In This Week’s Injustice Comic, Superman Does the One Thing Batman Never Would

Kotaku brings us news:

You might know that DC Comics has an Injustice comic running which sets up the stage for all the brawling in the upcoming fighting game. The story by writer Tom Taylor and artists Mike Miller and Jheremy Raapack is appearing in digital form first, with print editions following. Check out this excerpt, where Jimmy Olsen gets headshot through a camera and something very bad looks like it’s going to happen to Lois Lane at the hands of the Joker.

In the downloadable chapter that came out this week—outed on Bleeding Cool—readers see the fate of Lois and what Superman does as a result. Spoilers follow, so you may want to avert your eyes.

The thing that sets Batman—and presumably a bunch of other heroes—against Superman is the death of the Joker at the Man of Steel’s hands. Joker tricks Superman into thinking that his pregnant wife is actually ultra-powerful villain Doomsday (who killed Superman once in a big event two decades ago) and Superman unwittingly flies her into space where, of course, she can’t survive. The comics indicate that Kal-El’s grief leads him to set up some sort of crime-free super-dictatorship so that no crime or unjust death ever happens again.

This is a big deal. Over the character’s 75 year history, incidents of Superman killing intentionally are very rare so the fact that this happens at all is significant. That it happens to set up a video game story—one for a game that some would argue doesn’t even need a plot—is odd. Of course, Joker is a playable character in the game so it’s possible that the events in the preceding panel aren’t quite as final as they seem. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time a video game’s misdirection revolved around the mortality of the Joker.