Superman creator Jerry Siegel continued to write for Superman well into the 1960s.
It's not a hypothetical question. It's half of Superman's rogues gallery, including at least four different versions of Zod, four different versions of Bizarro, and four different versions of Ultraman. Plus alternate timelines, like Justice Lords Superman.
He tried to come up with plans to defeat the whole Justice League just in case. They included such brilliant plans as "Give Superman Red Kryptonite (which has a random effect each time) and hope that it helps Batman win, instead of just making him more powerful (or turning him into a gorilla or something)."
The first Batman story, The Case of the Chemical Syndicate, is literally just a drawn version of a Shadow story, only they changed The Shadow's costume.
Kevin Fisher
Why would you like Batman?
Noah Jenkins
Practically every superhero has a no kill rule, and there are very few good superhero games before Arkham Asylum anyway. And it's not like Spider-Man games were still on the level of Spider-Man 2, or like we were getting more Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
Benjamin Wood
Hail Hydra
James King
Well I know next to fuck all about comics, but when you're dealing with a guy that takes fucking magic to stand a chance of beating, you're probably not going to have much of a plan either.
Jonathan Perez
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Caleb Nelson
Doomsday killed Superman without magic or Kryptonite. Most of his other villains do just fine challenging him without them too. Luthor usually doesn't use Kryptonite anymore, and Bruce Wayne is basically just a more powerful Lex Luthor. But Bruce didn't realize that. Instead he used Red Kryptonite, well known for doing things like turning Superman into a Metallo John Wilkes Booth, or into some sort of ant monster.
Canonically, that isn't the plan Batman came up with.
Jeremiah Perez
Canonically doesn't mean shit in western comics because it all depends on the current writer.
Aaron Sanchez
Oh but it's not just limited to superhero games. Plenty Third person hack n slashers also use that terrible formula. Shadow of Mordor, The Last Templar, Witcher, etc. Man I wish we'd get more stuff like Ultimate Destruction or Infamous.
And my problem with Batman's no kill rule specifically is that it doesn't even make sense, especially when Batman goes at great lengths to keep Joker alive. Hell, doesn't he fucking maim Jason Todd in Under The Red Hood trying to keep him from blowing away Joker? I don't know how stupid it is with other superheroes but with batman it pisses me off to no end.
Jason Martin
Naw, that's just not true. What's canon and what's not canon just becomes more important over time. it's one of the key problems with modern comics. The reliance on previous canon locks out new readers.
Well yeah but you said superhero games in particular.
Batman's goal is to prevent murder, especially by his own hands. He wouldn't protect Joker from being legally executed by the state. However, the one time Joker was up for execution, Batman saved him because he was convicted for the one crime that he didn't actually do.
Superheroes beat up people who are trying to kill people. If Red Hood is trying to kill someone, even Joker, Batman's gonna beat him up.
That said, Batman later seems to come to an understanding with Red Hood where he kinda turns a blind eye to his activities, as long as they're far enough away.
Practically every other superhero has a no kill rule, but Batman's is probably the strictest. Flash killed Reverse Flash when Reverse Flash tried to kill his second wife at their wedding (Reverse Flash had previously killed Flash's first wife), and even Kid Flash testified at trial that Flash could have stopped him without lethal force. Superman killed a version of Zod from an alt universe where he killed everyone in his universe's earth, but then later he felt bad about it and stopped being Superman for a while. Later he killed Imperiex when Imperiex tried to blow up the earth (which would destroy the universe because of stuff that happened in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, which resulted in there only being one Earth afterward), but he did this by taking Imperiex to the beginning of time and blowing him up there, so he could be the original big bang instead of a new big bang. Superman was fine because he already survived the big bang at least once before (in the aforementioned Crisis).
The closest main-universe Batman's come to killing is when he shot the god of evil, Darkseid's, ghost (he's a god so being dead wasn't really a problem for him) with a god killing bullet because Darkseid was sucking the whole universe into his black hole heart. But even that didn't fully work and all the Flashes had to team up to help death catch up to Darkseid's ghost as it fell backwards through time as he died. And then Superman sang at the perfect frequency to counter Darkseid's vibrations (the DCU is made of vibrations) to erase him from existence, but the multiverse needs Darkseid, since he's a fundamental concept, so Superman made a wish on the Miracle Machine and Darkseid and all the other gods reincarnated back on their own universe, which they had previously destroyed.
So Batman kinda killed a guy one time. And Earth-Two Batman (the original Batman) killed a few guys back in his first few stories, but he stopped shortly after he got Robin.
