Point of Order
Taken from the Greg Rucka interview up at Newsarama:
NRAMA: Lock him up?
GR: How well would that work in the DCU? And Max knows that. How well has the process of locking up absolute lunatics worked in the DCU? That’s gone swimmingly for them. Arkham has a Frequent Inmate card. “Hello again Mr. Joker, your suite is ready as you like it.”
Alcatraz? Where he’d be conscious? The Phantom Zone? He’d die in the Phantom Zone. An infinite teleportation loop? He’d eventually die from signal decay. A chemically induced coma? How’s that not killing him?
All due respect to Mr. Rucka, but villains get out of impenetreable and escape-proof prisons because the stories (and the readers) demand to see Batman versus Joker for the millionth meaningless time. This and the escalating level of viciousness in mainstream superhero stories (more or less mirrored by comics' attempts to court Hollywood) dictates the sort of extreme responses shown in WONDER WOMAN #219. The stakes are raised to the point where the only final solution to a criminal rampage is a terminal one.
Writers write what they feel they must, whether by editorial fiat or by personal desire. However, the changes that they put their fictions through often stretch them to the breaking point and beyond. And this is exacerbated by the franchise saturation dominating the mainstream superhero market currently. If you have five Batman books on the stands, you're going to have the Joker break out of Arkham five times more often, stretching credibility (ha!) five times further (or more, since credibility stretches on a multiplicative scale, not arithmetic).
And maybe I'm really a sad old fanboy after all. I know, you figured that out a long time ago.
Funny thing is, this sort of moral examination and introspective drama would make for really compelling reading. Outside an iconic superhero book. You're talking about applying gravity to beings that fly, which by its very nature, yanks them out of the sky.
If this drama was playing out with new characters, I can say that I'd find it a lot more interesting and a lot less sad. Which is one of the reasons why WATCHMEN (why do I keep coming back to it? Must be some kind of comics touchstone) worked far better than it would have with the Charlton characters. If it was actually Captain Atom killing The Question, sure it'd have been more exploitatively shocking (for the longtime readers who knew the characters.) As it stood, there was plenty of drama in that moment.
But all this is leaving me cold on the mainstream. You guys keep rocking on your free world. I'll crack open CAPOTE IN KANSAS, then maybe DEAD WEST.