Death with Dignity : An examination of the Golden Age

[KA.]

I will try not to make this one of my pages long rambles.
Some of the arguments around here have gotten very heated when the topic of "Heroes who Kill" comes up.
Some say that they like "Iron Age" comics because there are a lot of "villains" that deserve killing.
Others take up the "Golden Age" point that "Heroes Don't Kill. Period!"

Personally, I prefer games that are "Four Color".
I don't play "killers", and I don't allow my players to design "killers", but I am trying to examine this topic in a dispassionate way.


Without trying to start a new flame war, I have a few points to make.

1) Heroes in the "Golden Age", at least if you define that as the time that started around 1938 and went through the end of WWII, killed.
Superman killed. Batman killed. The Green Lantern killed.
They just did.
I can dig through my DC Archives and give you issue numbers and all that if necessary, but they did.
They either directly killed, or performed actions that any reasonable person would know would result in the other person's death.
And not just Nazi spies. Regular criminals. Usually really nasty criminals, but still, just criminals.

2) The universal "Code against Killing" that was eventually enforced in the comics did not appear because of the wishes of the writers or publishers, it was pushed upon them by the "Comics Code".
So the "principle" that is being defended by the "No Killing" group (which I consider myself a member of) is not something that was "part of" the comics, but something that was "done to" the comics.
The closest parallel that I can think of is if, in the future. fans of rock music were defending the "sanitized" versions of rock albums that have been produced due to the pressure from the Parents Music Resource Center, as if they were somehow "the way things were supposed to be".

3) I do not like the "Iron Age" style of comics. "Heroes" that cackle over the corpses of their enemies are not anything I want to read about. I find it offensive, especially when the enemies seem to be so vulnerable.
A cop that shoots a shadowy figure in a dark alley that turns out to be a teenager with a fake gun is a tragedy.
A cop that giggles over shooting a real gangster, that is armed, in the back five times, is a sociopath and should be locked up.

So where is the middle ground?

Am I trying to "recreate" something in my games that never actually existed?
(Other than the "Comics Code" stuff that was the Political Correctness of it's day.)

Is the Iron Age genre actually "better" in some way, because of "more realism"?

I think I have found a personal solution.

Death with Dignity.

I still don't want a bunch of murderous vigilantes in my games.
I don't need endless Apollo and Midnighter clones popping the heads off of bank robbers like they are squeezing pimples.

And I notice that when I reread the "Golden Age" comics where the heroes kill, there is at least some sense of regret.
Some sense that it was the only thing that could be done.
And, it only was done when the hero did not really have another choice.

Which means, all things being equal, your 250 point hero will have a lot more "excuses" to kill than your 350 point hero, and so on.

(Note: I am deliberately ignoring the gleeful slaughter of Nazi's and "Japs" during the war years. That was considered a whole different thing at the time. )

I think what I have found so offensive about the Iron Age comics, at least the worst of them, is the way the "heroes" kill.
Even in a war, certain behavior is just not justified.
Many people on the NGD boards were quite upset by the story of the Peeping Tom that was anally violated by the family of a young girl he was watching.
But this kind of thing has happened, and been applauded, in some Iron Age books.
Some things are just wrong, even in fiction.
Winning a gunfight with someone who has an equal chance because you are a little bit better is one thing.
Killing people, even "bad people", that have no chance to defend themselves, and that you could have neutralized non-lethally, does not fit any definition of "heroic" that I am willing to tolerate.
I don't really think that the knee-jerk reaction some people have to "killing" is really about the killing itself. It is about the way that it is done.
If it is unavoidable, if it is the only way to save others. if it is the absolute last alternative, then I think that I would accept it in my games.
It is the "Beavis and Butthead" : "Heh, heh, he's dead! I tore off his nads!"
attitude that I find unacceptable.

Your comments are most welcome,

KA.

[Southern Cross]

True enough,but in the Golden Age (at least in the Superman comics) most of the deaths occurred because of the criminal's own actions.The classic example being the Ultra-Humanite's attempted murder of Superman with his electric-gun.Instead,it exploded in his face.
(It was this incident that forced Ultra into his body-swapping,as even his genius couldn't keep his crippled body alive for much longer).

[Chimpira]

Do you know why I liked Jack Hawkmoore (hope the spelling is right. It is late and I should be in bed) from the Authority. It was from a story that Ellis wrote back in the StormWatch days. Jack got into a big thing and he revealed that he had killed before and that it was something he hated to do. By the end of the story he killed the bad guy and cried about it. He then went on to kill someone else, a couple of issues later, but you could see that it tore him up inside. That was a long way from him saying "I have not hit anyone in the brain today." I miss that Jack.

[Trebuchet]

I think the very earliest Superman and Batman comics were really more holdovers from the era of pulp fiction than actually Golden Age. And of course, they were mostly dealing with mobsters and (later, during the war) spies and Nazi/Jap spies and saboteurs. Batman's pistols went away very early in his career; IIRC like issue #4 of Detective Comics. (And I'll note here that non-comic pulp fiction heroes like the Avenger and Doc Savage went out of their way to avoid killing criminals.) The most significant new innovation about the earliest Batman and Superman comics was the fact they wore costumes to fight crime. Batman was certainly not smarter, stronger, more skillful or better equipped than his pulp contempory, Doc Savage.

I'd thus consider the introduction of the Code vs Killing via the Comics Code to be the real beginning of the Golden Age. Like most new things, superhero comics had to first evolve from their original source into something different from their immediate ancestor.

A super who accidentally kills is still a superhero; one who deliberately kills is a mere supervigilante. As was was noted above, a cop who shoots a gangster during the commission of a crime is OK; one who laughs about it and looks for opportunities to kill again is a sicko and needs to be locked up. I think it's perfectly reasonable to apply the same standard to superheroes.

[OddHat]

As I've said elsewhere, I do not want to play in a game where "heroes" glory in torture and murder. I've played the occasional game of Nightlife, where the characters are Monsters by default, and there is some fun in that. Still, if the game is meant to be taken at all seriously, I want to play a Hero.

On the other hand, I do believe in both sides of The Deal:
1) Sane Metahumans (hero and villain) avoid killing.
2) Killers do not walk free.

If a GM writes up a casual killer, and creates a world where jailing that killer will not stop him, he has to expect the heroes to start killing. That is one of the major flaws in the 4th and 5th ed. Champion's Universe as currently written; villains like Fiacho are clearly casual murderers, and yet Stronghold is still a Comic's Code prison that only exists to be broken out of. Code versus Killing laden default Champion's "Heroes" are turned into inefectual thugs by that kind of set up. Their job becomes catching and briefly incarcerating Fiacho between murder sprees.

Personally, I'd like Comics Code and Non-Comics Code write-ups appended briefly to almost all villains and organizations, as was sometimes done in 4th ed. It would make it easier for me as a GM to read the history of the official setting without wincing.

[Trebuchet]

One of the central tenets of the Comics Code was that "crime doesn't pay." The villain either never got away with his loot or spent all of his time in prison after being beat up by the hero. The Joker is an exception only because he is literally insane, and just societies simply do not execute insane people. It is of course far more likely that the Joker would have simply been shot and killed by a cop during his 60 year reign of terror in Gotham City, but if that happened we wouldn't have any reason to need the Caped Crusader, would we?

Just because something isn't realistic doesn't mean we can't aspire to it. Superheroes are supposed to be a standard to live up to.

[OddHat]

One of the central tenets of the Comics Code was that "crime doesn't pay." The villain either never got away with his loot or spent all of his time in prison after being beat up by the hero. The Joker is an exception only because he is literally insane, and just societies simply do not execute insane people. It is of course far more likely that the Joker would have simply been shot and killed by a cop during his 60 year reign of terror in Gotham City, but if that happened we wouldn't have any reason to need the Caped Crusader, would we?

Just because something isn't realistic doesn't mean we can't aspire to it. Superheroes are supposed to be a standard to live up to.

We all have thresholds of suspension of disbelief we're willing to live with as we read, write, GM and play. Personally, a world where some duties of law enforcement are conceded to masked vigilantes because LE does not have the resources to deal with a problem does not bother me. We have real world precedents for that, even if they do come from societies that were in serious trouble. A world where The Joker is allowed to go on killing sprees again and again and again and ... is well past my own threshold of disbelief. Human behavior simply does not work like that. I do not see a "hero" that permits repeated bouts of gleeful toture and mass murder as any sort of ideal to aspire to.

If your threshold of disbelief differs, groovy. If we ever gamed together, I'd ask to GM a game free of unpunished serial killers and mass murderers, and you'd bring the beer.

[nexus]

KA, you really summed about how I feel on the matter. I don't mind Heroes that have had to kill. I don't want "heroes" that do it cheerfully or without any hint of remorse. That just seems sick to me. Yes, people can get that hardened about killing but they are not the sort I want to aspire to be.

Do you know why I liked Jack Hawkmoore (hope the spelling is right. It is late and I should be in bed) from the Authority. It was from a story that Ellis wrote back in the StormWatch days. Jack got into a big thing and he revealed that he had killed before and that it was something he hated to do. By the end of the story he killed the bad guy and cried about it. He then went on to kill someone else, a couple of issues later, but you could see that it tore him up inside. That was a long way from him saying "I have not hit anyone in the brain today." I miss that Jack.

I was honestly suprised to hear about that earlier version of Hawksmoor. I've only seen his Authority incarnation.

[caris]

I think that we tend to forget one of the other reasons for the code vs. killing. It actually has a practical purpose for writers and publishers. It allows you to not loose a potentially useful “resource.” If a hero kills all of his villains, particularly, characters like Batman who regularly faces off against mass murders or serial killers, you run into other issues. You can quickly, and easily run into the problem of your villains and stories starting to stagnate as you run out of ideas on new characters. (To an extent my exposure with The Authority, which is only the first two TB, has run into this problem. A lot of their opponents in those two books seem to be large hordes of pretty faceless villains, who as individuals are uninteresting.) Alternatively, you have the equally SOD busting problem of having villains coming back from the grave over and over again. Think that is bad now with Jean Grey? Imagine what it could be like with the Joker, a character that is far too interesting to stop using. Heck, the Joker has already come back from the grave once, IIRC, the Joker died in his first appearance back in the Golden Age.

[OddHat]

I think that we tend to forget one of the other reasons for the code vs. killing. It actually has a practical purpose for writers and publishers. It allows you to not loose a potentially useful “resource.” If a hero kills all of his villains, particularly, characters like Batman who regularly faces off against mass murders or serial killers, you run into other issues. You can quickly, and easily run into the problem of your villains and stories starting to stagnate as you run out of ideas on new characters. (To an extent my exposure with The Authority, which is only the first two TB, has run into this problem. A lot of their opponents in those two books seem to be large hordes of pretty faceless villains, who as individuals are uninteresting.) Alternatively, you have the equally SOD busting problem of having villains coming back from the grave over and over again. Think that is bad now with Jean Grey? Imagine what it could be like with the Joker, a character that is far too interesting to stop using. Heck, the Joker has already come back from the grave once, IIRC, the Joker died in his first appearance back in the Golden Age.

Yes, there is the problem of wanting to re-use favorite villains. There's are two obvious answers to that problem I use in my campaigns:

1) Develop interesting villains who are not serial killers or mass murderers.
2) Keep interesting killers hard to pin down in a direct confrontation.

#1 is easy. There are a fair number of interesting villain types who do not casually murder. This does not mean that they have to be Saturday Morning villains who commit no actual crimes; it means that murders that do occur should be rare and preferably carried out by underlings. If they start racking up a huge body count, let them stay in jail.
#2 is harder, as your characters need some interaction with the villains for the storyline to hang together. Still, with planned escape routes, super-thugs kept in reserve, two-way videa, and triggered teleports it is possible. If it gets frustrating for the players, let them make the final catch.

One more thought on this: Very few of us are running campaigns that will require us to keep using the same villain for 60 years. The longest campaign I've run lasted only ten years, and the re-occuring villains were not casual killers.

[assault]

A world where The Joker is allowed to go on killing sprees again and again and again and ... is well past my own threshold of disbelief. Human behavior simply does not work like that. I do not see a "hero" that permits repeated bouts of gleeful toture and mass murder as any sort of ideal to aspire to.

The thing with the Joker is that he is a recurring character who can't be killed off. Many other Batman villains have been explicitly killed off over the years. One or two of these have been retconned back to life, like the guy that had Dick Grayson's parents killed, but he got the chair the first time around.

Batman's CVK was one of the earliest ones, probably because he was originally one of the most violent characters. But even after it was introduced, his opponents would usually be punished for their crimes. Well, except for Catwoman.

The "Joker problem" built up over time. In part, of course, it's a problem of taking continuity seriously. It _is_ unrealistic that he would have escaped all those times. It is _not_ so unrealistic that he might have escaped (or been broken out) a couple of times.

Then there is the problem with the increasing violence of his crimes...

As far as Champions campaigns go, all this stuff shouldn't really be a problem. First of all, few games last for 60 years! Second, the PC's Hunteds are the only real recurring villains in a campaign. Everyone else can be locked up or rubbed out without particular drama. So can Hunteds too, of course, although they should technically be replaced or bought off.

So frankly, the GM just needs to keep the core villains (the Hunteds) plausible, and discard the others whenever appropriate. They can always be brought back if necessary. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's not overused.

I'm currently experimenting with building characters without Hunteds, with an eye towards keeping recurring villains scarce.

PS (Edit): OddHat's last post was posted while I was writing this one. I agree with him entirely.

[Worldmaker]

That is one of the major flaws in the 4th and 5th ed. Champion's Universe as currently written; villains like Fiacho are clearly casual murderers, and yet Stronghold is still a Comic's Code prison that only exists to be broken out of. Code versus Killing laden default Champion's "Heroes" are turned into inefectual thugs by that kind of set up. Their job becomes catching and briefly incarcerating Fiacho between murder sprees.

If Stronghold is the problem, then fix stronghold. I did. The stronghold that exists in the GGU has never had an escape attempt succeed, and the supervillain community knows that if you are there, you stay there.

Sure, I have a handful of "standard four color prisons" as you describe them, which are little more than temporary rest areas for some supervillains, but the really nasty villains don't go there... they go to stronghold. And the really, really nasty ones... the horridly murderous ones, are executed.

The GM's biggest problem with the "he's unredeemable, let's kill him" attitude, at least on the metagame level, is that sooner or later the players will start widening the list of "death penalty" offenses, and because they will be killing a wider and wider selection of villains, sooner or later the GM will start running out of bad guys. Sorry, but having to write a fresh raft of villains every game session doesn't appeal to me.

[Hugh Neilson]

Batman's CVK was one of the earliest ones, probably because he was originally one of the most violent characters. But even after it was introduced, his opponents would usually be punished for their crimes. Well, except for Catwoman.

Well, there was that golden age story where Alfred took her over his knee. But then, the older comics treated women differently "as was the fashion of the time". [I wonder how the early Comics Code would have looked at that scene.]

[OddHat]

If Stronghold is the problem, then fix stronghold. I did. The stronghold that exists in the GGU has never had an escape attempt succeed, and the supervillain community knows that if you are there, you stay there.

Sure, I have a handful of "standard four color prisons" as you describe them, which are little more than temporary rest areas for some supervillains, but the really nasty villains don't go there... they go to stronghold. And the really, really nasty ones... the horridly murderous ones, are executed.

The GM's biggest problem with the "he's unredeemable, let's kill him" attitude, at least on the metagame level, is that sooner or later the players will start widening the list of "death penalty" offenses, and because they will be killing a wider and wider selection of villains, sooner or later the GM will start running out of bad guys. Sorry, but having to write a fresh raft of villains every game session doesn't appeal to me.

I wouldn't want to run a game with players who had that attitude, and I do fix my version of Stronghold in Champions campaigns. Fixing Stronghold is one of the best ways to avoid turning your players into killers in the first place.

That is probably the hardest part of bringing some comic conventions into an RPG; if you teach your players that toture and killing are allowed by letting villains get away with hideously violent crimes, then you will end up with players every bit as vicious as the bad guys. If you want your players to be Heroes, you have to let them put killers into prison with a reasonable expectation that they will stay there.

(I am using the generic "you" here WM; I realize that this is more or less what you already do)

[Trebuchet]

We all have thresholds of suspension of disbelief we're willing to live with as we read, write, GM and play. Personally, a world where some duties of law enforcement are conceded to masked vigilantes because LE does not have the resources to deal with a problem does not bother me. We have real world precedents for that, even if they do come from societies that were in serious trouble. A world where The Joker is allowed to go on killing sprees again and again and again and ... is well past my own threshold of disbelief. Human behavior simply does not work like that. I do not see a "hero" that permits repeated bouts of gleeful toture and mass murder as any sort of ideal to aspire to.

That's why I pointed out that in reality the Joker would have been shot by some ordinary cop in the real world long ago. He's unquestionably extemely dangerous, and given his reputation as a cold blooded killer some police officer would have shot him just for twitching. If a New York City cop can be no billed for accidentally shooting an unarmed immigrant in the dark, no grand jury is going to charge a police officer for capping the Joker. "I was in fear for my life" is usually considered just cause for using lethal force, and being within 20 miles of the Joker would be just cause in my book. (I'm of the opinion that some cops or armed citizens would simply shoot the Joker on sight. "Better tried by twelve than carried by six.")

Of course, letting murderous criminals out of prison doesn't really require any more suspension of disbelief than flying people with capes.