Should Batman just kill madmen who murder?

[Lorendiac]

Originally Posted by RubberLotus

Silly-sounding question, but are we all sure that Devil's Advocate is in continuity? I've always gotten the impression that standalone Batman graphic novels and such are not part of the overall canon unless they're explicitly stated to be (i.e. Killing Joke).

Heck, this even applies to stuff like The Long Halloween, where the whole "First time Bruce meets Selina" thing was contradicted by a later comic.

Originally Posted by Sn4tcH

I think back when Devil's Advocate came out, it was when the Elseworlds line was still around. So, the book would have been labeled as such. And there's nothing in Devil's Advocate that contradicts canon either.

"Devil's Advocate" and "The Long Halloween" both came out in the 1990s, yes. The Elseworlds line was going strong at the time. And it's certainly true that neither one had an Elseworlds logo slapped on it. And as far as I know, we've never been expected to "automatically assume" that any stand-alone Batman graphic novel is out of continuity until someone guarantees otherwise.

But years ago I heard a report that "The Long Halloween" was not supposed to be firmly in continuity, as far as Denny O'Neil was concerned at the time. (And his opinions definitely mattered, since he spent that decade as the Editor in charge of Batman's regular continuity in several titles at once!)

For one thing, the whole idea from "The Long Halloween" of "Bruce and Selina are already dating in their secret identities when Bruce is still pretty new at the Batman thing" also contradicted a scene in "Knightfall," published just a few years before "The Long Halloween" started. At one point after Bruce is already in a wheelchair with a broken back, he and Alfred are getting in a chartered plane, about to leave Gotham for Santa Prisca. For reasons of her own, Catwoman (in plainclothes) is also in a hurry to get to Santa Prisca, but there are no seats available right away for that destination on any of the publicly available flights at the airport.

So Selina's course is clear! She hears about Bruce Wayne's chartered flight which is leaving that day, asks if they could give her a lift, is rejected, and stows away on that plane anyway. After the plane is far away from Gotham, she emerges from the restroom, yawning and rubbing her eyes and saying apologetically that she had just ducked in there to answer a sudden call of a nature and then . . . accidentally dozed off. It's a thin excuse, but she tells it with a straight face.

Bruce ends up seeming amused by the whole thing -- and, as Selina had gambled, he doesn't want to lose more time by having the plane turn around and fly back to Gotham to drop her off before resuming the trip to Santa Prisca. The two chat with each other in a way that makes it clear that they (when both in their unmasked identities) have never met before. She truthfully introduces herself as Selina Kyle, but that name obviously has no special meaning to Bruce, nor to Alfred! It never crosses their minds at the time that she might be connected to Catwoman!

Remember, Knightfall was definitely happening in what was the "modern continuity" in 1993 -- when Bruce had already been Batman for about a decade, and Dick had long since become Nightwing, and Jason had died after serving as the second Robin, and Tim had already been the third Robin for long enough to feel fairly confident about what he was doing. And yet Bruce and Selina (in those roles) were "just now meeting for the first time!"

So I've seen it asserted that the key thing to remember about "The Long Halloween" is that it was not one of the many Batman-related titles in the 1990s which were under Denny O'Neil's editorial direction. (That group included "Batman," "Detective Comics," "Shadow of the Bat," "Catwoman," "Robin," and so forth.)

Instead, the 13-part series was edited by Archie Goodwin, who was also in charge of the "Legends of the Dark Knight" title. That was a Batman-centric title, but it was not tied in with the regular continuity of all the other Bat-titles being edited by O'Neil. Instead, it was more "apocryphal." Occasionally there would be comments in the letter columns of LOTDK to warn us that any given story arc in that title did not necessarily fit in with the mainstream continuity.

I once saw someone say that most LOTDK stories could be called fuzzy continuity, a term which apparently was meant to point out that the matter was often very vague -- you got no guarantees as to whether or not the typical arc in LOTDK "definitely had" or "definitely hadn't" happened to the same Dark Knight you saw every month in "Batman" and "Detective Comics" and so forth. If you saw obvious contradictions between one LOTDK story arc and another, or between one LOTDK arc and a story in another title which seemed to be "definitely in continuity," you were supposed to look at the word "Legends" in the title of LOTDK, and reflect that it suggested "urban legends" or "apocryphal" material rather than "solid fact." Then you could just shrug and let it all roll off your back without getting uptight about every detail!

So the rumor I've seen in a few places on the Internet, but always second-hand or third-hand, amounts to this: Denny O'Neil had nothing to do with editing "The Long Halloween," and didn't think its ideas would be binding upon the "regular continuity" of anything he was actually editing in the 1990s. No more than shorter stories published in LOTDK would automatically apply to his beloved Batman continuity! Thus it didn't bother him if its version of the Bruce/Selina relationship blatantly contradicted things from the big "Knightquest" event which he had masterminded just a few years earlier!

I admit that things appear to have changed since then. Denny no longer is in control of Batman's regular continuity, and Jeph Loeb worked in at least one cute little reference to something else from "The Long Halloween" when he was writing "Hush," and I hear that other writers have grabbed the idea of "Bruce and Selina were dating for awhile, way back in the early days of Batman's career" and have run with it. So it seems as if some or all of "The Long Halloween" has retroactively been shoehorned into "modern Batman's history." But that (allegedly) wasn't the way it was intended to work when it was first being published! And to this day, I'm not sure if anyone in any "regular" Batman title has ever said, in so many words, "This mystery reminds me of the Holiday killings from way back when! Took us forever to catch the guy in the act! That was before your time, kid."

So even now, is it "firmly in continuity" that all the events of "The Long Halloween" happened in the regular DCU timeline as it now stands, and are vividly remembered by Batman and Catwoman and Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent and so forth? Beats me!

[The Bastard ColeCashETM]

Originally Posted by elikal

You see, its something I wondered myself often. You see all those creeps like Joker and whoever, and think, ok, there they go, another round in Arkham because of a system that can't cope with them. Sure, Bats got his moral high ground, but at the expense of too many people who die, one might think.

So the poll question is: should Batman give up his moral white vest for safety and get rid of some of those mass murderers, and just kill them?

What will happen if somebody not from the Bat-family kills every bad guy in Gotham in a short time? How will the members of Bat-family react to this? What will happen with this killer-of-all-Gotham's-bad-guys? What will the people of Gotham react when they realize that maybe their life is no longer in big danger? Will they want their "savior" to go to prison or will they protect him/her from the Bat-family and Gordon? Will they think that Batman was an idiot because he never ever stopped the villains permanently?

[Sn4tcH]

Originally Posted by Lorendiac

So even now, is it "firmly in continuity" that all the events of "The Long Halloween" happened in the regular DCU timeline as it now stands, and are vividly remembered by Batman and Catwoman and Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent and so forth? Beats me!

I don't know if you've been reading Batman, but the last couple of issues basically only work if "Long Halloween" happened.

[Lorendiac]

Originally Posted by Sn4tcH

I don't know if you've been reading Batman, but the last couple of issues basically only work if "Long Halloween" happened.

I don't know anything about their plots. I nearly always "wait for the trade" nowadays. I bought the Batman issues of "R.I.P." and then ended up feeling I had wasted my money.

By the way -- I recall being amused by a moment in the "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive" era when Batman was interrogating some sort of federal agent whom he suspected of being mixed up in something shady in Gotham. The agent said something like this: "Am I supposed to be scared? I've read your file. You never kill anybody!"

Batman said deadpan: "I think you mean there's never been any evidence that I did. I'm not sure why you assume I would actually leave any."

(Or words to that effect. Of course I knew he was bluffing, but it was still a good line!)