Can We Still Look Up to Super Heroes?
Have our favorite comic book characters lost their innocence or have we?
When I started reading comic books as a kid, the world of super heroes was still more-or-less black and white. Good guys were good and had very clear lines that they would not cross. This environment is what made characters like Wolverine so interesting and appealing. His moral code was off-center from the rest of the heroes and he would cross the lines the other heroes wouldn’t if necessary. But he was the exception. In general, the heroes were suitable role models for kids. For the most part a child’s moral compass would work pretty well by asking, “what would Spidey do?” The comic book publishers gave us heroes we could admire, look up to and emulate. They were doing their part to help produce upstanding young citizens.
The problem was we liked Wolverine.
Wolverine
Wolverine represented the moral grey areas of life that we became increasingly aware of as we grew up. There was also a cultural swing toward violence. I think that part of this started as a way for entertainment, especially movies, to shock and surprise us. There were cases where non-violence didn’t make sense to us, so the moviemakers gave us violence. The cliché of the hero throwing down his weapon to face the villain in a fair fight had become stale. It became increasingly more difficult to understand the hero’s actions and we wanted something that seemed more reasonable. A classic example is in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones is fighting off swarms of bad guys while searching for Marion. Suddenly the crowd parts and this large, imposing swordsman stands facing Indy, swinging his sword menacingly, preparing to attack. At this point, those of us seeing the movie for the first time expected a dramatic fight between Indy and the swordsman, but instead Indy simply pulls out his gun and casually shoots the swordsman dead, and then continues his search.
Audiences universally loved this scene. It was surprising and it made sense! When faced with this type of situation, it was ok for our hero to kill this attacker in self-defense. There was no moral obligation for a fair fight. But it didn’t take long before Hollywood took this too far with the Rambos and the Lethal Weapons where the “hero’s” body count became a measured statistic.
Comic books were certainly not immune to this cultural wave. Anti-heroes like the Punisher and Lobo became all the rage and the tried and true super heroes started becoming darker and grittier and placed in extreme situations where their moral codes were stretched and occasionally broken.
This was not necessarily a bad thing. Many of us yearned for stories that were more “grounded” in the real world. We wanted stories that required less suspension of disbelief that made the characters easier to identify with. This wave of change allowed the writers to give the characters more depth, and make them more human (even the mutants and aliens).
The more “grounded” or “realistic” portrayal of super heroes has become the norm. Even the paragons of virtue, the Justice League of America, have been shown to make morally questionable decision and actions. We have gained deeper, more interesting characters, but we have paid for them with our role models.
Maybe that’s ok. Everyone and everything has to grow up and lose their innocence eventually. Even Superman. Maybe the problem is that we have hung onto the classic characters too long. Once innocence is lost, it can’t be found again.
But that’s the way things are supposed to be.
There is a need in the comic book world for new characters. There is a need for innocent characters that have not been dragged down by the weight of the world. Perhaps there has never been a better time since the early days of Marvel in the 1960’s to create fresh new characters in a fresh new universe for a fresh new audience. Wouldn’t that be something?
We’d finally have the best of both worlds.
