An interesting article by Jacob Brogan for Slate Magazine (you can read it here) briefly goes into the history of violence in comic books and why it is that those comic book Superheroes often have a code against killing.
Specifically he mentions one of the more notorious Batman stories of the past, “The Giants of Hugo Strange” which appeared nearly 75 years ago in Batman #1.
He notes that the grim goings on in the story (Batman has no qualms whatsoever in killing Hugo Strange’s oddball monsters) were received with concerned notes from parents and that the editors behind the scenes of the book ordered writer/co-creator Bill Finger to ease up on the violence following that story.
What is fascinating to me is how this may well have changed -for the better- the whole idea of superheroes, something Mr. Brogan goes into as well. Even as a very young comic book reader I always admired the fact that heroes fought for good against at times very vicious villains but never descended to their level.
The Joker could and did kill, but Batman would never take him out. Arrest him, imprison him, even rough him up, but never kill.
So too it was with Superman, though in his very, very early stories he also engaged in some roughhousing and possible murder as well.
So ingrained was the idea that heroes didn’t kill that one of the most startling things I experienced very early on as a child was the very first episode of the Six Million Dollar Man TV series (as opposed to the films released just before) entitled Population Zero.
In that episode, which owed a great deal of (ahem) credit to the book and movie The Andromeda Strain, an entire small rural town appears to have been killed off. Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, is sent to investigate and he dons a space suit and walks into the town. Everyone appears to have died simultaneously, their bodies littered all over the place. But then, they awaken, seemingly all normal.
It turns out a master villain has knocked them all out with a sound wave weapon, one that can be calibrated, like the Star Trek phasers, to kill.
As the episode goes on, Steve Austin is captured and the evil scientist, it turns out, is well aware of the bionic project. His sound wave project was declined funding by the government in favor of the bionic project. He is delighted in having captured Steve Austin and imprisons him in a large meat freezer, noting that his bionic parts will freeze and he’ll die there while the villain uses his weapon to kill those who are pursuing him.
Steve Austin gets away, and in one of the most exciting climaxes of any TV show I had seen up to that point, rips a metal post from the ground and hurls it at the bad guy’s van. It hits the van and the whole thing, including all the villains, blows up. All the villains die in the explosion.
To say the least, I was shocked by this ending.
Steve Austin had killed instead of apprehended the bad guys! He knew they were using power from the power lines around the area to fuel their device. He could have taken them out and rendered their weapon useless. Instead, he ends the threat there.
Completely.
It seemed the late 60’s/early 70’s were a time when the idea of what made a hero a hero was being tested. You had Clint Eastwood in the Spaghetti Westerns and, afterwards, as Dirty Harry. These roles provided a new template of what made a “hero”. In this case, especially concerning Dirty Harry, our hero pushed the limits in decidedly shocking (at the time) ways. So too in comic books you had villains who were more vicious and, as the decade of the 70’s moved on, heroes that would kill (Wolverine being a prime example).
In the 1980’s movies took several steps forward and suddenly you had heroes that killed villains by the scores. Included in this mix were characters like Rambo.
Today, the state of the hero is in transition. In Batman Begins, a film I happened to like quite a bit, I was more than a little irritated by the ultimate resolution between Batman and Ra’s Al Gul. When Batman has Gul helpless in the train at the end of the film, he SHOULD have taken him from the train before it crashed and jailed him, instead of using the silly “I don’t kill, I just choose to not save you” idiocity. By choosing to do nothing, he has very much made a choice and Gul dies in the wreck, a victim of Batman’s chosen inaction.
In the recent Superman and first Avengers film we deal with the destructive effects of a fight between gods yet both films try to sanitize the ultimate results of these destructive fights vis a vis the civilians caught in between. While the Man of Steel film was rightly called out for showing destruction that should have resulted in scores of casualties, fewer fans called out essentially the same thing shown in Avengers.
The point is that the concept of the superhero is an evolving one. The first comic book superheroes were influenced by Doc Savage and The Shadow, two of the greatest pulp creations. These characters, especially The Shadow, who were not at all adverse to killing off their current villain problem. Superheroes underwent a drastic change to where they did not kill and were always on the side of truth and justice, yet that changed as mentioned above.
Where do we go from here?
We’ll have to wait and see.