Funny you should mention it but they did just that.... But with AOC of all people. And only then because she personally fucked with Amazon's money which I'm sure secretly pissed Kripke and Rogen off that they were most likely made to make her a villain.
That's funny; it kind of kills their own woke message when the AOC-stereotype who wants to muzzle rogue supes is just another evil supe working for a typical evil corporate boss. So what does that say? Not to put hope or faith in people trying to keep supes in line because they're probably just controlled opposition? That the only way forward is vigilantism? That's a quaint message to preach.
Hitman is actually Ennis' superhero criticisms at their most reasonable. Never-kill rules are redditoid slop for those who won't suffer when violent criminals are constantly let out. Normal people don't have the luxury of letting villains backstab them with muh human rights.
Never-kill rules are so that you don't have to make a new supervillain every time the heroes are done fighting the current one. Why doesn't Peter Parker just snap Doc Ock's neck? So that he can come back a few issues from now and do the same shtick. Of course, these were the days before Superman died and then came back to life so who gives a shit nowadays if the Punisher shoots The Russian through the throat? He can just come back with his head attached to a different body and- wait what the fuck that actually happened. They made his new body a female one, too. Oh my mistake, his head was put back on his original body, they just gave him soy shots that gave him tits and apparently a PMS, and he decided to dress up like a woman. What the fuck
I'm going to throw Garth Ennis a big, fat bone here, and say that he is absolutely correct in this regard.
Never-kill rules make perfect sense from an editorial standpoint; you want to be able to reuse bad guys, and you want your heroes to look good so they're marketable to kids. But if the setting is a mature setting where bad guys kill people, it makes zero fucking sense story-wise; your hero is letting innocent people die to satisfy his moral code, so he can virtue-signal about how noble he is.
It's like that one duchess in Star Wars: The Clone Wars who made the planet of Mandalore into a pacifist nation to show how kind she is in giving up the brutal warrior ways of the past, only for her people to get massacred by crime syndicates who invaded the planet, so her people vote in a soldier as the new prime minister, and the soldier proceeds to undo everything she did, and he sets the nation back towards the path of the warrior.
At least in shows like GI Joe: A Real American Hero, there are no actual deaths in combat. Even the mooks jump out of exploding tanks and planes. So it makes sense that Duke never kills Cobra Commander or vice-versa when they capture each other, since the show is made for kids and no one actually dies.
But in most western comics like Batman, where the no-kill code is most present and even a plot point that characters in the story comment on, it just makes Batman and other western comic heroes look like massive hypocrites in that they're not willing to shed blood themselves, yet they allow the Joker and the other villains to kill people repeatedly. The only thing they do is lock the villains in revolving-door prisons that they can easily escape from. This just means that every person the villains kill, all that blood, is on the heroes' hands, because they had the power to end this shit once and for all, but refused to.
So in this instance, I'd fully agree with Garth Ennis.
That, and we have heroes who have killed God knows how many bad guys without being morally corrupted; you have Optimus Prime from the many iterations of Transformers, you have Luke Skywalker from the Original Star Wars trilogy; both have killed millions of their versions of Space Nazis, be they Imperials or Decepticons. Yet these heroes are still morally pure and good in the most literal sense; Luke is so pure he redeems his evil father, Optimus is so pure that he refused to break despite millions of years of warfare. If these morally correct paladins of virtue are capable of killing a bitch to end the threat they posed, then they make comic heroes like Batman holding back on killing the comic equivalent of Unit 731 look colossally stupid in comparison.
Allow me to play devil's advocate but the elite squad trained solely for handling superpowered threats is a really cool idea and I get why Ennis is into that.
It's an idea that's been better executed in other franchises.
In Transformers, you had human military units like MECH and Cemetery Wind who are trained at fighting giant robots, and so they are able to counter the Autobots or Decepticons' advanced technology and are able to kill them or capture them for study.
In Star Wars, you have Mandalorians and Clone Troopers who are trained on how to kill Jedi, and the latter were even cloned from a member of the former who did kill Jedi, and he trained the latter, which makes Order 66 plausible, especially if the Jedi spent the last 3 years fighting robots, not humans trained on how to kill Jedi.
Hell, even other forms of capeshit they did it better. DCAU had Project Cadmus, which was sponsored by the US Government, using all sorts of technology and even making their own heroes to counter the growing power of the Justice League in the odd case they became a threat. During the Marvel Civil War, you even had supes joining the government against supes who didn't want to.
The way Ennis did it, it's just supes vs. supes, except the supes who are the "good guys" wear edgy black trenchcoats, aside from Hughie and Starlight. The show basically made it Batman vs. Superman writ large; normies using skill and knowledge to overcome super-powered foes.
