That said, I’ll start my bitching now.

Final Crisis is DC Comics’ big crossover event for this year. Every year, DC and Marvel have some huge earth-shattering event rampage through their stories, eschewing good characterization and storytelling in order to make a quick buck off of gullible readers and completists. These stories aren’t complete unless a character gets killed off or otherwise dramatically altered. In Final Crisis #6, that character is Batman.

Yep, Batman is dead. Don’t panic, though. It’s just a gimmick. He’ll be back once people get sick of Dick Grayson trying to fill the Dark Knight’s shoes and sales start to drop. At worst, he’ll be back by the time the next movie is released so DC can properly cash in on the franchise. DC has been down this road before, having killed off Superman, the Green Lantern, the Green Arrow, the Blue Beetle, and the Flash over the last generation. Superman came back within a year or so, the Green Arrow came back a few years ago, the Green Lantern returned to life in time to face off against Yellow, Blue, and Red Lanterns (but that’s a rant for another time), the Blue Beetle lasted maybe a year and a half in the grave, and the Flash came back to life just in time to see Batman die. Basically, the editor of DC Comics saw how Marvel’s sales jumped when they killed off Captain America recently and figured he could cash in by knocking off one of the most popular and iconic characters in all of comics. The problem is not so much that Batman is dead, however. The problem is the way the creative team decided to send him off.

I won’t give a synopsis of Final Crisis because the story is even more insipid than most comic book crossovers. However, I will focus on Batman’s last moments. Essentially, the Caped Crusader comes into the story fresh off of a major character arc in his own book called Batman RIP (which he actually survived, just in time to get killed off here). As the plot of Final Crisis revolves around gods and other celestial-level powers, Batman ends up finding a “god-killing bullet.” (Cue last year’s American Dad Christmas special…"Why do we even have Heaven guns?!”) Batman loads the god-killing bullet into a gun and then shoots the villain Darkseid with it, killing him. At the same time that Darkseid gets shot, he blasts Batman with his Omega Sanction, which kills Bruce Wayne’s body while sending his soul to a horrible alternate reality (thus leaving the door open for Batman’s eventual return).

For some reason, readers are up in arms about Batman dying, even though it’s painfully obvious that he’ll be back. What bothers me about the story is the fact that Batman picks up a gun and kills somebody with it. The only constants in Batman’s history since he was revamped for the Silver Age has been that he doesn’t use guns and he never kills. It’s the only thing that keeps him on the side of the law rather than having him cross over to become as crazy and dangerous as the villains he fights. The choice to have Batman kill even a villain as evil as Darkseid does more damage to the character than any physical death ever could.

The argument behind Batman’s actions is that Darkseid is an evil world-destroying force and the stakes of Final Crisis are so high that all of reality might be destroyed. Thus, argues the creative team, Batman had to break his cardinal rule. Except that Batman has fought Darkseid dozens of times, and this is at least the third time in as many years that all of reality has been threatened. Basically, the folks at DC Comics are so desperate to get some quick sales off a cheap gimmick that they’re willing to throw away the one piece of moral integrity that Batman has had as a character for the last half century.

Having Batman shoot and kill someone is akin to having Spider-Man donkey punch his Aunt May. It’s taking a character that has always walked a fine line between right and wrong and having him become the judge, jury, and executioner of villains. It’s taking what is unique and interesting about Batman and throwing it in the trash. Barring a complete revamp that leaves Final Crisis as nothing but a bad dream, Batman is always a killer now. Even when Darkseid inevitably returns and Bruce Wayne is running around Gotham City again, that piece of continuity remains. Batman just committed premeditated murder.

If DC really wanted to kill Batman off, they could just as easily given him a heroic demise. They could have done it back in the Batman RIP storyline, which would have made a lot more sense. They could have done just about anything, but instead they chose to leave with the image of Batman calmly gunning a villain down. Even Frank Miller, who loves nothing more than to strip away any semblance of human decency from the characters he writes, realized how essential it is to the character to have a Batman that doesn’t kill.

So Batman is dead for the time being, but he’ll be back shortly. Unfortunately, one of the key elements that made him the character he is today has been tossed aside like garbage, killing the Dark Knight more effectively than any actual death would accomplish.