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The Harsh Way of the Hero

The coming of a cultural paradigm shift may imprint the arts in various ways, including the content of popular entertainments generally considered escapist, such as books, movies, and, of course, comic books. While the various entertainments often suffer criticism for their detachment from "reality" - as if critics have a particular grasp on the concept denied to others, and as if a single human mind can grasp individually what six billion minds can only see collectively in individual facets that do not necessarily resolve to a single consensus - the recurring fantasies of an age can take a form even in the territory of men who wear tights, fly around, and pummel one another for the enjoyment of masses.

The superheroes that erupted at the dawn of the thirties began from a pulp-themed kernel, harsh and sinister men who served to corral desperate characters into a justice that conventional policing and jurisprudence could not, for whatever reason, create. In this aspect, they became a kind of wish-fulfillment thrust against the fear of Prohibition-era crime, exemplifying the idea that men of sufficient determination and excellence could tame the beast of creeping gangsterism. But soon enough the comics that the pulps sired moved to act on fantasies more of power than of retributive justice; thus, the extravagant superheroes of the forties, who could fly, burst into flames, change into things, or perform specialized acts of the impossible as their core concepts might require.

As the superhero changed in his transition from his origins in the thirties to his population explosion in the forties, he would continue to evolve here and there in various decades. The fifties hero we can leave for other exploration, owing to that decade's disinclination to the costumed hero after the forties form; but by the sixties, we again saw particular traits attaching to the new and refurbished variety. On the DC side of the aisle, the hero became a kind of avatar of chivalry, perhaps reflecting the notion that American culture had begun to lose its moral underpinning. On Marvel's side, superheroes expressed their quirkiness and human traits, suggesting other fears of a technological era, including the possibility of dehumanization (such as one might associate with the notion of stifling conformism).

Yet the most drastic change seemed to begin in the 1970s, where a variety of hero appeared that suggested something more - perhaps that the hero had gone awry, into a territory of irrelevance to contemporary human concerns. In one sense, this new variety represented a dramatic turn backwards towards the pulp-era hero; but in another, it implied that the very notions of mercy and limited response themselves had fallen into disrepute. And thus the 1970s marked the beginning of the costumed vigilantes, and a newly Harsh Era of the Hero.

The Early Model

The earliest pulp and comics heroes frequently behaved with considerable vehemence against enemies, often taking lives instead of prisoners. This ruthlessness reflected the understood ruthlessness of criminals themselves; the kind of criminal writers of late pulps and early superhero comics used as a model derived from prohibition-era concerns about rising crime rates. Assassins, white slavers, spies, and the like, and the crime bosses that led them, served as models much more so than (say) nickel-and-dime gamblers, pickpockets, or other trivial criminals. And these early heroes took lives because, as they saw it, by doing so they saved lives.

This provided the keystone of the equation. The hero, as one of his missions, protected life, even if this meant the occasional loss of human life as a means of preventing greater loss of life. The angle connected the two - a priority system rated the lives of victims or targets as more worthwhile in a comparison of predator to prey and a moral cost-benefit analysis pointed to an approach that treated the lives of innocents as something of value, but at the cost of much respect for the lives of criminals.

Since lethal force sometimes figured in the superheroic equation here, one can note as a particular that these heroes indeed sometimes killed. However, a shallow view of such heroes threatens to remove their own policies of lethal force from the justifying context; and, to a later generation, the fact that the heroes of old may have killed criminals becomes not a means, but an end in its own right.

Enlightened Penology

Various competing notions about crime and its origins traveled within the ferment of twentieth-century thought. Some optimistic theories assumed that the so-called criminal differed from the so-called civic role model mainly by circumstances and luck, and that the right effort could transform the former into the latter. Therefore, the argument went, penology should look to repair of damaged lives in order to rehabilitate and reintegrate.

Furthermore, deterministic arguments frequently repositioned the locus of control away from the actors in crime. Society, in this model, took the blame rather than the criminals themselves; cultural vectors rather than ethical ones made crime more likely and conventional penology failed because it treats symptoms rather than root causes.

Even before a trend developed and punishments tended to become less severe and less certain, the methods of crimefighters began to mellow out somewhat. Comics editors and publishers looked with concern at the notion that superheroes using lethal force glorified violence, and toned down comics considerably. The earliest Batman might pump bullets into the heart of a vampire, but fifteen years later, one would expect the resolution of a story to involve hauling the villain to jail or watching while some ironic quirk, such as a deflected bullet that hits the marksman rather than the target, took his life (or seemed to do so).

Urban Terror

At the birth of the superhero, one can read from the early stories that they targeted an audience who feared the villains and shed no tears over them if they happened to die, whether at the hands of the protagonists or not. Something like a generation later, we find, as a kind of minority opinion, the same position; yet this position, pushed underground by a shift in civic ideology, resurfaced in the context of a decaying urban environment that some saw as requiring drastic remedies.

The sixties produced any number of riots; a colorful set of murders; and the vision that no one seemed to bother keeping the streets - and, thus, the ordinary citizen - from harm. The Speck murders, the Manson family murders, and the killing of Kitty Genovese all belonged to one piece, representing what one might call the "new murder;" while in the thirties and forties, one saw the same old kinds of murder, generally centering around money, sex, or other crime, with the aforementioned incidents the observer began to realize that some murders involved little more than a kind of thrill-seeking through homicide. In the case of Kitty Genovese, furthermore, the city-dweller could understand that having many witnesses to a prospective murder would not involve any particular deterrence - the witnesses just watched Kitty die, no more involved in the proceedings than if they had watched a simulated homicide on a police program on television.

The cities began to seem, to some, as places where human predators waited for an opportunity to kill, and not only would no one do anything, no one seemed to care. The network of citizen - police - judge relationships that once existed, involving a perceived common purpose, had decayed considerably in the remaking of the western worldview after World War II, and the man in the street could, with some justice, doubt that anyone watched out for his well-being.

It becomes obvious, in such a context, that in the absence of social, political, and legal forces to set the scales even again, the most likely method of creating a new kind of balance between predatory criminals and their human prey must involve someone taking on the role of a soldier against the armies of crime. Such a view provides the cornerstone of the vigilante self-justification, and permeates the original killer vigilante heroes of the seventies.

The Death Wish Ethos

Remembered greatness combined with contemporary aggrievedness, stirred by calls to absolve one's abusers unto the point of becoming their enablers, can produce in even otherwise level-headed individuals a remarkable bloodlust. All these factors applied to America in the mid-seventies, when political and economic decline, plus growing currents of self-loathing, plus ever-more-dangerous life in general, invited certain processes of thought. But behind all sat one key principle: A government that does not protect its citizens has lost the moral authority to prohibit that they protect themselves. And, arguments about where the duty to protect lies, with the citizen or with his government, one can nonetheless note that 250 million citizens might have widely varying notions of the appropriate limits of such self defense. Some might accept a right of self-defense that does not allow escalation (I understand this principle to exist in English common law), meaning a defender who resists fists with a knife will go to jail for his efforts. Some might accept no particular upper limit on escalation, provided a defensive posture (to some extent, this principle applies to Texas law, with some limits on chasing down one's attacker). However, in the full-blown "Death Wish" ethos, self-defense becomes a proactive activity.

Concisely put, this means that a principle of self-defense allows for preemptively killing street criminals who, given the time and opportunity, would make a target out of you (generally, but not exclusively, as proven by previous behaviors). This ethos thereby justifies a preemptive kind of slaughter, including as targets both proven street predators and a variety of goons who, though perhaps not having actually yet established a resume of robbery, rape, assault, and murder, most probably will once the circumstances permit.

In the dramatized world of cinema or literature (we need not distinguish here between prose and comics), one can know, with certainty, of the guilt of one's target. Coincidence and insight work in magnificent ways in fiction that policemen can only dream about as they pursue tiresome methods like evidence-gathering. This translates, in the real world, to the likes of lynch law, of selection of a likely target for punishment, using accusation as proof of guilt.In this, many see the danger of the Death Wish ethos - not the dangers of punishing the guilty, but of targeting random marks for punishment.

Where no one seems to act, leaving urban raptors to control the cities, however, one can recognize the appeal of arguments like Kill 'em all - let God sort 'em out. And, with such a notion in mind, the killer heroes of the 1970s and on began campaigns of mayhem, frequently moving into a territory of the absurd.

The Killer Heroes of the Seventies

The cynic's reaction against the gallant-and-exemplary, but not particularly realistic, heroes and ethos from the 1930s onward, provided a preemptive welcome to the coming of the killer vigilante. A market definitely existed by the time superhero comics caught the trend - for instance, most stores that sold magazines and paperbacks carried material like Bolan's Executioner books or Sapir and Murphy's Destroyer books, both of which offered neo-pulp treatments of protagonists who made lethal force their principal tool against the predations of crime, unselfconscious of the possibility that such an approach to keeping the peace might, itself, contribute to urban terror.

The killer hero of the seventies killed less as a method of protecting human prey from out-of-control human predators and more as an act of vengeance (the wish-fulfillment angle that catered to growing fears ordinary people had of the dangers of living in places where criminals plied their trade). Furthermore, the act of killing by vigilante heroes served as a symbolic refutation of the often hyperbolic compassionate-model theory of penology. If one suffered disgust at the notion that prisons should tend to the emotional needs of and heal the wounded inner child of rapists, robbers and murders, the hero who casually dispatches criminals to their Maker (or that Maker's antithesis) provided a potent symbolic act of contempt for a worldview which many came, increasingly, to disdain.

This latter, symbolic aspect of the killer vigilante / antihero represents a considerable amount of his appeal. For contempt for theories of crime that seem to excuse criminal acts and implicate everyone except the malefactor, from justifications of robbery and rape to outright ludicrous excuses for murder, generally will not proceed far without someone who does not wish to play the role of target raising some kind of objection. Not all objections, furthermore, involve the same amount of moral wisdom or intellectual clarity. Some responses involve a bluntness and a desire to cut off the debate (and foreclose the possibility of appeal by a rapid disposal of the criminal himself, the object of such a prospective debate).

The Legacy

When the Punisher - admittedly a derivative creation - appeared on the comics scene in the early seventies, he represented an inversion of the heroic model as understood from the iconic DC formula. To some degree, he represented an iconoclastic faction of popular culture that sought to dispense with the cliched, avuncular, unnecessarily benign superhero that came when comics at the dawn of the forties stripped most of the danger superheroes had inherited from their pulp-hero antecedents.

By the eighties, however, more and more heroes adopted the fundamental ethos behind the Punisher, a belief system that held as its central imperative "Blow the bad guys away." The phenomenon would appear among World War II era heroes and DC-style Silver Age characters - antiseptic and stoic as a rule - having, with various degrees of success, retrofitted themselves to the Stan Lee heroic model of the early sixties. So the rigid moral codes of the late fifties combined with the melodramatic emotionalism (which could sometimes border on morbid self-obsession) to make aging hero concepts appear, to some, as soft, weak, afraid, and unwilling to do what might appear to the bloodthirsty as the first appropriate solution to the problems that have always confronted superheroes.

The Punisher-understudies that infested eighties comics would provide an annoying yet evidently tempting prototype for the cannon fodder of "the new comics" as defined by Image (and its imitators) in the early 1990s. Big goons with big shoulder pads and big guns would, with no particular clues to the reader about the moral justification of the mayhem, blow away similarly-designed villains with impunity. In this early phase, the notion of heroism did not so much appear; the rumble justified itself by providing someone with something to fight for the amusement of the reader, devoid of long-term purpose. By the mid-nineties, as fatigue from this nihilistic brand of antiheroism set in, occasional works would attack an ethos which had even lost the pretext that brought about the Punisher and his ilk; for instance, Kingdom Come serves as an accusation of the emptiness of so-called heroes who remain indistinguishable from their enemies and concern themselves little with the consequences of their actions.

Through vehicles such as Stormwatch and the later Authority, however, the Kill 'em all, et cetera notion would regain some degree of credibility, though less from the defensibility of the notion (which had not changed) than from the aesthetic credentials of the talent that worked on the titles.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 279. Completed 06-OCT-2001.