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As a staple, I understand the NEED for them to return and be a threat, again and again, but what about the henchmen? What are your feelings on that?

This question came from this article where Snyder is defending (angrily) his decisions in Batman V Superman. 

And I remember being in the theater and thinking hard about that car chase scene and I thought "Bats wouldn't do that..." but maybe he would or better yet, maybe he should.

I have no answers because we live in a  darker interpretation of many of these characters..My (first) Batman was 60's camp. And then I discovered the comics......

Are we wrong to be bothered or is it time we grew up?

Please My Byrne, make sense of this......

And of course anyone else that has some thoughts....

Timing is key, I suppose. The TV show captured the Batman of the early/mid-60s pretty well. I too first discovered Batman through "Batman." But when I first really read the comicbook, it was the O'Neil/Adams version. Different from the show, no doubt. And, I was young enough yet that this made no real impact upon me. I hadn't seen really any camp in the TV show. The threats to the Dynamic Duo were darned real to me!

As I grew up, of course I discovered the burlesque aspects of "Batman," and I've never been able to love the show since then. Yet, camp-aside, the heroic nobility of character displayed by Batman in the TV show remained definitive to me, and such would be totally incongruous with his choosing to kill even just low-level bad guys.

Are you OKAY with that change in tone?

And I admit, I am happy to have your attention, for even a moment - and I do declare it is your responsibility to set the tone for the next wave/generation of artists. Is it okay for Superman to kill the Joker in INJUSTICE (the video game story line) as a possible reality - or does it 'break the world'?

As a kid, I HATED that all the bad guys got away - just like how I hated on Gilligan's island something always failed and kept them stranded or Josie and the Pussycats - I think Alexandria kept betraying them and they kept her alive or Doctor Smith in Lost in Space....

Do you, for the sake of a series keep the bad guys around and alive, or is some part of you suspending belief that (almost) no one dies? Do you know why Superman never killed Lex or Batman doesn't kill the joker?

In the recent movie Joker says something to the effect that Batman NEEDS the Joker. Is that true? You should know.

-C!

I'm probably not the best person to ask about this, Drew, because I stopped reading comicbooks around the time JB first started on "The Fantastic Four." Some of what I've discovered about what happened to the characters I had known as a reader has come to me as quite a shock as I've discovered details over the years, almost wholly through reading threads on the JBF. I like what I like, and I like that I like it -- but I wouldn't post comments here purely as a classic old crank, especially about comicbooks that I've never actually read. Others like what they like too!

Anyway, in my time as an active reader -- you can round it off to 1970-1980 -- I think the tone was fairly consistent. Are you referring to a "darker" tone post-1980...? About that, well -- I've heard things...!

It may be that "Gilligan's Island" was always a severely limited premise and your frustration simply focused on flaw in conception.

But, of course, if they were ever rescued or escaped the island, then... what's the show? 

In re comicbooks, that line of contravening the essential should not be crossed. Lots of debate over what is essential, but I think that despite many different types of changes between the late 30s to probably (as far as I've learned subsequently) the mid-80s or so, i.e., about a half-century, the essentials of most superheroes were readily identifiable no matter the era.

For Batman v Superman, when I watched the film I interpreted that one of the plots was that Batman was embittered and way down, which makes him be too violent, and Superman saves him. After reading Zack Snyder, it seems that his intention was other: I should grow up and accept that adults kill people.

Please, let nobody have him direct a biopic about Gandhi!

Bringing to justice does not mean Batman executing them.