10 Times Superman Was Forced To Kill

5. Everyone In The Olden Days

Batman famously has his own variation on the no-killing rule, with his stretching to expressly forbid the use of guns, following his parents getting shot as a kid. Except, in the early days of the character when they hadn't quite nailed down all these absolutes, the Dark Knight used to murder people all the time.

That same respect for human life clearly came late in the game for Superman, since his thirties appearances by creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were full of Golden Age genocide courtesy of the Last Son Of Krypton. Not so virtuous now, huh. Not wishing to waste any time, he got right down to it in the pages of Superman #1, when the character was just starting to enter the "jingoistic propaganda figure" phase of his career, as he tossed an army general off of a cliff and then destroyed an enemy plane without checking to see if the pilot parachuted out in time.

From there, he blew up a munitions factory and appeared as a star witness in his Clark Kent guise at a criminal trial, ensuring the defendants all got the death penalty. Man, old timey Superman was super into people dying. In the next issue he broke into a bad guy's lab and let him be consumed by his own poison gas, boasting that it had no effect on his alien physiology. Then he caught a bomb dropped by an enemy aircraft and chucked it back up, destroying the plane (and, presumably, everyone onboard). He lets a truck full of criminals fall of a cliff in favour of saving one belonging to the Daily Planet, which sort of puts paid to The Prisoners' Dilemma boat scene in The Dark Knight.

Oh, and finally he let a guy who'd figured out his secret identity fall down a flight of steps and break his neck before he could spill the beans. Yes, "fall", that sounded convincing enough...