>Regarding the killing mass-murdering villains before they can kill any more innocent bystanders issue:

Don’t you think that there is a bit of a double-standard at work, considering that the priority scale of heroes and anti-heroes alike generally seems reversed?

Despite that comparatively helpless mooks constitute far less of a threat to the public safety than actual extremely psychopathic supervillains, they are generally killed off far more frequently. For example, if I remember correctly, even a morally upstanding character like Captain America had no problem killing regular human Hydra agents or enemy soldiers as depicted in Brubaker’s run on the book, yet generally avoided killing more distinctive brand name characters that constituted far more of a threat.

And for another example, I heard that Deadpool recently killed Ultimatum terrorists by the hundreds, yet he showed mercy to Omega Red, who is likely more dangerous than all of them combined, and on the same moral level as pre-inversion kindergarten child-eating Sabretooth.

Shouldn’t the scale be aligned more according to making it a main priority to find elaborate ways to permanently annihilate the worst of the worst, such as Dormammu, Thanos, and Mephisto, first (meaning destroying them spiritually, physically, metaphysically, mentally, existentially, etcetera) so that they are completely wiped from ever existing, and can never ever be resurrected or make a comeback, and last order of the list, comparatively helpless mooks that do not constitute any particular threat to master combatants with superhuman powers? Or at least possibly be reconsidered to turn more consistent? 

I apologise about being a bother, but I tend to get hangups on these sort of things.>

I feel like you’re conflating a number of different things here, so let me try to unpack this a little bit.

You’re asking, in essence, for our characters to kill, but in a more logical fashion. That’s a very intellectual argument, however, and the issue is a lot more emotion-based, I think.

You’re also lumping all characters into a single pile. But there is a world of difference between Captain America’s morality and that of Deadpool. So any rule is not going to be one-size-fits-all.

In battle, in a fight, Captain America isn’t trying to kill anybody. But as a soldier, he is aware and accepts that, in combat, sometimes enemy combatants die. But there’s a difference between knocking AIM or Hydra footsoldiers off of a moving train that’s packed with a bomb and which needs to be stopped–that’s a situation where the mission is to stop the train, and the collateral damage to the footsoldiers in the way of that goal is acceptable. Even then, there’s nothing that says that any of those guys is necessarily dead. In different circumstances–if there wasn’t a bomb, for example–Cap might very well try to save those same footsoldiers. 

And Deadpool’s morality is even more fluid than that. Deadpool has no compunction against killing even random people if the situation is correct, but it’s a morality that he struggles with. So depending on where he happens to be on his own personal morality curve, he might show mercy, or he might not. He’s not evaluating a future threat coldly and dispassionately, and it’s not a decision based on the mathematics of future encounters.

Beyond that, there’s a larger and more pedantic consideration at work here, and that’s that our heroes are going to need villains to contend with next month as well! if Deadpool killed everybody he fought, after awhile it would be difficult to find people for him to fight. So it’s much easier to wipe out hundreds of nameless, faceless, instantly-replaceable Ultimatum goons than it is to cap Omega Red.