Looking back on it, one thing that really bothered me about Superman's shocked reaction was that it seemed he and Diana never had any meaningful, detailed follow-up discussion on exactly why he was so upset, after there'd been a little time for tempers to cool and stuff. Or not in any story I was able to find and read when I was researching this Timeline, anyway.

After I posted copies of this on other forums last year, I recall that someone responded to me by quoting a bit from a "Wonder Woman" issue set right after she had killed Max. She went back to the embassy she was using as her home base in those days (Rucka's run), and described recent events to her friends. Someone raised in dialogue the point that it hadn't been all that long since Diana had killed Medousa in a fight which received global TV coverage as it happened, and she had gotten away with that one just fine! Diana, in turn, made a little speech to the effect that Medousa had been a snake-haired monster out of myth and Max Lord just looked like an ordinary man, and it was going to make a huge difference in how much flack she got from the rest of the world this time. Or something along those general lines.

As I recall, the guy quoting those lines of dialogue suggested that Rucka was trying to tell us Superman was horribly, hypocritically prejudiced against people who didn't exactly "look human" or "look Kryptonian" or something like that (or maybe he figured it was just "supernatural creatures" who didn't deserve "civil rights," or whatever).

I believe my response at the time went like this: "But "Superman never said that this was where he drew the line! Diana was only offering her own spur-of-the-moment opinion when she speculated that the difference in physical appearance between Medousa and Max Lord was at the root of the greater amount of criticism she was already starting to receive -- but we never got to hear Superman explain exactly what was going on inside his head, and he ought to know a lot more about his own attitudes towards different types of sentient beings than Diana does!"

I mean, Wonder Woman's killed enemies, sure.

But then, right in front of Superman's eyes, Diana kills an *ex-teammate*.

I know that I would be a hell of a lot shocked if my best friend suddenly killed our mutual high school friend than if they killed some terrorists in Iraq. They may both be human lives, sure, but there's a lot to be said for connections and people who have previously been friends. Killing an ex-friend and ex-teammate would strike most of us a lot harder than killing a terrorist.

Thank you! You've reconciled my continuity perfectly! Now can you skip ahead a year and sort out the difference between the end of Countdown and the beginning of Final Crisis? (i.e Orion kills Darkseid/Darkseid kills Orion...)

Think about it. He got enough of a power-boost from the Anti-Monitor in CoIE to be able to control the emotions of whole planets. He remembers the pre-Crisis DC universe, and (as seen in 'Animal Man') wants to recreate it. All of the key players in the lead-up to 'Infinite Crisis' were acting out of character in emotional ways; Superman is lost in self-doubt, Wonder Woman has become more ruthless, Batman's turned paranoid, and the villains are all being remarkably friendly to each other. That many people acting that badly out of character when there's an emotion-manipulating supervillain standing right there, well...Occam's Razor.

I remember Action 761; a few months later (might’ve been in Loeb’s book?) Superman was sitting on the porch in Smallville, talking with his Pa and telling him about how he was off with WW for a thousand years. This was around the time that Parasite was masquerading as Lois Lane and making a mess of their marriage. It was played for laughs because Superman was so matter-of-fact about it and Pa was flabbergasted, but he clearly remembered.

Ouch! If that was around the time Parasite was replacing Lois, then I know I've read all the relevant issues of all the Superman titles from that era at least once. But it's been years. Apparently that bit completely slipped my memory -- I still don't remember that conversation, although I vaguely recall that Superman and "Lois" made a trip to Smallville in that timeframe.

Meanwhile, I've also been told in other feedback that Wonder Woman once mentioned it in a heart-to-heart talk with Lois Lane (who obviously had not heard about that thousand-year-war from her own husband before Diana brought it up). So apparently that story became much more "firmly embedded in continuity" than I realized. I'll make appropriate adjustments in the Second Draft of my Timeline, whenever I get around to cranking one out. (It will be a long time -- I have other things I want to finish writing, or old things to revise for new editions, and I wouldn't want to bore people to death by producing a slightly-improved version of this Timeline every month or so.)

I'd heard about the "Max Lord remarkably is no longer in a robotic body any more, et cetera," but I hadn't read all the relevant stories and I decided not to bother going into that side issue. It did occur to me in passing that if Diana was behind the curve, she might have assumed (or claimed to have assumed) that what she was facing was a robotic replica of Max which had obviously gotten glitched in its programmed personality and ought to be fair game if it wasn't really a "living, breathing human being." But as far as I know, Diana never actually tried to offer such a defense, and I decided it wasn't really my job to try to invent possible defense strategies out of thin air for her!

You mentioned how, at the very end of the Byrne run on Superman in the late 1980s, Superman was in the Pocket Universe where the entire human population of the local Planet Earth had been exterminated by a trio from that Pocket Universe's Phantom Zone, and Superman eventually managed to depower them with Gold K and then pronounced a death sentence on them and finished them off with Green K.

Although I didn't mention it in this Timeline, I had previously gone back and forth on the idea of giving that item its own listing. I also considered listing the time when Superman killed Doomsday (and died himself) in 1992. I finally decided not to mention either of them, because my emphasis here was supposed to be on how Superman perceived Diana's ethics regarding killing enemies, rather than on what Superman himself had done in the distant past. I did include his killing of Crucifer, though; partially because it was "much more recent" at the time Diana killed Max Lord, and partially because Diana participated in that adventure, and partially because of the remarkable parallels between what Crucifer had done (mind-controlling Superman to turn him against his friends) and what Max had done (ditto!).

Personally, I think that, while it might not make much sense 'in-world' so to speak (but then, most of the interactions between Superman, Batman and WW in Infinite Crisis don't), its a killer (off-panel) moment in Rucka's prety good OMAC Project. Lord is set up as having planned everything so he couldn't be stopped, and the murder and its broadcast, just top that off a treat.

Sacrifice was lame and basically one issue stretched over 4; hell, part one and two were basically exactly the same comic, and the cover of part 3 promises a Superman vs. Ruin fight that takes up precisely one (hallucinated) panel in the issue.

As regards Lord's characterization, didn't I read Titans-fanatic Didio wanted to use Mr. Jupiter but the editors talked him out of it as (quite rightly) pretty much nobody knows who he is? Giffen's made no secret of the fact that he didn't care what was planned for all the characters in Formerly Known as... and he was just gonna write 'em how he wanted to.

I know Max HAD reformed, and J'onn scanned his mind (back in JLI #10 or something??) but that implies that he was going to stay reformed...

My suggestion was that he finally decided that the best thing for all concerned (and again primarily Max here) was to take over Checkmate and the OMACs...

I'm not saying that's what happened, or what was written or what was implied.

It's purely my take on the scenario to reconcile the Max Lord that I remembered from JLI, all the way through to "Formerly Known as the Justice League" and "JLA Classified 5-8-I Can't Believe it's Not the Justice League" to his sudden appearance in Countdown to Infinite Crisis as someone who was willing to kill Ted Kord at point blank range...

It really is bad writing and editorial that has left such a HUGE step unexplained... Hence my personal idea that Max snapped after the failure of SuperBuddies and went back to his Megalomaniacal ways of old...

It's the only way I could see them as the same person... Max snapped and went back to being pre-Millenium Max...

In my mind it makes slightly more sense than "SuperBoy Punch!" or "Timeflies" or "Elseworlds"...

But I'm not sure this is something to do with a specific hero religious belief. It's more like some genres themselves posit a thelogical framework. Stories about vampires and killer robots and demons, for instance, often make it explicit or implicit that the creature has no "soul" or a fallen soul, and so it's fair game for the heroes.

I think superhero tales partake of horror stories or sci-fi stories when they deal with such things.

How do atheists like Mr Terrific fit into that equation?

Therefore, if I take issue at the senseless killing of a human, then I should take issue at the senseless killing of a vampire/alien/demon/animal/robot. If I, as a superhero, try not to kill a human under any circumstances, then I should then try not to kill a vampire/alien/demon/animal/robot under any circumstance. (Coincidentally, this is a reason why I've had a real big gripe with a recent event done by a certain company).

However, I appreciate that morals essentially differ from person to person, but Supes obviously believes that there should be a common code shared by superheroes. This I agree with, but such a code cannot really include one that says never kill a being/human under any circumstance, because there are circumstances where that needs to be broken (an "unsentient" Doomsday is a good example of this).

My personal view is that if heroes need to kill, it's cause they're not good (read: skilled or powerful or smart) enough to defeat their opponent, so it's a personal failing of that hero. Perhaps that needs to be incorporated into the shared philosophy of the heroes.

I think a good question to ask is: would Supes & the world have prefered if Diana rendered Lord into a vegetative state?

When Superman sees Wonder Woman killing some evil pagan creatures, Superman recognizes that Diana is dealing with denizens from an universe that plays by completely different rules than the realm of men. It's not just speciecism from Superman's part, but a recognition that Diana's world has a different set of laws, both in the legal and the supernatural senses. Superman also recognizes that Diana is better equiped in all ways to deal with this universe.

A vampire and a sentient robot can be killed even by "heroes that don't kill", because they're supposed to have no soul. A big part of the taboo against killing is "playing God", choosing who gets to live and who gets to die. The dilemma isn't a real dilemma when the creature in question has nothing to do with God's plan and can be dispatched with theological impunity.

Demons and evil gods and evil monsters fall mostly in this category too. They supposedly lack a human soul that can be redeemed. Even if they do have a soul, they're not under God's purview, I suppose.

Science fiction monstrous aliens are a different case. I don't remember them being killed with such impunity. Though they seem to rank lower than humans or humanoid aliens.

But with this we get to the second major point: legality. I think demons, vampires, robots, and gods are also not recognized as persons by the law. So you don't break human law by killing one. Aliens are somewhat different, in that an alien may be treated more like a foreigner and the "lawful" thing to do in a superhero universe would be to extradite him back to his planet, forcibly repeling the invasion.

I'm not saying I agree with all that, only that it seems to be how the stuff works in superhero comics.

(It can work out fine in genre pastiche, but a pastiche story can generally build a much more convincing setting than any ongoing DC superhero monthly ever will.)

Well. not if Gotham's in Michigan / Wisconsin / Minnesota / any other state that doesn't have it (although I think it's been established that Gotham DOES have the death penalty, via a GN from the 90s).

Or New York, where the death penalty statute was ruled unconsitutional in 2004 and hasn't been replaced.

And that's without even going into mental capacity.

Now, arguing whether Joker's committed a federal crime subject to capital punishment, that's something else entirely....

If the Joker had ever existed in the real world, he would have been sent to the electric chair (or lethal injection or gas chamber or whatever) a long long long long long long long time ago, rather than everyone standing by and letting him continute to live despite the fact that he escapes from Arkham Asylum on a weekly basis and has to have amassed a body count of several thousand victims by now. So, y'know, right then and there, any real-world analogies fall completely flat on their face.

Sorry if the theory has been discredited, but that's the way I have chosen to see it.