Comics are not a subtle medium. They’re full of melodramatic story lines, about larger than life characters, depicted by bombastic art. A recent trend in comics involve heroes coming to blows with each other. I’m not talking about the standard crossover where superheroes settle their differences by slugging it out for a page or two before uniting against a common foe. Many comics have heroes devolving into villains. They become extremists led there by the best of intentions, do something awful and then have a reboot or retcon where everything is forgiven and forgotten. I’ve decided to call it Hal Jordan Syndrome.
In the 1990s ( a dark time for comic books the world over) Hal Jordan, Green Lantern of 2814 received a major blow. The villainous Hank Henshaw aka Cyborg Superman, and Mongul destroyed Coast City, Jordan’s home. In the aftermath the Green Lantern tries to use his rings god-like power to restore Coast City and the people who died there. The Green Lantern’s bosses decided that this was for personal gain and put Hal Jordan on trial. The stress causes Jordan to snap. He renames himself Parallax and goes about destroying the entire Green Lantern Corps. Eventually he dies, returns from the death, the corps is resurrected, and Parallax turns out to be a yellow fear demon which possessed Jordan clearing him of all culpability for his crimes. The kind of sensationalist story telling wears out the enjoyability of comics. Even when dealing with a grizzled anti hero, like the Punisher, the reader wants to be able to root for the protagonist. The most sure fire way of doing that is make the hero loyal to some ideal. It doesn’t have to be the law or even justice, but simply an inner moral code. When hero goes to some unforgivable extreme it ultimately tells the story of compromise. If the writers were trying tell a tale of a tragic fall from grace, that would be one thing, but those stories never stick. Eventually the status quo is restored for better or worse. All gravity of the story is lost.
A few recent stories include
- Iron Man leading pro-registration forces against anti registration heroes.
- He creates a extra-dimensional prison and keeps heroes there without trial
- Builds an army of “Cape Killers” nannite controlled villains sent out to hunt down heroes
- Creates a Clone of Thor which goes on to murder Bill Foster aka Goliath
He Then loses his memory and is forgiven via reboot
- Putting aside the Onslaught story from the 1990’s dark age Professor Charles Xavier, a one time paragon of compassion and tolerance has had volumes of character assassination.
- He created a second team of unknown X-Men, who died in battle and subsequently erased everyone’s mind of their death, so they wouldn’t quit the X-Men
- When the Danger Room becomes sentient he keeps it as a slave so his students would be prepared
Most of this has been ignored or retconned. The Danger Rooms slavery was explicitly changed
- Batman, may be a paranoid maniac, but he is most often depicted have a moral compass that is even stronger than Superman, yet he still creates details files on how to kill every single Superhero in the DC universe should they go evil. Why not create files on how to stop ever supervillain if they become a global threat?
- The Scarlet Witch a long time Avenger, and ally of the X-Men goes crazy. She attacks the Avengers, destroying a fair share of them. Next she alters the entire world creating a parallel universe where Magneto rules the world. To put icing on the cake, when she changes things back she depowers most of the worlds mutants
- Marvel’s Superman expy The Sentry’s entire mythos is about how the greatest hero is simultaneously the world’s greatest threat.
- To bring things full circle the Guardian’s of the Universe, the Green Lanterns’ bosses, have decided that the universe is too chaotic and the only way to order it is to eliminate free will.
I’m not against dark stories, or compromised heroes who face tough moral decisions but it’s as though modern comics have forgotten that good guys should fight bad guys, not each other. Come up with an interesting villain which represents something contemporary, and dangerous. Throw a Lovecraftian horror at the superheroes and see how they deal with that madness ensues. Don’t Lex Luthor and Doctor Doom want to rule the world anymore? Stories with Hal Jordan Syndrome, tell us that heroes don’t exist anymore, and the ethos that lead them to save the day are lies.
That and they’re getting boring.
