Batman and Comic Book Murder

Batman doesn’t kill. It’s sort of his whole thing.

It’s something I’ve always respected about the Caped Crusader, even when it narratively is used to his detriment. Batman as a franchise, in all of its ebbs and flows, does come from a place of idealism: the idea that one bad day can turn someone into a force for good just as it can rot them to the core.

Batman doesn’t kill. I promise. He’s better than that. But he will maim. He will break bones, dislocate joints, throw a mook into a wall, punch them hard enough to knock out teeth, detonate explosives next to them, shoot them with a taser, throw razor-sharp batarangs at them, leave them hanging from a gargoyle upside-down and then cut them down so they fall, restrained, on their heads.

In spite of this article I’ll still affirm that Rocksteady’s Arkham games are the platonic ideal of a superhero game. They crucially allow the player to feel like Batman. We stalk around shadows, picking off armed goons, investigating mysteries, putting together the pieces to solve problems and save every life we can.

It’s a shame, then, that these cool moments are sandwiched between brutal group beatdowns.

Let me start with this: it’s normal for games that are at their heart power fantasies to include spectacle, and what more streamlined way than to show Bruce Wayne’s combat hyper-competence? Batman is capable of juggling a dozen foes at once, blocking and countering and entering a sort of violent flow-state. I have no issue with this on principle. Marvel’s Spider Man lifts the freeflow combat from Arkham pretty much entirely.

But there are some crucial differences: Peter Parker is a lot spindlier than Bruce Wayne, and his combat is a lot more about webbing up the bad guys. Every gadget in some way is customized to bind and restrain the goons, not just to incapacitate with injury. Spider-Man weaves and dances and flows around his enemies.

Arkham’s Batman breaks their arm, and slams their jaw into the curb. They don’t move afterwards.

Batman doesn’t kill. He just inflicts permanent harm. There’s a very concrete difference, you see, that makes him still an unequivocally good guy.

It always leaves a sour taste in my mouth when Batman seldom tries to inflict the same harm on his Rogues Gallery that he does their goons. He carries the Joker’s body out like a fallen friend at the end of Arkham City, but pummels every last guy between them – those carrying out the clown’s orders – into concussions or worse. And he hits hard! The game’s acoustics go out of their way to accent the force. The climactic knockout of every battle is accompanied by a booming gunshot, and each combo finisher comes with a sickening crack that aligns with Bruce choke-slamming a goon or punching them so hard their body instantly goes limp and they curl into a fencing response (a telltale sign of a severe brain injury).

Like most games, too, the Arkham series escalates. Arkham Asylum’s minions are almost entirely from Blackgate prison, convicted murderers and serial rapists and god knows who else, all of whom are openly complicit in Joker’s scheme to take over the titular island. The sequels muddy the binary nature of good and evil. The titular open-air Concentration Camp in Arkham City does have dangerous offenders locked away behind the walls, many of whom shack up with one of the warring super criminals. However, not all of these guys are of that same ilk. Arkham City is also used to house political dissidents, opponents of Hugo Strange, and petty criminals. As Batman weaves about and starts combat with a flying kick to the back of a goon’s head, I have to ask… just how many of these guys have joined up with the gangs specifically to survive? There are few alternatives. Like many real world prisons, the choices seem to be to harden up quickly or be slaughtered by the wolves in the pen.

Arkham Knight takes it even further: After Scarecrow’s terroristic threats, Gotham City is evacuated ahead of Halloween Night. We see buses of people departing the metropolis. But how many get left behind? How many homeless people and people in poverty, people who have been chewed up and spat out by systemic violence, were left behind?

Batman doesn’t kill. But he does escalate.

As the games get bigger and punchier so do Batman’s toys. Arkham Knight’s big shake-up is the implementation of the Batmobile. It isn’t the sleek sporty car from the days of old, though. It’s a god-damned tank.

Batman has to fight other combat vehicles, but the game doesn’t stop us from running people over with the vehicle – “painlessly” launching a guy into a building after making contact at 80 mph. We also get to use the Batmobile’s cannon to shoot on-foot thugs. Batman doesn’t kill. But he will shoot an unarmored guy in the head with a 40mm rubber bullet.

If it’s not immediately fatal, but the guy dies three hours later from a brain bleed, maybe that was his own fault.

Do a lot of the enemies in the Arkham games deserve to be locked away? Definitely. Sometimes the goon chatter seems specifically cultivated to minimize the pit in my stomach whenever I pound a head into concrete. Here’s my issue: Batman has an endless amount of space in his belt for toys, but he doesn’t have handcuffs? The super criminals get detained and brought to the Gotham City Police Department to stand trial down the line, but their goons are thrown aside. Batman claims to be justice – but he also transmutes the very real abuses of policing into psychosexual vigilantism.

Batman has to intensify because the world is just getting scarier around him. He has no choice!

This is what they say about our police learning how to kill, being trained by the IDF, being given tanks and flashbangs and noxious chemical weapons. There’s simply no other choice than to extrajudicially murder the Bad People.

Alan Moore asks who watches the Watchmen. The police watch Batman, and cheer on his violence with pats on the back and big thanks. In a sense, he becomes a tulpa of the Police State.

As protests over ICE and police violence continue in the United States, I hear endlessly about the use of “nonlethal deterrents” by authorities. This is nonsense. The products are marketed specifically as less-than-lethal because of their ability to still inflict major harm if used incorrectly. A month ago a young man protesting (as is his First Amendment right) was shot in the eye with a less-than-lethal rubber bullet (which, I might add, still has a metal core inside). He lost his eye and is likely going to battle brain damage for the rest of his life. They’re less-than-lethal if fired into center-mass. But they aim for our heads.

They fire toxic gases that would likely violate the Geneva Conventions if used on people in another country. Police scream “STOP RESISTING” as they beat a man on the floor who has already been handcuffed. Kneeling on a neck is just a temporary tactic to restrain.

Just ask George Floyd.

Just ask Alex Pretti.

Batman doesn’t kill, but he too has been perverted by the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the progressive militarization of our carceral state in the past decades. I find it almost alien to go back and watch Batman: The Animated Series after replaying the Arkham games. How strange it is to see a Bruce Wayne who councils his villains as much as he thwarts them! How strange it is to see Bruce as a wounded figure trying to cope with his own trauma, fully aware that one bad day has also perverted him, but into a phantom of justice, clawing desperately towards order in a world defined only by its chaos. How strange it is to see Batman as a daft trickster and detective rather than an American Cop.

Maybe Batman is just so smart and so sharp that he can always aim his hits to incapacitate without wounding. But that’s a cop out answer.

Sorry I have to be the one to say this, but ACAB includes Batman.

———

J.M. Henson is a freelance critic/author who haunts the Blue Ridge Mountains and is in turn haunted by most things out of their control. Follow on Bluesky.