3) Adrian Chase
With the competition introducing The Punisher as the main antagonist of Daredevil‘s second season, it’s clear that anti-heroes are very much in vogue. Thankfully, DC has no shortage of those in its stable and one with quite the lasting legacy is the Vigilante, Adrian Chase.
Created in 1983 by the legendary Marv Wolfman (Teen Titans, Blade), he was a quiet reply to Marvel’s resident eternal warrior, Frank Castle. Like Castle, Chase was also spurred into action by tragedy. A District Attorney who tried to prosecute the wrong mobster, his family was killed in retaliation. In return, Chase began a campaign against those who wronged him. While he was driven by the same cold revenge that Castle was, he was nowhere near as confident. Untrained, unrefined and unsure of his ability to fight crime in this way, Chase’s career was very much trial by fire.
[zergpaid]He eventually consolidated his doubts into a fragile moral code: he only allowed himself the use of lethal force in the most extreme cases. How long such an ambiguous code can last was what made the series so thrilling, as he became both a sympathetic hero and a despicable anarchist.
Such a contrast is something Bruce Wayne must be exposed to. I’m not saying he needs to alter his “no killing” code (despite him breaking it several times), but such a frigid, contradictory belief, only installed to make the character marketable to children, is not enough to save the Gotham featured in this show. If he is to one day don that cowl, he must know that which is so painfully obvious to everyone here in the real world: sometimes, being a hero means doing some pretty bad things.