie of King playing mass murder for laughs, the incident illustrates how Batman's refusal to kill this modern, Batman-obsessed Joker is itself the direct cause of at least a dozen deaths. The way the character is written today is very simple. The Joker will kill people. He will kill them in order to get to Batman or just because he has a new idea of a way he wants to torment and kill them. Their deaths will further no scheme for personal gain or wealth -- they will only serve to lure and taunt Batman or feed the Joker's desire to kill and inflict pain. And the Batman could end it with a stab, a neck twist, a long drop from a tall rooftop, etc. Since he refuses to take those steps, he causes more deaths when the Joker inevitably escapes Arkham Asylum and goes on another spree. Probably more deaths than he saves.

I don't want to be misunderstood. The Batman's code against killing is in fact a vital part of who he is. The 1990s were littered with also-ran masked vigilantes who did kill their enemies, often in boring job lots. The tightrope walked by a man who must stop crime by any means he can but who must not cross the line to adopt the criminal's ultimate sanction makes for a great character theme and builds depth into every conflict.

Moreover, the code is right. Batman operates largely outside the law even while he tries to hold criminals accountable to it. If he doesn't set rules for himself and follow them, he will all too soon operate with no rules at all. If he doesn't distinguish between himself and them in some way before he begins, then he really won't be any different. The problem is not with the Batman or his code; it's that the code doesn't have room for the current version of the Joker and his obsession with Batman himself. As long as that remains his dominant trait, then we will continue to have the unsatisfying non-solution of beating the crap out of a man who considers that part of doing business and a sign that the object of his obsession still cares.

Is the solution to the impasse, then, finally killing the Joker? In the real world it probably would be, but let's remember we're talking about a world where a man wears black longjohns and a mask with pointed ears in order to fight crime. It's fictional. The real solution is for writers to dial the Joker back and to stop being endlessly fascinated with how many ways they can show him creepily obsessed with Batman.

In Miller's 1986 alternative reality, a catatonic Joker reanimates once he learns that Batman has unretired and is once again fighting crime in Gotham City. The Joker's therapist, the touchy-feely Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, has argued that Batman himself is the real menace to society and that he commits by proxy the crimes attributed to his villainous opponents. Like much of the fictional audience the reader scoffs at this kind of psychobabble. Wolper's goofy misplaced sensitivity gets him (and an entire TV show audience) killed, indicating we readers should not accept his unrealistic vision of human nature. But we learn several pages later that ironically Batman actually agrees with it and considers himself to have murdered the Joker's victims by not crossing the line and killing the Joker when he could.

Writers of today's Batman stories, whether they agree with Wolper's idea or not, have created the exact situation he describes and laid the groundwork for an endlessly unsatisfying cycle of brutality and bloodshed. Lay the delicious dialogue and appetizing artwork out on the slices of dark wry humor, but the meat is still missing.

And what's left is starting to smell.