One thing about Marvel and DC is that they always seem to be reacting to each other, trying to one-up the other. Marvel did a big continuity purge with their House of M story line, and DC then did their own continuity purge with their Infinite Crisis plot. DC delved into moral ambiguity and the repercussions of superheroes playing god in Identity Crisis, and Marvel did something similar with Civil War. DC responded to Civil War by deciding they’d go into World War III. Marvel said, fine. You’ve got World War III, we’ve got World War Hulk. And around and around it goes.

One bit of frustration for me is that, somewhere in this whirligig of the companies trying to outdo each other while revolutionizing their heroes at the same time, they have stopped making their superheroes the good guys. With the exception of maybe Superman, there is almost no iconic character in either Marvel or DC who is actually a hero anymore.

The trend of heroes becoming anti-heroes has been going on for years now. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns made the notion of a heartless, war-embittered Batman appealing to many people, and companies immediately started going too far with it. Good guys like Superman and Captain Marvel were no longer interesting, and were replaced by tough loner characters like the Punisher and Wolverine. That style eventually became adopted by Image Comics, where the loners were so plentiful they eventually formed into their own teams.

Following the old model of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the “bad hero” age eventually died down a bit, leaving only the most popular anti-heroes, such as Wolverine and Lobo, standing. However, in recent years, things have moved back toward the model of heroes being borderline bad guys. Only this time they’re not gritty loner anti-heroes. This time, the heroes are essentially villains.

A few years back, DC released a mini-series called Identity Crisis. In the series, Sue Dibny, a major character in the DC Universe, was revealed to have been raped by the villain Dr. Light. Dr. Light was captured by members of the Justice League, who then got the idea to mindwipe the villain, erasing his memories and attempting to “fix” him. The resulting mindwipe essentially gave him a mystical lobotomy, but it turned a nefarious villain into a harmless fool. Eventually, the heroes began doing other mindwipes, essentially rearranging villains’ thoughts to what they decided was right. And, when Batman discovered what they were doing and tried to stop them, they erased part of Batman’s memories as well, so he wouldn’t expose what they had done. It was an interesting idea, because it showed a gradual descent of the superheroes in question toward a villainous act. They were trying to make the world a better place, but in doing so they were taking away people’s free will.

One story like that was pretty intriguing. However, the comic industry doesn’t know what market saturation is. When there’s one popular idea, they try to cram it down the audience’s throats until they choke on it. Just look at the explosion of Marvel movies out there; X-Men and Spider-Man were hits, so marvel figures anything with their logo on it will sell, even if it’s abysmal crap like Daredevil, Ghost Rider or…*shudder*…Man-Thing. So DC’s great idea of having superheroes toe the moral line got copied ad nauseam.

DC did a lot of this itself. As the geared up for Infinite Crisis, they abruptly turned many of their superheroes downright evil. Maxwell Lord went from a funny and likable supporter of the Justice League to someone who used his psychic powers to mind control half the League and turn Superman against his closest friends. Several of the people who saved the universe back in the 80s during the Crisis on Infinite Earths became the villains behind the new crisis. Even the original Superman became something of a jerk (or, well, more of a jerk), lashing out at people without even trying to get the facts straight. Amusingly, the only person who seemed to show a significant amount of remorse over her deeds was Wonder Woman, who killed Maxwell Lord during the crisis. I find this funny, because of all the heroes in the DC Universe, a warrior-queen like Wonder Woman logically wouldn’t have a code against killing, but she’s the one who is still struggling with the repercussions of that one act. Meanwhile, there are people like Batman, whose extreme paranoia led to the deaths of many people, but he doesn’t seem more affected about it than usual.

Over in Marvel, they’ve been doing the same thing. A group of heroes composed of Professor X, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Blackbolt, and Doctor Strange formed the Illuminati, a secret group who decided they knew what was best for the world. This secret group decided to shoot the Hulk into space because he was too much of a menace to the world. Then they wound up killing dozens of innocent people during the superheroes’ Civil War, when the superhero community became divided over a registration act that required masked vigilantes to sign on with the government. Iron Man went to such extremes as using mind-controlling nanites to brainwash people into attempting assassinations on political figures. The heroes started spying on each other, double crossing their friends, and acting generally like dicks. In World War Hulk, the Illuminati have to face a Hulk that’s come back to Earth and is madder than ever before. Despite the fact that it is now revealed that the Illuminati are responsible for millions of deaths on an alien planet – a planet where the Hulk became a king and a hero – there’s still this charade that the people with superpowers are actually good guys.

There are a lot of good literature and comic book stories out there about heroes who go mad with power. However, in an ongoing storytelling format like superhero comics, the readers need to see that their favorite hero is still a good guy. That’s why Batman was given a sidekick named Robin; readers needed some assurance that he wasn’t just a gun-toting psychopath. Having a hero go overboard in an elseworlds story like Watchmen is one thing. Heck, there are some anti-heroes like the Punisher who are based around that concept. But some heroes, like the Fantastic Four or Wonder Woman or Superman, are designed to be good guys. Turning them into mind-controlling dictators works as a one-shot story, but not as an ongoing element. The Fantastic Four used to fight Dr. Doom. Now they’re doing stuff that would make Dr. Doom step back and say, “Damn, man. That’s cold.”

I think a lot of the problem is the notion that heroes need to be deeply flawed to be interesting. Batman, one of the most popular ones out there, is a borderline psychopath. Similarly, Wolverine, the Hulk, and many others have a pretty significant dark side. But having a hero who is also a bad guy is not the only way to make things interesting. Superman, for example, was not remotely villainous in Superman Returns, but remained interesting as the alien outsider stuck as the Earth’s savior. Spider-Man has been an interesting character for decades. Although he’s sometimes given a darker side, the inherent piece of his character that makes him interesting is that he’s a young man learning about responsibility. The Green Lantern is about a person who overcomes his greatest fears. A hero can be a hero and be interesting without secretly being a genocidal pedophile or whatever the psycho flavor of the month is.

Fortunately for me and anyone who might agree with me, comics follow the laws of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. I mentioned that before. In the late 80s and early 90s, we had a trend away from the clear cut good guys to the badass antiheroes. By the mid to late 90s, those antiheroes got boring, and heroes returned to popularity, albeit with a bit of a loner edge to them. Similarly, audiences have apparently decided that characters that actually do what is right are boring, so we have heroes who act like villains. Down the line, people will get sick of the goose stepping superhero (or, if you look at how many people hate Iron Man right now, maybe they already have), and there will be a synthesis moving back toward what came before. Superheroes will probably be good guys, but they will occasionally walk the line between heroism and villainy. Either way, I hope future writers and fans remember one thing: it is okay to have the heroes act like heroes once in a while.