Killing the JLA, or, How Are These People Still Alive?

[Ramza00]

There was a storyline where that happened in the DC universe. Black Ops organization rounds up the super villains and uses super advanced technology to dump them all on an uninhabitated planet
( Big surprise : It doesn't work)

That is why you team up with a powerful magic user, and you combine magic with traditional lead rounds.

Stop making this complicated. Keep it Super Simple. Dead Men do not visit the supermarket, and if they visit the supermarket that is why you have recruited super powerful magic user to make sure they stay dead.

[Aotrs Commander]

Even superman when he is pissed is extremely scary. See here youtube link

I am a terrible person (but we all knew that already, right?), because I enjoyed Supes kicking Batman's arse WAAAY more than I should.

There was a storyline where that happened in the DC universe. Black Ops organization rounds up the super villains and uses super advanced technology to dump them all on an uninhabitated planet
( Big surprise : It doesn't work)

I think the first problem there is the obvious one, that it involved not killing them.

If you're going to be a dirty black ops organisation, you should at least have the same level of stones to make the decision to actually kill people.

Granted, death might not permenantly stop them: but for FRAG'S SAKE if death is only a temporary prison, at least it's GOT to be more secure than Arkham Asylum...



(There's a thought, actually: if you can categorically (as in the Marvel U) prove that there is, in fact an actual hell in which people go to when they die (and pretty heavily implied there is a corresponding heaven), you'd have thought that with the way people keep popping back out of it (e.g. Sabretooth) maybe you should start treating it LIKE a prison on an official level...)

[Jayngfet]

That is why you team up with a powerful magic user, and you combine magic with traditional lead rounds.

Stop making this complicated. Keep it Super Simple. Dead Men do not visit the supermarket, and if they visit the supermarket that is why you have recruited super powerful magic user to make sure they stay dead.

Or better yet, just take some regular magic users and train them.

Because again, magic users are a dime a dozen in the DCU, and provided you have even a tiny trinket you can get into the oblivion bar and start recruiting. If you're spending all this money anyway you could probably just enchant all your guns and bullets to work better and cut out the middle man. Better yet, since none of the core leaguers frequent that bar and it's security is a bunch of rotating gated entrances with no outgoing or incoming calls, you have a whole lot more breathing room and a spot to plan things out.

The best solution here is probably the easiest one, and in the DCU it's easier to bite the bullet and just use alien tech or magic than it is to insist on regular guns and soldiers. If you're working based on kryptonite weapons, kryptonite beams are going to be more efficient than regular rounds anyway since they have no recoil and move faster. If you want to keep a god occupied to stab her in the back, it's better to just throw cash at some demons instead of hoping that your soldiers won't fold, and have them take care of it. That's kind of half the fun of the setting: Things turning silly and outlandish is usually easier than being grounded and tactical.

Not to mention that hell, demons and mutants work cheap. You'd be amazed how often even a second stringer like Green Arrow winds up over his head because a bunch of subrbanites wound up getting their hands on something that makes a gun look like a toy.

[GloatingSwine]

Granted, death might not permenantly stop them: but for FRAG'S SAKE if death is only a temporary prison, at least it's GOT to be more secure than Arkham Asylum...

I dunno, we are talking about a universe where one character once had a casual conversation with the ghost of another about when they would be coming back....

Plus, at least escapes from Arkham make the news, even if it's sufficiently frequent to appear on page #37 by now. Coming back from the dead you tend to find out about only after the campaign of terror by the mysterious new villain who seems to know far too much,

[Aotrs Commander]

I dunno, we are talking about a universe where one character once had a casual conversation with the ghost of another about when they would be coming back....

Plus, at least escapes from Arkham make the news, even if it's sufficiently frequent to appear on page #37 by now. Coming back from the dead you tend to find out about only after the campaign of terror by the mysterious new villain who seems to know far too much,

Has ANYONE who escaped Arkham EVER been caught before they started their next Campaign of Terror...?

[Dienekes]

Has ANYONE who escaped Arkham EVER been caught before they started their next Campaign of Terror...?

Yes, Maxie Zeus, that glorious son of a bitch.

[comicshorse]

Has ANYONE who escaped Arkham EVER been caught before they started their next Campaign of Terror...?

In 'Knightfall' Maxie Zeus escaped from Arkham and then ran straight into a tree and knocked himself out because he was too occupied ranting. That count ?

EDIT Damnit, just beaten to it

[lord_khaine]

I am a terrible person (but we all knew that already, right?), because I enjoyed Supes kicking Batman's arse WAAAY more than I should.

Funny enough, i personally enjoyed seeing Superman being about as powerfull as he should be just enough

[SeeDarkly_X]

It's a pretty good movie, based on the Tower of Babel

Disagree.
It's an ok movie, and only loosely based on the Tower of Babel story, that yet again has DC animation making unnecessary changes in a story that add little to no additional value for the changes made.
Changing the cast from including Aquaman and Plasticman to instead include Cyborg... and adding an array of villains unrelated to the original story in anyway was a huge disappointment.

But yeah.. the story itself in the comic was excellent.

And it's only one scenario for bringing down the heroes. In the end though, if they die, the story ends...
then what are we going to bitch about?

[Coidzor]

One point you may be overlooking here. Killing all of them would only serve to compound the conundrum when they all come back.

I don't know the full roster of full-timers, part-timers, and affiliates, but that's an awful lot of the Earth's super/metahuman population you'd be doing away with nigh-simultaneously. If that doesn't proc some kind of huge crossover event either in killing them or when they come back or both, I don't know what would.

[Ramza00]

Funny enough, i personally enjoyed seeing Superman being about as powerfull as he should be just enough

And even then he was going easy on them. Notice how fast superman is going when he almost hits Bruce Wayne. It is faster than 60 mph, yet slower than the speed of sound. When you get hit by something that is kryptonian level of invulnerable traveling at 60 mph, you are going to be dead.

And then superman stops on a dime, not because he has too but to show off since Bruce "beat" him, and they have to one up each other.

----

I also liked how bruce is the real victor of that exchange, but he did not win due to some techno gadget from his utility belt, no he won for he is the world's greatest detective who knew his opponent, and did not start a fight without knowing he was going to win it.

[TeChameleon]

Heh. My original post was more to point out that it wouldn't be all that hard to kill a significant portion of the League, even if you didn't have magic zap guns, assuming you had half-way competent soldiers and tacticians. Granted, the aftermath would likely be amazingly ugly, if not outright Days of Future Past levels of ugly. But the start? Yeah, the start would be surprisingly easy.

And yeah, as to why Checkmate and/or Task Force X haven't just started snuffing problematic supervillains... well, aside from the obvious out-of-story reasons, it seems to me that if you got rid of all the Crazy Quilts, Polka-Dotted Men, and Pranksters, the void they left would be filled by someone who was far, far worse. As long as the lower ranks of the supervillain roster is filled with largely harmless idiots, it's not filled with psychotic thugs. As to why they don't just leave the actual psychotic thugs they can get their hands on dead in a ditch somewhere? Yeah, no idea on that one.

And that Justice League: War movie was awful. Not even entertainingly awful, just kind of blech. At the end of it, I was pretty much left sitting there going "... okay, who were all those ***holes, and why were they wearing bad imitations of the JLA's outfits? And why were they calling that cut-rate Godzilla wannabe Darkseid?" I don't think I've ever hated a character redesign quite as much as this new 90s-action-figure-Darkseid. Seriously, if there's one hard-and-fast rule in superhero comics, it's 'if you think you're improving on some of Jack 'King' Kirby's most legendary design work... yeah, not so much.' Argleblargleyech.

[Jayngfet]

Heh. My original post was more to point out that it wouldn't be all that hard to kill a significant portion of the League, even if you didn't have magic zap guns, assuming you had half-way competent soldiers and tacticians. Granted, the aftermath would likely be amazingly ugly, if not outright Days of Future Past levels of ugly. But the start? Yeah, the start would be surprisingly easy.

The main issue, however, is still going past those automatic defenses, or else the ones they're already super good with. I mean Hal Jordan and Clark Kent are nice guys, but that's a conscious choice. When you have Superman running on instinct or a ring that's basically refurbished manhunter tech calling the shots things get really ugly really fast.

Though the other issue is you're vastly underestimating the actual cost and difficulty of acquiring a whole bunch of this stuff. Contrary to popular belief, disposable assassins aren't terribly easy to find. Most of the real examples tend to come from extremist camps who've had months or years of heavy indoctrination, and even then their rate of success and competency isn't nearly a hundred percent even when they're attacking regular people, and even more will give out information if they get captured.

To account for the numbers and skill level you want without just biting the bullet and vat growing or augmenting your troops isn't nearly so easy. We're talking about sending dozens of men into guaranteed suicide missions against public idols here, after all.

[TeChameleon]

... okay, 'guaranteed suicide missions' are your words, not mine. The whole point of this thread is that there are some things that could work. Superman's not going to be 'operating on instinct'. He's either going to be stone dead or perfectly fine, depending on how godmode-sue the writer wants to go with him. Frankly, I'm still not too clear on why he'd somehow automagically know that a small portion of the lead bullets being fired at him have kryptonite hidden inside, at least until after they've perforated him.

I've been working on the assumption of 'mercenary', or maybe 'military', not 'suicide trooper'. The only mention I made of disposable mooks was to throw at Batman as plan B, and there I was thinking 'random gang member hired by some generic guy with a brown paper bag full of payment', not 'skilled operative connected to the organization that's trying to kill Batman'.

Also, the Green Lantern Rings' automatic defenses, to the best of my knowledge, are pretty strictly passive, not some kind of psychotic berserker mode. Standard protective aura, preventing the ring from being removed, and possibly some low-level psychic defenses(?)... running on memory here, that's about it- no 'blow up world', or even 'blow up immediate vicinity' setting. Also, the protective aura is significantly weaker than the active shields- basically navigational deflectors vs. combat shields, if you'll pardon an even geekier analogy.

[Eric Tolle]

Heh. My original post was more to point out that it wouldn't be all that hard to kill a significant portion of the League, even if you didn't have magic zap guns, assuming you had half-way competent soldiers and tacticians.

i doubt your scheme would even work against Batman. "Contingency Plan 126: Sniper Waiting Me When I Answer the Bat Signal; Contingency 142: Sniper Setting up in an Apartment Near the Bat Signal; Contingency Plan 218: Orbital Laser Death Satellite Targeting the Bat Signal."

[lord_khaine]

... okay, 'guaranteed suicide missions' are your words, not mine. The whole point of this thread is that there are some things that could work. Superman's not going to be 'operating on instinct'. He's either going to be stone dead or perfectly fine, depending on how godmode-sue the writer wants to go with him. Frankly, I'm still not too clear on why he'd somehow automagically know that a small portion of the lead bullets being fired at him have kryptonite hidden inside, at least until after they've perforated him.

Ok, i will point out a couple of reasons for why your Superman plan, thats still one of the more likely ones to work, continues to have a lot of things that can go wrong.
1) First of all, bullets made of lead is quite unusual, and will turn up x-ray vision, that alone is enough to make him suspicious and ruin the entire plan.
2) Kryptonite is extremely rare, if you cant get a hold of it then your entire plan fails.
3) When you shoot a fragment of kryptonite incases in the soft pliable material that protects against its radiation, then you risk that the bullet just deforms with the deadly cargo inside, dropping to the ground without Superman even noticing anything ouut of the place.
4) Lastly and most importantly, the point thats most likely to fail is that it requires Superman to actually stand still and be hit, when there is a million other things he could do to ruin the entire plan. Like make everyone drop their guns because they became to hot to touch, or just take them with super speed, or pluck the bullets out of the air.. or..
The case is that letting the bullets deflect off his body is the thing he would try the hardest to avoid, seeing as there were no way of telling who else they would hit.

[GloatingSwine]

1) First of all, bullets made of lead is quite unusual,

Bullets made out of the most common thing bullets are made out of is unusual?

The real problem comes in whether the lead forms too good a shield against kryptonite radiation. If it does then the bullet merely bounces off Superman and at worst he gets shards of kryptonite in his skin.

However, just making the bullets out of kryptonite and shooting him does the trick, as long as you can catch him unawares enough to do it. (He has actually been killed this way in what-if stories before, including once by Punisher).

But, y'know, it doesn't stick.

(Alternate ways would be to do what Atomica did in Forever Evil, use Ray Palmer's shrinking tech to introduce a sliver of kryptonite into his brain, disabling and slowly poisoning him).

[comicshorse]

And yeah, as to why Checkmate and/or Task Force X haven't just started snuffing problematic supervillains... well, aside from the obvious out-of-story reasons, it seems to me that if you got rid of all the Crazy Quilts, Polka-Dotted Men, and Pranksters, the void they left would be filled by someone who was far, far worse. As long as the lower ranks of the supervillain roster is filled with largely harmless idiots, it's not filled with psychotic thugs. As to why they don't just leave the actual psychotic thugs they can get their hands on dead in a ditch somewhere? Yeah, no idea on that one.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons the Black Ops groups don't just kill super villains is that given how mind bendingly paranoid they usually portrayed as being they want to have super villains around to keep the super heroes occupied.

[lord_khaine]

Bullets made out of the most common thing bullets are made out of is unusual?

The real problem comes in whether the lead forms too good a shield against kryptonite radiation. If it does then the bullet merely bounces off Superman and at worst he gets shards of kryptonite in his skin.

However, just making the bullets out of kryptonite and shooting him does the trick, as long as you can catch him unawares enough to do it. (He has actually been killed this way in what-if stories before, including once by Punisher).

Fair enough, i missed this detail because all the bullets i had used myself turned out to be plated.

This does not change the main challenge though, that catching him unaware with unshielded kryptonite is a lot harder, and that actually hitting him with such a projectile requires handing him a sizable idiot ball first, as well as an impressive suit of plot armor to avoid getting knocked out first.

[GloatingSwine]

Fair enough, i missed this detail because all the bullets i had used myself turned out to be plated.

This does not change the main challenge though, that catching him unaware with unshielded kryptonite is a lot harder, and that actually hitting him with such a projectile requires handing him a sizable idiot ball first, as well as an impressive suit of plot armor to avoid getting knocked out first.

Yes, the best opportunity would be to assess his route to his day job at the Daily Planet to determine a blind spot and use a sniper rifle at some point where he won't have seen it to shoot him from behind.

[lord_khaine]

Yes, the best opportunity would be to assess his route to his day job at the Daily Planet to determine a blind spot and use a sniper rifle at some point where he won't have seen it to shoot him from behind.

Indeed, and even that is horribly risky, requirering him to take that specific route when the sniper is in position, instead of flying in as he sometime does.
As well as for the shot actually hitting and being instantly lethal, since he can most likely recover if it just passes straight though his body.

And all that still also requires getting kryptonite, getting a skilled sniper in position without anyone notice, and getting his secret identity, all rather hard requirements.

[Jayngfet]

Also, the Green Lantern Rings' automatic defenses, to the best of my knowledge, are pretty strictly passive, not some kind of psychotic berserker mode. Standard protective aura, preventing the ring from being removed, and possibly some low-level psychic defenses(?)... running on memory here, that's about it- no 'blow up world', or even 'blow up immediate vicinity' setting. Also, the protective aura is significantly weaker than the active shields- basically navigational deflectors vs. combat shields, if you'll pardon an even geekier analogy.

Usually. On one occasion Hal's ring flew off on it's own and started calling the shots. Though that was a one-off, it's important to keep in mind that the ring itself isn't just an inert piece of random tech, it's got it's own onboard AI.

Even then, passive shields aren't exactly EASY to crack, since even advanced alien tech can't exactly do it in one go.

[Spamotron]

Many have already said the reasons why those particular plans wouldn't work. But there is also the fact that even most of their enemies don't want them dead. Why you ask? Because without them the world would have been destroyed a hundred times over.

No regular guy or mafia group is gonna want to take out Wonder Woman, You would have a powerful nation's military, or Actual pantheon of gods coming for your neck. And then after you die you'd end up in Tartarus where Hades can torture you for all of eternity.

Aquaman. You piss him off too much or kill him and it's global war.

Flash, hell most incarnations have his enemies and him have working relationships.

This, its actually been noted several times by the saner villains that if they kill the heroes the likes of Darkseid, Braniac, Starbreaker, Sun-Eaters and Neron are now their problem. Going to prison is nothing compared to being mind-controlled slaves for eternity, or getting to watch the Sun die.

[Jayngfet]

This, its actually been noted several times by the saner villains that if they kill the heroes the likes of Darkseid, Braniac, Starbreaker, Sun-Eaters and Neron are now their problem. Going to prison is nothing compared to being mind-controlled slaves for eternity, or getting to watch the Sun die.

Of course, in the case of Darksied it could be him trying this. I mean he does run Intergang, and give them a bunch of ridiculous alien tech to do their jobs too. I mean anyone who's played DCUO can tell you that they'd rather get into a fistfight with Sinestro than Mannhiem.

[GloatingSwine]

I mean anyone who's played DCUO can tell you that they'd rather get into a fistfight with Sinestro than Mannhiem.

I dunno, you could CC Mannheim quite a lot if your kit had a lot of stuns and knockdowns in. Ice Brawler was p. good at doing it.

[Anteros]

Anyone read Irredeemable? The part I liked best was when the evil Superman-analogue basically squished the Batman-analogue into a fine red paste before he could even finish pleading for his life. That's what would happen if Superman really needed to take Batman down, not Frank Miller's masturbatory fantasy.

People always say this, but considering that Bats regularly goes up against people as strong or stronger than Supes and comes out alive or even wins...it's just not true. Bats would go into hiding if Superman wanted him dead. Superman would never see Batman again, while Bats works from the shadows against him. Supes could kill him with a sneak attack if Batman wasn't expecting it, but that's like saying Batman could beat Superman if he slipped a kryptonite rufie in his drink. It might technically be true, but it's not really in the spirit of the discussion.

As for all of these plans to kill the Justice League...people have tried almost these exact plans dozens of times before. It never works.

[Jayngfet]

I dunno, you could CC Mannheim quite a lot if your kit had a lot of stuns and knockdowns in. Ice Brawler was p. good at doing it.

Right, but Sinestro was still a much easier encounter overall. Mannhiem is probably the single hardest boss intended for single player since he quite frequently gives players almost at 30 a run for their money, since I remember my old guild needing to help newbies semi frequently. He's easy if you had good equipment or the right build, but those requirements are much stricter than basically anything else.

[LadyEowyn]

In a world where people have superpowers, Batman and the Flash should both be easily killable. All you need is a telekinetic - in both cases, just pinch shut a vessel in the brain, or crush their heart, and they're done. Or if it's a more powerful telekinetic, crush all their bones into powder. Night-instantaneous, with no defence against it.

Would work against a Green Lantern as well - if they don't know it's coming, they can't defend against it. That, and you can telekinetically grab the ring away from them first, rendering them a normal non-powered person.

Really, could do the same with Superman at any point when he was in proximity to kryptonite.

Doesn't the DC universe have any telekinetics?

(This has always struck me as a major flaw in how most media deals with telekinetics. If you can throw someone across a room with your mind, or toss heavy things at them with your mind, you can crush their heart with your mind and be done with them a lot quicker. Telekinesis doesn't just provide a Vader-esque means of oppressing subordinates, it's a nigh-infallible assassination technique.)

[Jayngfet]

The obvious issues being that Supermans body structure isn't just invulnerable skin, his muscles and nerves and blood vessels are also proportionally as strong, somehow.

Likewise, those automatic defenses are still probably going to stop you. The ring is keyed to respond to and even emulate mental powers, after all.

In any case, TK isn't particularly rare, per se, since there are a good few floating around(though this means all parties involved have plenty of practice. Lantern and Supes both regularly fight the strongest of them in the universe). It's just that finding someone who can cover that kind of strength and distance is kind of a kicker. We've seen the bartender in the oblivion bar use it to serve drinks, but he explicitly isn't strong enough to do anything serious except slowly move glasses and bottles around, because of his own limitations, which work differently from physical ones.

[TeChameleon]

3) When you shoot a fragment of kryptonite incases in the soft pliable material that protects against its radiation, then you risk that the bullet just deforms with the deadly cargo inside, dropping to the ground without Superman even noticing anything ouut of the place.
4) Lastly and most importantly, the point thats most likely to fail is that it requires Superman to actually stand still and be hit, when there is a million other things he could do to ruin the entire plan. Like make everyone drop their guns because they became to hot to touch, or just take them with super speed, or pluck the bullets out of the air.. or..
The case is that letting the bullets deflect off his body is the thing he would try the hardest to avoid, seeing as there were no way of telling who else they would hit.

As far as 3) goes, some relatively simple R&D cycles would take care of the problem of making sure that the kryptonite payload was discharged from the soft lead casing with sufficient velocity to do damage. Might even be as simple as casting the lead so that it's not much more than lead foil at the tip of the bullet.

With 4)? Superman standing there and playing human shield is something he's done as his standard operating procedure for...pretty much every incarnation I know of (warning, TV Tropes link) in his 75 years of publication. One of the most iconic images of Superman is him advancing slowly towards a hapless gunman as bullets ricochet off his chest. His awareness of ricochets tends to vary by incarnation and writer, but the whole 'standing there to show that shooting me does nothing' schtick is very old and very well-established.

Plus, people seem to be assuming single gunman shooting Superman directly, when I explicitly said in the original post that your best chance would be lots of shooters, including snipers who are further away, with multiple angles of fire and a non-bulletproof target that he specifically turned up to protect.

As for Batman... meh. It depends on how omniscient the writer wants him to be. If he's in full Bat-sue casually-squash-angry-gods-with-enough-planning-time mode, then yeah, he's functionally unkillable. If he's on a more human level, then there's no real reason why planting a remote-detonation claymore in the Batsignal and gluing a couple of webcams with long-life batteries and line of sight to the GCPD rooftop, and then just waiting, or something to that effect, wouldn't work. Or a guided missile fired from halfway across the city when the guy who's lived in an apartment above the Batsignal for twenty years calls you to tip you off that Batman is there because you offered him fifty bucks to do so, since you wanted a photo or just a cheap thrill from seeing him or whatever. The signal is both a long-established part of the mythos and a huge freaking hole in Batman's defenses, since it means he'll be at a known place at a known time.

Now that I think about it, the Green Lantern rings' passive defenses tend to be incredibly erratic as to how effective they are, or even if they actually do anything. Well, aside from keeping the wearer alive in hostile environments, which is pretty consistent. But even the passive shields come and go, with there often being no protection whatsoever when the ring-slinger is unconscious. But even in a worst-case scenario in terms of passive ring defenses, if you're up against Hal Jordan, just aim for his head. Dude's been knocked out so often that it's a wonder he can still tie his shoes after that many concussions.