Technical Pacifist / Comic Books

• The rival gangs in 20 Fists have a solid rule about not killing anyone during their regular brawls, but they're both more than happy to beat the other side into paste.
• Batman:
  • In one Robin (1993) issue, while the Boy Wonder is training with a super secret paramilitary unit, one of the members asks why he and Batman don't use guns. Robin replies that, unlike the cops and the military, Batman and Robin can't appear in a court of law to justify it if they end up killing someone, and they don't have any official authority, so they don't use lethal force.
  • Which is all a mask for the real reason; Bruce's parents were killed by a gunman, leading his philosophy against lethal force. Obviously they can't tell the world that, but still. It's also implied (or in some continuities outright stated) that Bruce doesn't trust himself to stop killing criminals if he ever violated that self-imposed rule, fearing that if the rule were anything less than absolute then he'd always be able to find a reason that one criminal or another "needs" to die. Basically, it's his way of averting He Who Fights Monsters. However, this rule does not seem to extend to anything that's not human. In The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), you see him standing side-by-side with the Amazons wielding a frickin' BATTLEAXE, which he proceeds to bury in the bodies of numerous clones of Doomsday. His justification? They were never alive to begin with.
  • Cassandra Cain, the third Batgirl. By being able to read body language as a first language means that killing a man makes her feel the horror of the other person's death, thus she doesn't kill.
  • Kate Kane is generally more violent than Bruce, but avoids killing out of respect for Batman and the pragmatism of not getting on his bad side unnecessarily, even though she has no moral issue with it if it's needed. The only times she has killed (outside of mindless demon Mooks) have been in last-resort situations to protect others, and she has never been bothered by it.
• Supergirl is more proactive and more hot-tempered than her cousin, and is willing to try to and reform criminals and villains... even if she has to beat them up first. Nonetheless, she attempted to kill the Anti-Monitor because was too dangerous, and she threw Worldkiller-1 into the Sun reasoning that an artificially-engineered murderous symbiotic parasite doesn't count as a "living being".
  Supergirl: I know who I am, and I know what you are— A mockery of life. This is not murder. It is the end of a terrible mistake.
• Superman abides by a "No killing" code, but he's forced to kill sometimes. Pre-Crisis, Superman's "No killing" code is so strict that some villains have tried to take advantage of it and, in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? depowers and banishes himself after killing Mr. Mister Mxyzptlk. In the Post-Crisis era, killing is a very last resort - in The Supergirl Saga, he kills three Kryptonian criminals when he realizes there's no way he could safely contain them and in The Death of Superman and Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey, he's forced to kill Doomsday as he won't stop at all.
• Spider-Man: Peter Parker is usually depicted as this . Sure, he's willing to beat the ass out of the villains, but he absolutely refuses to kill anyone, even against said villains. Then again, it's also more or less of his fear of himself if he drops his Thou Shall Not Kill moral code. In fact, when a resurrected Kraven the Hunter offers Spider-Man the opportunity to kill him in Grim Hunt, he was about to pull a killing blow on Kraven, but later refuses to do so after being given a vision of a Bad Future where he becomes a mass murdering Anti-Hero vigilante, thus reinforcing his moral code.
• King Mob in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles begins the series killing indiscriminately, then turns into a kung-fu master/Technical Pacifist after realizing that the death toll is negatively affecting his karma.
• Green Arrow started as this, and indeed made it into a form of art, with stunning arrows, sleep/cough gas arrows, electronic disturbance arrows, and his trademark boxing glove arrows. When he accidentally killed a man in the '70s, he more-or-less had a breakdown. After his long-time lover got kidnapped and brutally tortured, though, he killed her captor and kept going from there.
• Rom: Spaceknight: ROM, SPACEKNIGHT, who banishes rather than kills the Dire Wraiths early on... because he thinks they suffer more that way. ROM is stone cold. A much later issue of The Avengers find themselves stranded in the dimension where ROM keeps sending all those Dire Wraiths. They force the Avengers to kill them rather than continue to exist there.
• The Silver Surfer will only kill living beings if he feels there is no other option.
• Transformers: Traditionally, and very unrealistically for a military commander with hundreds of millennia of experience, Optimus Prime has been a Technical Pacifist or close to it. (More accurately, it is unrealistic that a technical pacifist would survive military command that long, though he might certainly want to be a technical pacifist after so much death and combat.) This is likely because the original series were aimed at children. More recent comics produced by IDW make Prime willing not only to kill enemy soldiers, but when absolutely necessary accept collateral damage, though it eats at him.
• Brainstorm from The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye is a skilled weapon designer, but his skill at building weapons let him make it through the Great War without actually ever using any of them, as he was too valuable to risk on the front lines. When first given the opportunity to actually shoot someone ( Megatron's helpless protoform, which he'd traveled back in time to kill in an attempt to avoid having the war ever break out), he ends up spending ten minutes standing there, unable to actually pull the trigger.
• Tintin is somewhere between this and Actual Pacifist, but he generally only uses forces on self-defense. Tintin in the Congo doesn't count.
• Both incarnations of Dove, of Hawk & Dove. Don Hall was somewhat more pacifistic than Dawn Granger, but both believed in using as little force as possible, contrasting with Hank/Holly. This is not entirely surprising for characters who are empowered by a Lord of Order to serve as the living embodiment of Peace. If anything, it's almost more shocking that the Doves are allowed to fight at all.
• Throughout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello has been shown to be the most peaceful of the Turtles, but he still needed to be a kickass fighter. So this personality trait was cemented with him fighting with the rather less lethal Bo, instead of something sharp. He's also stated a hatred of guns several times, although it's not clear whether he considers them an "immoral" weapon or whether he's just not comfortable using them.
• Ultimate Marvel
  • Ultimate X Men: Professor Xavier is a technical pacifist due to his desire to have mutants rise above humanity's baser instincts. For example, rather than simply defeat Well-Intentioned Extremist Magneto, he creates an impressive explosion to make it seem as though he perished and then takes it upon himself to rehabilitate him. It doesn't work.
  • The Ultimates: Thor preaches pacifism, but he's unstoppable in a fight. He's a pacifist with a big, scary hammer.
• DC Comics Western character Bat Lash. He sees himself as a pacifist, and hardly ever uses his gun (although he's very good with it). And yet, he keeps finding himself in situations where he has to beat people up, or even kill them.
• Nikola Tesla would never lay a hand on anybody. Heavens no! Why would he do that when he has a perfectly functional Atomic Robot to do it for him?
  Robo: But, Mr. Tesla, you're a pacifist.
  Tesla: Yes, Robo. But you are not.
• The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk is this Depending on the Writer. Notably shown in World War Hulk: X-Men, where while trying to capture Professor X, he brutally disabled virtually every active X-man and woman one after another, taking full advantage of their healing factors and Nigh-Invulnerability. While he didn't kill any of them, he didn't have a problem crippling them.
• Captain America varies from continuity to continuity, but he's usually unwilling to kill people outside of a combat situation unless it's absolutely necessary to save lives. (In the Silver Age, he never killed at all. In more recent versions, he's killed in war, but he no longer sees lethal force as appropriate, since he's now fighting criminals rather than soldiers.)
• Klara Prast of the Runaways fills this role in the current lineup, preferring to use her plant-control powers for either defending her teammates or restraining enemies. But if you upset her to the point where she can't think clearly, all bets are off...
• Piper in Zita the Spacegirl at one point has a big row with his ex-girlfriend Madrigal about his unwillingness to fight. Turns out the only time he's really in the mood for a fight is when she's threatened. It's the resumption of their relationship.
• X-23 has slowly evolved into this. Born and raised to be a merciless killing machine, as she's put her life back together she's become increasingly reluctant to kill. The page image comes from All-New Wolverine, in which she's caught up in a conflict between Alchemax Genetics and four clones they made of her called the Sisters. Laura makes every effort to resolve the situation without killing anyone, and her refusal to kill Taskmaster when he came for the girls led to Zelda Taking a Third Option by Knee-capping. Of course, Laura herself has no problem cutting off hands and fingers, beating the crap out of Alchemax's mooks, and leaving their leader lying in the wreckage of his Humvee (which she helped wreck).
  • She finally reaches her limit in issue 18 when confronted by Kimura, her psychotic ex-handler, and the woman who's made her life a living hell since she was seven years old by torturing her, and threatening her family, friends, and other loved ones.
  • Gabby herself lampshades to a Brood Queen that Laura's "code" is more like a set of loose guidelines than an actual rule. So Laura will kill if she doesn't have a choice. It also depends on the adversary: Hand Ninjas and Brood are pretty much fair game.
• Wonder Woman. Like Captain America mentioned above, Diana will use lethal force but only as a last resort.
• Klone from The Others (1995) will fight to protect the Enclave, but never with lethal force, and in truth he hates violence. In fact, his usual contribution to a battle is to serve as a living shield, allowing assailants to demoralize themselves by seeing their attacks harmlessly deflected by his Nigh-Invulnerable hide.

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