10 Times Superman Was Forced To Kill

3. The Joker, In An Alternate Dimension

Injustice: Gods Among Us is a very, very weird video game. A fighting title developed by the people who made Mortal Kombat, they had the unenviable task of not only dreaming up a reason for a bunch of DC superheroes and villains to be fighting amongst themselves, but also why the usually anti-death likes of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman would be pulling off some brutal FATALITY-style finishing moves.

NetherRealm Studios ended up doing well at hinting at why the former superfriends had all fallen out without going into too much detail, which meant there was plenty of room for the prequel comic book to pick up the slack. By all accounts, the Injustice comics have become pretty entertaining as they've entered their second year, becoming a pretty goofy and fun alternate reality, wish-fulfillment kinda funny-book. The first batch, though, were pretty rough. The art was uniformly ghastly, the writing wasn't up to much snuff either, and in order to reach the status quo of the games we had to see a lot of superheroes acting wildly out of character.

Like Superman shoving his fist through The Joker and murdering him by tearing out his heart, for example. To back it up a little, the first issue of the comic opens with Batman telling Supes that Lois Lane is pregnant with his super baby. Which is all very exciting, if a little unrealistic as Mallrats will tell you, and whilst they're distracted by the celebrations, The Joker walks up to Lois and Jimmy Olsen in the street and shoots them both dead.

Enraged, the Man Of Steel turns up at court on the day of the Clown Prince's trial and kills him. Which puts him a little at odds with Bats, who has managed to resist that urge for years, and from there a superhero civil war breaks out. So maybe he wasn't forced to kill in this situation but, man, wouldn't you?