6. Leaving KGBeast To Die
The '80s were a scary and tumultuous time for Batman. Robin died at the hands of the Joker, Mr. Mom played him in a movie, and in the 1988 story arc "Ten Nights of the Beast", Batman ran up against undoubtedly his greatest foe (aside from The Joker, Two-Face, Catwoman, Ra's al Ghul, The Penguin, The Riddler, Black Mask, Bane, Mr. Freeze...): KGBeast, a.k.a. Anatoli Knyazev, a cybernetically enhanced KGB assassin who dressed like a refugee from a bondage gear shop. KGBeast was, in true '80s action movie fashion, an "unstoppable killing machine", leaving such a ludicrously large number of corpses that he probably qualifies, in just four issues (!), as a mass murderer on the scale of the Joker. This dude was so "hardcore" he literally
cut off his own hand to escape from Batman. Clearly the final confrontation between these two would be a titanic physical clash... ...or Batman could outsmart the Beast, locking him down in the Gotham sewers,
where he would gradually starve to death:
Batman, the superhero most noted for his incredibly strict "no killing" rule, left KGBeast to die a slow, agonizing death by starvation. Justifiable? Well, maybe; again, let's remember the ludicrous body count the Beast left behind him. But especially in a universe where Batman refuses to kill the Joker because "it would bring me down to his level", it seems like sort of a cop out to have a man whose whole life and career have stood in opposition to deadly force be faced with a literal "killing machine"...and then solve the issues by just killing the dude. The moment was controversial enough that writer Marv Wolfman later retconned it, having Batman state that he alerted the Gotham police as to the Beast's whereabouts, several days after he had collapsed from fatigue...which still seems like kind of a dick move. Killing the villain? Not cool. Possibly putting him into a coma? Aces! But then Batman has a history of making these kinds of questionable calls...