While Gotham City is known for its crime and brutality in the DC Universe, it’s actually somewhat rare for criminals to actually die. Part of that is just the nature of comic books; after all, if you don’t have compelling villains for the hero to confront you really don’t have much of a story. For Batman specifically, part of that is the hero himself, as Batman is well-known for his personal code of conduct, his infamous “no killing” rule. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t occasionally happen, however, that a villain meets their end and now, one of Batman’s oldest foes has been killed off—and it’s kind of the villain’s own fault.
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If you’ve been following Matt Fraction’s run on Batman, you know that Gotham City has a new major threat, the Minotaur who his own crime syndicate, Torus. Because this is Gotham City, Minotaur isn’t the only criminal element at play in the city, and Hugo Strange has also been operating, hiring a hit through Tozuki-San, the head of Tozuki Petro, a front company that was operating as a supplier for the Torus. However, things don’t exactly go the way Strange has planned in Batman #10 and it could be a signal of what else is to come.
Hugo Strange is Batman’s Oldest Villain And He Got Played By His Own Hand
To say that things don’t go the way Strange had planned is a little underselling it. While Strange had hired Tozuki-San to do a killing, Strange ended up double-crossing him and sent his own Monster Men to go after the hit team. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well and functioned as a declaration of war on Tozuki Petro which, in turn, was seen as an attack on the Torus. Strange ends up being targeted by the Torus and gunned down, leading to his very bloody death.
While this is comics and the reality is, at some point in the future we’ll likely see Hugo Strange again (this isn’t the first time the villain has died in comics) this death is still very significant. Hugo Strange has an important place in Batman’s overall history. Not only is he one of Batman’s first and oldest foes first appearing in Detective Comics #36, but his role in Batman #1 led to Batman’s “no killing” rule in the first place. In that issue, Batman faces off against Hugo Strange and we see Batman firing a machine gun to stop the Monster Men created by the villain. He also is seen actually killing one of the men by hanging him from the Bat Plane. It’s implied the man’s neck is broken in the process with Batman suggesting that he’s “probably better off this way.”
The moment was so jarring that it led to an editorial mandate that Batman would no longer carry and use guns as well as the rule that he and other heroes wouldn’t kill. While different stories have seen Batman do some serious things over the years (and, yes, the hero has since killed) it established one of the things Batman is best known for, creating a pretty familiar status quo. What makes the death of Hugo Strange in Batman #10 now so fascinating is that in a sense, it also helps to establish a sort of status quo or rather shake one up. One of the things that we’ve seen building up in Fraction’s run is a shift to Batman’s existing status quo. We’ve gotten new villains, new threats, and a lot of the tone of the book is even changing. Killing of Strange could very well be a piece of a larger move away from the bad guys we know and expect and new, more modern threats and stories for the iconic hero,
At least until he’s brought back again in the future.
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