On the subject of heroes not killing.... Robin #140

[icon_uk]

A repost from two S_D incarnations ago.... Discussion of the no-kill rule here reminded me of this in Robin 140 by Bill Willingham and Scott McDaniel

We start with a cover which just screams "WRONG!" on every level to me. Robin with a rifle, surrounded by hand grenades and hand guns just seems deeply disturbing...



To summarise the plot so far, after the loss of his father and Steph, Tim has moved to Bludhaven to be by himself (aside from occasional visits with Cass/Batgirl) which is JUST what you'd recommend for a stressed out teenager with abandonment issues.

during this time Tim had been attacked by assorted random weirdos (new villains) and had learned the Penguin had put a bounty on his head (hence the villain attacks), so when a new guy called the Veteran showed up, Robin assumed he was a villain and they had a fight. During this Veteran gassed him, took Tim back to his own apartment, undressed him and put him to bed... And no, I'm not making that up.

Tim investigates the Veteran (As you do when strange me drug you and leave you undressed in your own bed the next morning) what is known about him at any rate and finds he's something of a military urban myth. So the next case he's on, when the Veteran gets involved, Tim leaves a note inviting them to meet up. They do, and the Veteran literally says: "I'm here to steal you away from Batman."

Methinks the Veteran has been watching the Teen Titans cartoon and is empathising with Slade just a little bit too much. (The Veteran knows Tim's secret identity through the magic of plot power)

Anyway, he shows up and offers Robin a job working for the military, though in a non lethal capacity. Bizarrely, Robin agrees to consider it (Him not killing I can accept, but being prepared to work with others who do as a matter of course should be ringing alarm bells)

He is driven to their base by the team as a guest, and is shown military courtesy down to the point of not quite disdain, very much a "You're a civilian to us, so we call you sir. That's the sum total to our interest in you as a person". Nice recruitment technique there, real charm offensive, though possibly quite realistic.

The Veteran is a new character (Though the implication is that there has been a Veteran for a long, long time, just not necessarily the same one), but generates a SMUG vibe at the megawatt range. Clearly he's a Willingham favourite because we'll never see him set a foot wrong, even when he's at odds with the entire ethos of the Bat-titles.

To be fair I can see the start of the argument quite well; Batman DOES train up exceptional "special ops" candidates, moreso than any other hero. And their reason for not recruiting Batman is plausible, inasmuch as he is the ultimate Type A personality. However their smug (Forgive me if I use that word more than once, it seems a singularly suitable one) dismissal of ANYONE who has saved the world on multiple occasions should have Tim reacting a lot more strongly than he does here.





That last page just plain baffles me, the point seems to be that there is an untold story about trying to recruit Dick Grayson when he was Robin. Again, fair enough, but their "need to know" bit at the end could easily by shot down by Tim saying "Fine, I'll just ask Nightwing, let him decide how need to know it is before I think about joining you"

Tim is offered a chance to spar with either of two members of the Veterans team, and sportingly offers that, to be fair, he'll fight them both at once, just for fun.



I love Scott McDaniel, I really do, his stuff on Nightwing was drop dead gorgeous, but I think that his work on Batman wasn't as good, and the reason for it is, bizarrely, the capes. His kinetic multi-pose-strobe style works terribly well with Nightwing, but with Batman and Robin the capes get in the way, hiding a lot of the physicality, if that makes sense.

So it's a relief here that Tim decides, for no apparent reason, to strip down to his long pants for the fight... oh, and the mask, ALWAYS the mask! :)



So the true First World War was the combined Napoleonic Wars,

The Second World War was what we call the First World War

The Third World War was what we call the Second World War

The Fourth World War was the Cold War

The Fifth World War is the current "War on Terror" which "most of the world want to close it's eye and pretend doesn't exist"... I sense a subtext heading towards text here...

However, I leave it to better military historians and commentators on current events than me to comment on the accuracy of these. I will add from vaguely remember high school history, that AFAIK the First World War wasn't named as such until the Second one came along, until then it was "The Great War" or optimistically "The War to End Wars".

I'm also not sure the Cold War counts as it was precisely NOT a war as such, it was a long form standoff and game of political one-up-man-ship without war ever being declared, and the "War on Terror" is a nebulous concept at best.



It could be, as Tim suggests, they are trying, unsuccessfully, to distract him, but it's terribly satisfying when the civilian teenager kicks the crud out of both of them with one smooth movement. Way to go Boy Wonder!



And this page approaches the WTF and zooms past it at a rate of knots. Apparently, the Batclan now avoid lethal conflict, not because of a sworn oath never to take a life, a guiding principle of the current Batman history, but because it saves on the paperwork and fuss involved in court appearances???

Tim reports his meeting to Batman, who (because of his mood as a result of War Games) seems fairly ambivalent about whether Tim takes the Veteran up on the offer or not. But then starts a complete investigation into the myth of "the Veteran". This is flatly contradicted a few issues later when Batman talks directly to the Veteran and it's clear they've known each other for years, so who knows what that bit was all about.

Comments

[aaron_bourque]

There are a lot of reasons by Bats and clan don't kill, outside of the genre convention.

For most of the clan, there's the respect they have for Batman; he doesn't kill, so they don't either. Then there's Huntress, but she's barely part of the Bat-family these days.

So it mostly comes down to Why Doesn't Batman Kill?

Partly it's the law like Tim says here.

Partly it's due to Bruce trying to respect his father, a doctor, and the "first do no harm" thing.

But mainly it's because, deep, deep down, he honestly does believe that there's hope for anyone. Yes, even the Joker. He may never be able to be rehabilitated back into society, but he does need to be rehabilitated before he can face justice for his crimes, whatever justice that might be. So, Batman does actually belong with the rest of the League, nyah.

[nezchan]

...on the other hand, maybe Tim doesn't want to reveal personal details about Bruce to people he doesn't implicitly trust, so has a cover story that explains the "no guns" policy instead.

He is supposed to be a smart guy, after all.

[icon_uk]

Fair point, though the fact that these people already know he's Tim Drake suggests they'd know a LOT about Batman already.

[greenmask]

Maybe he doesn't want to debate a no-kill policy with people who clearly don't agree with it? Seems practical, to me.

[icon_uk]

Except they're actively trying to recruit him, if he can't articulate his objections to their approach what's he going to do?

[greenmask]

Yeah but they've already put across their views about no-killing to him, which he digested without comment apparently, and he seems to want to keep checking out their outfit anyway.. so picking a non-ethics based reason for his current policy seems like the detective's choice.

[icon_uk]

He's checking them out, getting them talking is the best way to do that I'd say, and ethics are a good hot topic in most situations.

[arbre_rieur]

It should be noted that the Veteran showed up in a Superman storyline shortly after Infinite Crisis, where we find out that Superman has met him before and the two have a healthy, non-adversarial respect for one another. More indication that Superman doesn't have a hard 'killing is wrong no matter what,' at least when judging other people.

[arysteia]

I don't think it's "paperwork" so much as accountability and justification. Acknowledging that cops and soldiers et al can use deadly force, but precisely *because* they have to be able to answer for it in public and to a higher authority. Readers often complain about Batman's policy with exactly the argument that there are cases where lethal force is justified. And Tim's explaining that those cases are justified in part because they're not arbitrary or decided on one man's whim. Bruce et al has higher reasons and a very strong moral code etc, granted, but this is also acknowledging that if he didn't, he'd be answerable to no one, and effectively judge, jury and excutioner. It's clumsy, but I don't mind it.

[icon_uk]

Superman would respect the need for a military person to have that POV, just as he does not interfere with the death penalty being enacted when the legal system mandates it.

[thelazyreader]

New reasons have come up over the years with various stories.

In one, Batman acts as a human shield for a mob boss when a rival gang tries to off him. Catwoman calls him out on that, and he later realises that his respect for human life comes from his father, a doctor.

There are other stories where Batman refrains from killing because he believes all his repressed anger will turn him into a bloodthirsty executioner if he lets loose.

Yes, I suppose the legal argument also counts. Supposedly it's the main reason Gordon and the GCPD support him.

[thelazyreader]

With relation to the above, Dick Grayson was at one time a cop, and thus legally sanctioned to carry firearms and use deadly force. Was that ever explored in his series.

[sherkahn]

Tim's smart. Smart enough to know that they don't know everything, and that if they do talk to him to gain intel, he should leave a false trail, littered with half-truths to make it sound plausible.

The less anyone knows on how the Batman works, the better.

[sherkahn]

Not satisfactorily.

[icon_uk]

Sort of, before he joined Bruce challenged him on that very point, and Dick handwaved it away with the idea "he'd think of something".

IIRC Later, Dick showed up at the Batcave in uniform, and Batman coldly points out that he never wants to see a gun there.

The one time we DID see Dick pull a gun, he was in civvies and it was in one of the most appallingly bad scenes I can ever recall, during the "Dick meets his long lost Romany stereotype grandfather" story in Gotham Knights. Basically someone is firing at him and gramps, and so he pulls his gun (I'm trying to remember why he'd be carrying it in civvies) and aims it at the suspected shooter, only to have it turn out to be Bruce. The thought that pulling a gun would EVER be Dick Graysons first reaction boggles the mind a bit too much.

Of course, real cops very, very rarely pull their weapons, and can go their entire career without ever doing so.

[star_of_airdrie]

Maybe Dick's trigger finger was the only thing working that day...? that is very convoluted way to make a plot point. They might as well have had Bruce have a gun to see Dick's response.

Police officers pulling their weapons here in the US really depends on where they work, but I'm not an expert. I saw it once as a first responder but I didn't spend much time in the streets personally to make a good judgement.

[warpedhand]

I think there's also the whole thing about him needing to have a line he doesn't cross, both for Gotham (so he's not just another crazy thug with a wacky theme, and for himself (so he can know that he is different and that what he's doing is still right)

[greenmask]

It seems like the kind of thing that could fast lead to bad blood, though. It's still something he can choose to bring up later, but if you're gonna get confrontational (other than in a sparring context, obv!) and you're inside the lair of some people who you know have killed in the name of justice, ethical debate is something that I would want to enter on my own terms only.

But maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree! :]

[icon_uk]

But maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree! :]

On the interwebs? Never!! FIGHT TO THE DEATH!

Bring your own bat'leth!

[karthzon.livejournal.com]

I really wish Tim would have told these jackasses that the Justice League they dismissed so smugly had saved the Earth multiple times from threats that the various militaries were useless against and that their "no-killing" policy is not necessarily a sign of being squeamish so much as not wanting to start enforcing their will upon the entire populace. Because that's what it would lead to if they took justice into their own hands.

Of course, the Veteran might view that as a good thing.

[karthzon.livejournal.com]

Also, their definition of a world war boggles my mind.

[freddylloyd]

The first war in which battles took place on three distant continents was, I believe, the Seven Years' War (French & Indian War). In addition to the campaigns we remember in Europe and North America, the French and British Empires and their allies fought in India, the Senegambia, the Caribbean, and South America. That fed into the American War for Independence, in which the British fought US allies in India, Gibraltar, and the Caribbean, as well as the better-known campaigns in North America. And then Britain and France kept fighting for another generation, through the French Revolution and Napoleon's rise, fall, rise, and fall again. So I think the Veteran actually understates how far back worldwide wars began.

This storyline was toward the end of Willingham's run on Robin, the last issues he wrote that weren't tied into some big editorially choreographed crossover. They struck me as an author's imposition on an established character—two covers in a row featuring a gun-toting Tim Drake! While I can accept that Tim would evaluate different career paths after his father's death, and as part of growing up, he seemed to give the Veteran far more time than seemed natural. Willingham grew up in an army family and served in the US army himself, so might naturally have wanted to explore the place of the career military in a superhero world. But nothing in Tim Drake's previous stories would suggest the same interest.

[nezchan]

"His parents were killed with a gun and the trauma has left him hating guns forever" seems rather a higher level of personal info than they're likely to have. "MY PARENTS ARE DEEEAAAAD!!" jokes aside, I don't know if that's out there enough these guys would/should know about it.

Besides, wouldn't it be rude of Tim to spread around personal history stuff like that? Hell, I'm hesitant to pass on people's email addresses without their explicit okay.

[sistermagpie]

That's exactly how this story always seems to me. I read it and just think: Here's Bill Willingham talking through the comics. I barely consider it canon for that reason.

[karthzon.livejournal.com]

Although I would argue that they were far from true world wars in that the only players involved were European and American countries and the various theatres had very little to do with each other. That is to say, they took place at the same time, but in the minds of the people, they were different wars and were treated accordingly. In contrast, every theatre of WW1 and WW2 was directly connected to the main confrontation between the two alliances (the Entente cordiale vs the Central Powers in WW1 and the Axis vs the Allies in WW2) and they involved every non-colonized country of the time.