Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

I actually love how rare it is that superhero comics even comprehend the question of "what if the hero is wrong?" Whenever superheroes make mistakes it's treated as one-offs not a fundamental challenge to their very vigilante notions.

There's a Superman storyline where he's mind-controlled into believing he has to literally address every problem in the world and it basically turns him into a tyrant who does try to "put the whole world in a bottle" and I think this is great conceptually but it shouldn't be that he was tricked by a villain, he should actually consider this a logical extension of his regular intentions. Why shouldn't somebody who is that fast and powerful and "good" think he needs to cover the entire planet trying to stop every murder or disaster or anything else? Regular Superman stories just assume he's not aware of shit going on elsewhere even with his superhearing and supervision and so on, but what if he sees that shit and just says "nah, it's not Metropolis, I'm not bothering"? Doesn't that make him seem evil in some way that a regular human would not? Batman (and Iron Man) goes down this route every so often with his need for control, why doesn't it happen to any powered heroes? Is the idea too morally fraught?

This is actually one reason I didn't hate BvS even when everyone else did, it was directly considering this topic for both heroes. And it really pissed people off that it treated all three of the Trinity as actual human beings rather than gods.

The alt universe Injustice comic books basically do this.

I dropped it after some point as it gets pretty whack somewhere down the line which might be owed to it being a prequel for the videogames and not a deep superhero deconstruction but a fun read nonetheless