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One of Batman’s allies just broke one of his most important rules in Detective Comics, and the Dark Knight doesn’t seem all that upset with them.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Detective Comics #1042, on sale now.
A long-standing series of rules for Batman and the Bat-Family have kept him and his allies from crossing lines in their mission to save lives and fight crimes across Gotham City and the world. Sometimes, the mission at hand requires some bending of those rules, often to the annoyance of someone like Batman. But one of his allies just crossed perhaps the biggest line possible with the Dark Knight — only to be met with a surprising caviler attitude.
Hue Vile was just seemingly killed by Huntress in “The Jury: Conclusion” from Detective Comics #1042 by Mariko Tamaki, Viktor Bogdanovic, Daniel Hernriques, Jordie Bellaire and Aditya Bidikar — and notably, Batman doesn’t seem to care.
Batman has increasingly been placed in dangerous settings lately, contending with not just his reduced funds but also a number of new threats — such as the deadly Mister Worth and the growing influence of the Magistrate. Perhaps the most pressing threat though has been Vile. Vile even tries to force Batman to hunt down Worth and kill him. Although Batman comes close to doing it — dropping him from a rooftop at Vile’s repeated command — Bruce Wayne is able to regain enough control to catch him with a rope and help him survive the fall. Batman is even able to contain himself somewhat, handcuffing himself while he briefly has control of himself again. This keeps Vile from using him to try and kill Huntress — forcing the creature to try and flee the two heroes by escaping Hue Vile’s body.
But a single, well-placed bolt from Huntress runs the creature through while it is in mid-air, seemingly killing it and reducing Hue’s body to almost nothing. Within hours, Hue Vile dies in a local hospital. Notably, this seems to have fully broken Batman’s rule against killing, often held up as perhaps the most consistent and important law of his crusade against crime. But instead of railing against Huntress for her actions as he has in the past to the likes of Jason Todd, Bruce seems somberly content with the outcome. He and Helena briefly talk about their time under Vile’s control, and part on good terms — indicating they can call upon each other in times of emergency going forward.
It’s possible that, given the inhuman nature of Vile, Batman decided that it didn’t fall under his rules against murder and made peace with it needing to die. It was perhaps the only way for Batman to be free of Vile’s influence and to keep himself from being overwhelmed and turned into a killer for the creature. But it still stands that Hue Vile — by all intents and purposes a man with a life and with connections in Gotham City — is dead by the hand of a hero, and Batman is okay with that.
This might especially complicate things going forward, considering that Vile was working at the right hand of Mayor Nakano, and he may see the demise of Vile as more proof of the danger and damage that comes to a city when people with powers and masks are allowed to run freely. This might be the final key to Nakano turning over the full power of Gotham to the Magistrate, which has been teased to lead directly into the upcoming Scarecrow attack on the city known as “Fear State.” Compared to his recent acceptance of Jason Todd back into the Bat-Family (regardless of the men he’s killed), it appears Batman is becoming at least a little laxer with necessary killings — which speaks to the generally pressured and overwhelmed nature of Batman at the moment.
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