It's one of the defining characteristics of the character - alongside the wonderful toys, abandonment issues and black underpants over the tights - and yet Batman's unfailing faith in the criminal justice system hasn't always been just so. Not that he has a particularly non-violent approach to conflict resolution as it is (as hilariously shown in this video), but it's been a badge of honour that the Dark Knight has never taken a life, an action which would be in pretty bad taste after you saw your own parents gunned down in cold blood before your very juvenile eyes. Yeah, he doesn't deserve to wear that badge at all, since Bruce Wayne has been bumping off criminals in a more permanent fashion than a life sentence in Arkham Asylum (rarely served consecutively) since day one. The early issues of Detective Comics saw him chucking countless gangsters off of rooftops, shooting formative supervillain the Mad Monk in the heart at point blank range, leaving Russian bad guy KGBeast - maybe the "Russian" bit was unnecessary - locked in an underground chamber to starve to death, and taking a magical space bullet straight to the heart of cosmic antagonist Darkseid. At this point Bruce Wayne has taken nearly as many lives as The Punisher! Well, not quite, but you get our point. Oh one more thing though, because the Frank Castle comparisons - surprisingly - don't end there. Where The Punisher took the very weapons that took away his family as the tools he'd use to get bloody revenge on the assembled thugs of New York, Bruce Wayne saw his own parents gunned down with a firearm and, from that day forward, vowed never to use a gun himself. Except for all the times he has used guns, often with fatal results. Nice one, Caped Crusader.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
