Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Comic Books

• Since Word of God finally made up their minds that the anti-registration side was in the wrong, this means Civil War was one of these for the message they were trying to send... whatever the hell that was.
  • The Aesop was something along the lines of "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." Not a good aesop to use when your main readers are nerds, particularly (in America anyway) Liberal or left-wing nerds who distrust the government on social issues, Conservative nerds who distrust the government on economic and Second Amendment issues, and Libertarians who really distrust the government on all issues.
  • It also doesn't make much sense independent of the audience's political leanings. None of us are perfect, so we're all doing something wrong and all have something to hide. Also, just because you're doing nothing wrong doesn't mean you should let everyone see everything you do — the obvious example is that there's nothing wrong with having Safe, Sane, and Consensual sex, but not everyone is an exhibitionist.
  • And in addition to all of the above, the "intended" pro-registration aesop of Civil War goes completely against the anti-registration aesop that the X-Men comics had been running with for decades. Marvel spent years preaching to their audience that mutant registration is wrong, and then turned around and tried to argue that superhero registration is good... without making it at all clear that that was what they were going for. And then they acted surprised when the audience sided with the anti-registration side.
  • Another problem is that the pro-reg side were depicted as committing multiple atrocities, especially in the tie-in books (unleashing some of the universe's most notorious Psychos For Hire on unregistered heroes, creating an evil clone of Thor, running a concentration camp where the commandant tortured people for fun), while the anti-reg side were shown as largely morally pure.
  • They didn't do themselves any favors by putting Captain America, probably the closest thing Marvel has to a hero made of Incorruptible Pure Pureness, on the anti-registration side. They doubled down on not doing themselves any favors by giving him the awesome "Plant yourself like a tree beside the River of Truth, and tell them 'No, you move'" speech.
  • They also ignored the numerous stories where various supervillains infiltrated the US government and were able to access all kinds of dangerous information, like one in which the Red Skull actually got himself elected to the US Senate and started a secret bioweapon research facility in Mt. Rushmore, which had only happened a couple of years before Civil War was released. The Pro-Registration side offered no assurances that registered supers would have their personal information protected from such acts. In fact, The Hood was able to blackmail Pro-Registration hero Tigra by way of threatening to kill her mother. Mind you as well, many supers' reason for choosing to have a Secret Identity in the first place is to protect their loved ones - and, yes, the Hood made clear that her being registered was the reason he was able to access information about her family.
  • And that's just government infiltration. Plenty of people wouldn't want superhuman beings in the hands of the US government in real life, and the US government hasn't built Sentinels. Pretty much every story where the Marvel Universe government is involved has it either failing at its job or actively trying to make things worse, so a bit of tentativeness in giving them leverage over all of America's superbeings seems pretty reasonable. Hell, that was exactly why the SHRA eventually got repealed; the enforcement of the act was given over to a Villain with Good Publicity who promptly ran the whole thing into the ground.
  • The last issue - the head writer of the anti-registration side was J. Michael Straczynski, who has a long and distinguished track record with these particular themes, and arguably ended up far more eloquent in his arguments than the pro-reg writers.
• The Invisibles attempts a subversion—it shows us memorably exciting action sequences, and then gives us equally memorable depictions of the suffering inherent in that flashy violence, most notably A Day in the Limelight showing us the sad life of one Mook.
• Powers goes for something similar. Many of the characters have rather cavalier attitudes towards violence, indulging in black humor, but on-screen violence can be very uncomfortable and jarring despite (or because of) the cartoony art style. Word of God has it that Bendis and Oeming want viewers to be faced with something unpleasant and ugly when characters get violent. Despite all that, the darkness of it can be compelling because Powers relies on a grim-and-gritty, street-level view of supers as its driving premise. If the whole work is darker and edgier, then showing that the violence is dark and edgy is not necessarily gonna work.
• This was very much the reason for crime comics in the 1950s, particularly EC Comics. This got them (and American comics in general) busted and led to The Comics Code being imposed.
• In Batman #1, Batman had Robin fight a bunch of unarmed crooks to see how tough they really were without their guns. Robin trounces them with ease, leaving one of the crooks to say "If only I had my gun!" Batman breaks the fourth wall to point out that the readers shouldn't emulate crooks. Sadly, the aesop and the story were probably overshadowed because the comic book also introduced both The Joker, one of the most popular, and psychotic, comic book characters of all time, and Catwoman, one of the most popular Anti-Hero characters of all time.
• DC Comics' war books were often gritty, dark, and featured tortured protagonists (especially those written by actual veterans, such as Joe Kubert and Robert Kanigher). They often ended with the sign-off, "MAKE WAR NO MORE!" But they were and are exciting adventure stories.
• Chick Tracts fall into this quite heavily to the point where they have been believed to be parodies, and Jack Chick had to point out several times that this is not the case.
  • In general, the antics in the tracts often send unintended messages like "God is a dick who will send even good people to hell for not accepting my religion, meanwhile serial killers who do get off with no punishment" and "You can kill as many people and steal and burn as many things as you want, if you accept Jesus right before death, you'll be marked as a good person and thus won't have to face any consequences". Depending on the tracts, he'll even make the devils funny or sufficiently clever to provide comic relief... until the Big Boring White Guy In The Sky throws them into hell in the last panel.
  • The notorious "Dark Dungeons" made roleplaying out to be an exciting life-or-death scenario that introduced real occultism and gave players fabulous supernatural powers that they can use to brainwash their parents into... gasp... buying them stuff. Also, apparently it's a great way to meet women since most of the players in the comic are female. More than a few roleplayers love the tract and it has been parodied and affectionately referred to in innumerable ways among the subculture. One group of roleplaying fans even made a film adaptation — with Chick's permission! — that parodied the source material simply by playing it completely straight.
  • In his anti-Catholic tracts, he shows very little downside to being one of those dastardly papists, since they seem to have nothing but crazy sex parties, oodles of cash, and secretly run the world.
  • The Contract: Feel free to make a Deal with the Devil; you won't have to hold up your end.
  • Wounded Children: You should do what a demon tells you. No, really. When some people attack Brian, the demon tells David to help him. Brian dies because he didn't. The whole tract is ridiculous: David follows his demon friend's advice all his life, and is a happy, out gay man with a thriving social life and a sweet boyfriend. The supposedly godly Christians attack and kill Brian completely unprovoked and are even portrayed as morally in the wrong (this in a Fundamentalist comic strip preaching the evils of homosexuality). David's life only starts going down the drain when he ignores or rejects his nice supportive demon, and in the end he still dies of AIDS, but having repented and accepted Christ, he goes to his heaven filled with self-hatred as the perfectly nice demon burns for the mortal sin of telling him to be proud of who he is. It's very difficult to accept that the tract is not a parody.
• One of the comics epitomes of this trope is The Punisher. Just about every writer who has depicted the character on a long-term basis has established in their works and backed it up with Word of God that Frank Castle is a deeply disturbed and damaged man who barely even qualifies as "human" anymore, whose mass murders do nothing to actually improve society, whose activities only don't cause massive innocent casualties because of extreme authorial favoritism, and who should not be considered a role model by anyone. However, go anywhere in comics fandom and you'll stumble across people who think that Frank Castle is the coolest guy ever and it's a terrible pity that nobody's taking out the bad guys like that in the real world. After all, for all his inner demons, he's still a gun-toting badass who's always portrayed as a well-meaning Anti-Hero rather than an outright villain. It's for this reason that his skull logo has become a popular symbol among pro-police activists, with one company even selling an entire line of Punisher-themed "thin blue line" merchandise. Part of this is that in a comic book universe where Thou Shalt Not Kill is the order of the day, it just seems like Frank is the only one who's actually willing to put down the bad guys rather than send them to the Cardboard Prison, even though in real life, such an easily-escapable prison is not remotely a consideration when dealing with the crime Frank goes after.
  • Part of what makes the Punisher appealing is that even though he's shown to not be a good person, the villains he fights against are far worse than him. When Frank is killing the worst scum of society it's hard to not make him look cool even if he isn't supposed to be.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
  • An issue of My Little Pony: Friends Forever has Pinkie Pie requesting Twilight Sparkle's help in weaning her from PheNOMNOMenons being sold at a carnival. When we see them, they're bright, colorful and delicious so it's easy to see just why Pinkie would get addicted to them. Twilight can't resist them either. The same would go for the jeweled pretzels that Spike gorges on in the end.
  • A similar occurrence happens in My Little Pony: Legends of Magic where Rockhoof spends his nights pigging out with his friends after saving his village from a volcanic eruption. His gluttony endangers his health and nearly gets him kicked out of the Mighty Helm, but he was still having the time of his life doing it.
• This is one of the, if not the, biggest criticisms towards Secret Empire. Despite the fact that HYDRA and the Cosmic Cube-altered Captain America are effectively the bad guys of the storyline, Cap is shown as an Evil Is Cool character of Villainous Valour who is not only the Lesser of Two Evils between him doing this or the Red Skull as well as being worthy of Mjolnir, Marvel's marketing has been heavily leaning towards HYDRA and not their heroes, to the point where they were trying to get comic book shop owners to wear shirts with the HYDRA logo on them, making many question if Marvel knows what they're doing. This also wasn't helped by the waffling between downplaying the idea of HYDRA being connected to Nazis and invoking HYDRA's connection to Nazis whenever possible.
• The DC villain Snowflame of The New Guardians is clearly supposed to be an example of Drugs Are Bad, given he gets his powers from cocaine. However, he's not shown to have any drawbacks from his source of power, he gives some of the most memorable lines in the series^note to the point where people read the series just to see him, and his premise alone is just so insane that people would probably want to do cocaine rather than avoid the drug.
• The original run of Blue Beetle features a hippie sculptor whose modernist sculptures are portrayed as pathetic and self-pitying, especially when contrasted with the realistic art in another wing of the museum. The problem is, the modernist sculptures are a great example of the artstyle that made Steve Ditko a legend, and look much more interesting and dynamic than the realist ones, which could've been drawn by anyone.
• The Boys, similar to the Punisher, suffered from this with its Punisher Expy, Billy the Butcher (not coincidentally, the comic was written by Garth Ennis, who is a massive Punisher fan). Billy is ultimately revealed to be evil and hatches a plan that will kill anybody with the compound that grants superpowers, including himself. This is meant to be a Deconstruction of the Vigilante Man characters like the Punisher. Except that throughout the comic, just like the Punisher, Billy kills many very evil people, and when he turns on the rest of his team, he kills all but one of them, with his protégé Hughie surviving only because Billy spared him. And during the final showdown with Hughie, Billy only loses because he forgoes his chance at victory to save Hughie. The result is that even though Billy turns out to be a villain, he has been criticized as Garth Ennis' personal power fantasy.
• Keith Giffen dislikes Lobo in part for this reason. Lobo was intended to be an over-the-top parody of the kind of grim-n-gritty quote-unquote badasses that were becoming de rigeur at the time, and to that end, Lobo basically took the archetype to its logical and maximal conclusion. Far from being merely troubled and violent, Lobo is an outright Villain Protagonist who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. His origin involves him having committed genocide on his own species without a hint of regret, and he didn't exactly improve from there, being little more than a violent thug whose responses to anything he encounters are some combination of robbing, killing, or sexually propositioning. However, because the stories always had a humorous edge, Lobo ended up crossing the line twice and being funny to most readers, capturing the zeitgeist of the era rather well: once you've murdered Santa Claus (depicted as the wicked slave driver Kris "Crusher" Kringle), it's rather difficult for people to take you seriously as a genuine monster. Readers who enjoy "badass" characters tend to be into a character who does over-the-top things, and all Lobo's parodic nature did was allow him to go further over-the-top than any of his competition. Plus, adaptations and crossovers often sanded off enough of Lobo's edge that he came off as a straight-if-somewhat-humorous take on his archetype, ensuring that even more people who encountered him didn't get the joke and just saw him as genuinely cool.
• Wanted: The comic goes out of its way to subvert and deconstruct the idea of an Escapist Character with Wesley. The story even ends with him calling the reader out. Despite this, his life is still pretty enviable: He gets to do whatever he wants, has an attractive girlfriend, can visit unlimited alternate universes at will, and suffers from no legal consequences.

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