10 Times Superman Was Forced To Kill

1. Zod And Pals In Superman #22

So, Superman doesn't kill, except for when he does. And more often than not, when he decides to get his hands dirty with the blood of his enemies, the enemies in question are General Zod and the Kryptonian crime gang.

We've already seen our hero eliminate the bad guys in Superman II and Man Of Steel, both cited as being totally out of character and not consistent with the comic books at all. Except they absolutely are, and there was a whole storyline about it back in the eighties, courtesy of writer/artist John Byrne.

Byrne, who had previously made a name for himself drawing some of the most famous X-Men and Wolverine stories in Marvel's history, made the jump to DC right around the time of that Crisis On Infinite Earths thing we mentioned earlier. He was entrusted with rejigging and updating Superman's origins and character for a modern audience, which he did in the Man Of Steel miniseries. Apparently updating Clark Kent for the eighties meant giving him a mullet, but besides that, Byrne did a pretty good job of recreating the hero for a modern age: he still had the same costume, the same morals, the same abilities. He was just younger. And used a cell phone from time to time.

In this new universe, we reverted back to Kal-El as the actual Last Son Of Krypton, with none of these other dilly-dalliers counting in the existing continuity. Which meant that when he inevitably faced General Zod in Byrne's version, he had to travel to a pocket universe within his own where many Kryptonians had survived the planet's destruction, including alternate reality versions of Zod, Quex-Ul, and Faora. Who actually weren't different from any other incarnation, and so Superman has to beat them up.

He then realises that the group were sentenced to death before Krypton was destroyed, and they only avoided this punishment because they managed to escape before it was dealt. They had also just wiped out the human population of this alternate Earth, so Superman reluctantly took the role of executioner, exposing them all to Kryptonite that had no effect on him for some reason. He sure did feel bad about it, though, and maybe that's the most important thing: Superman shouldn't kill, true, which means that when he is forced to, it's all the more tragic.

And dramatic. And worthy of being put in a list.