Well, it could be said that the villains are such Complete Monsters that any punishment is acceptable. Still, the writers should be careful in handling it, because it could make the hero come off as even worse!
There was an issue of Avengers Academy where the six students learn that Tigra, one of the instructors, was brutally beaten by the Hood, and that it was videotaped. Three of the students find the Hood and kick his ass, making him beg for mercy and taping it. In the scene, it wasn't treated as anything particularly wrong. Later on, they show the video they made to Tigra. She kicks them out. The end of that issue, and most of the following one, is making it clear that what they did is completely unacceptable.
So there are still some writers intentionally avoiding dark and edgy.
Kieron Gillen avoids it, too, actually. He had Loki threaten to torture someone, but later admits to someone else he would've had no idea what to do, and he was completely bluffing.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.I don't know.
I agree and disagree. Whilst I hate seeing heroes acting unheroic, I think there is a place for the darker stuff, dependent both on the character in question and how the subject matter is handled.
E.G; the Punisher. He's as far from being a decent guy as you can get, and solves every problem with bullets. But the guys he fights are often worse. Is the comic depressing? Hell no! It's often played for dark laughs, the darkness is occasionally so absurd you can't help but laugh. But more importantly, the Punisher can also be used to discuss issues Spider Man can't.
There is a place for darkness as much as there's a place for idealist fun. All it requires is some intelligent, good writing.
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As you point out, there's a huge distinction between the Secret Six and the other characters you mentioned. The S6 are NOT heroes. They are NOT good guys. They are NOT nice people. They are at best Type V antiheroes. Given the kind of people they are, they have no qualms about torture and murder. I think it's literally a case of the S6 being the lesser of several evils, which isn't saying much considering they once had a genocidal killer on their team. I don't think we're supposed to admire them per se OR cheer them on, just realize that even these evil, damaged people can and often do have some sympathetic qualities.
(The same is true of the Flash Rogues. They range from Punch Clock Villains to mentally ill people to outright sociopaths, but are also presented as having sympathetic and even admirable traits at times. That doesn't make them any less bad, but it does flesh them out.)
I have more moral objections to heroes like Zatanna brainwashing villains. Not just mind-wiping them so they don't remember people's secret I Ds, but altering their personalities. That's beyond wrong, and an awful way to handle the character. Especially considering that one of the brains she tinkered with was Catwoman's. And THAT made no sense. Selina's a thief and an antihero. Not a murderous psycho. It made no sense and made Zatanna look bad.
edited 4th Sep '12 10:32:46 AM by PennyDreadful
Ideally, every universe should have corners for both the bright and optimistic stuff and the dark and grim material. That way, if you don't want to read about guys who would torture or kill like the Secret Six, you can just go read Superman or Booster Gold. The problem comes when the darkness starts affecting the tone of the whole line.
The beauty when that happens, though, is seeing the books that refuse to give into that darkness. The ones that say, "Yeah, the world's a dangerous place, but you know what? It's also a pretty amazing place. No matter how bad things get, there's always good, too. The books that can stay optimistic while surrounded by darkness? Those books are usually pretty great.
That's what some people would say, I'm sure, but I've never believed that certain people deserved literally any punishment. The punishment, if it happens (and sometimes it doesn't in fiction, as the Karma Houdini page says, but when it does), should fit the crime. When Major Force killed Kyle Rayner's girlfriend and left her in the refrigerator for Kyle to find, yes, that was evil, but other villains have done much, much worse. Hell, heroes have done worse. So a fitting punishment would have been "You murdered somebody, so you die too." Or "You made me suffer, so I'm going to make you suffer just as bad."
A fitting punishment is not what Kyle did, which was "You deserve to suffer FOREVER, so I'm going to make sure that you do."
If things worked out the way Rayner had wanted them to, Major Force would suffer as much as Kyle and his girlfriend combined did. But his punishment wouldn't have ended there, so he would go on to suffer twice as much, three times as much, four times as much, and on and on. He'd suffer a thousand times worse than they did, and it would've just kept going on, because he's immortal and space is infinite.
Hell, he might have suffered worse than they did during the time before he somehow got back to Earth and got free.
The only thing that might warrant eternal punishment, IMO, is an eternal crime. And that's assuming punishment is the right thing to do in the first place; as we know from Batman's Rogues Gallery, a lot of villains aren't responsible for their actions. Scarecrow, for example, needs to be cured more than he needs to be punished. Punishing him would probably just make him even more insane, and thus more dangerous were he to ever escape. (Which, given that he's usually in Arkham, is pretty likely.)
That sounds cool. But...
Which it seems to be doing, at least the last time I checked. I thought that there were some writers whose stories I could buy, take home, start reading, and know that I wasn't gonna see the protagonist do anything like the stuff I described in the first post.
I don't think that Brian K. Vaughan or Tom DeFalco would write something like that, to use two examples, but who the hell knows? I didn't think Grant Morrison would do it, but it turns out he did.
I don't see how you can be a fan of a character without admiring that character to some degree. What kind of answer do you think you'd get if you asked a random fan of the book "What do you think of Catman?" Now, obviously fans aren't a hive mind so I can only guess at the answer without knowing it, but I'm guessing it would be something like "He's awesome". Not "He's an evil fuck who tortures people and goes way over the line, but who has some sympathetic qualities."
Uh, yeah, on the list of people whose stuff I can't read, Garth Ennis is at the very top.
edited 4th Sep '12 3:45:32 PM by KilgoreTrout
I suppose you could give one character more redeemable traits, or at least less dog kicks than their victim and you can wish your audience justifies it, but complete monster is not a trope. It is an audience reaction, and whether or not a reader will find a character monstrous enough is still something a writer can only hope for.
But grit would be low on my list of worries if I was running Marvel. Don't know about DC, since they went and restarted everything except not really.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack![]()
Tom De Falco? Well, he did write that story where the Silver Surfer turned Carnage into a living statue. To be fair to Surfer, he seemed to think that would actually lead Carnage to think about all the damage he ever had done and eventually reach redemption, but I'm not sure if that didn't just mean De Falco painted him as a complete naive fool.
Scarecrow is usually painted as more of a sadist very aware of what he's doing, rather than someone in actual lack of control over his actions, like the Ventriloquist, Two-Face or even the Joker himself.
I think that, just like mindwipes (that can be counted as Mind Rape), heroes putting villains in Fates Worse than Death is often done without too much thought, but also without actual writing malice at times. The villains escape those situations almost as frequently as they do from Cardboard Prisons. The trope has lost so much of its true horrific value it's even plyed for laughs in cartoons like Darkwing Duck (where Darkwing does it to Liquidator).
edited 4th Sep '12 6:38:46 PM by NapoleonDeCheese
Fair enough, I guess it's more a matter of personal taste. I love idealistic stuff like All-Star Superman but I enjoy the darker things every now and then too.
That said, Crossed was fucking harrowing. Gimme yer lunch money, dweeb.
I don't like Ennis much, either. There's using fiction to make a controversial point with the potential to offend people, and then there's using fiction to make a controversial point while expressly trying to offend as many people as possible. Ennis does the latter.
Doesn't help that his frequent creative partner Steve Dillon draws people with expressions suggesting they're perpetually taking a particularly painful crap.
Anyway, maybe OP would enjoy Dan Slott's She-Hulk?
As it happens, I think the opposite - a universe should have one general tone and more or less stick to it. If you don't like Requiem, there's always Blake and Mortimer.
Ukrainian Red CrossI'll be the first to agree that there's a place for darker stuff, but I, too, have never derived any satisfaction from the hero or heroes torturing a villain, even a complete monster villain. That's a matter of taste, though; understand, there are a lot of people who DO like seeing the hero give the villain "what's coming to them".
Firstly Kilgore Trout? Are you the same guy from One Manga Forums?
As for me, well I like dark comics or even character suffering from a horrific fate but I don't want that to be the general tone of the universe and sadism be something heroes do on a regular basis. I agree with the sentiment that there should be both light hearted comics, darker comics and comics that walk the fine line in-between.
Possibly, so long as it didn't have anything like what Warren White went through in his "Arkham Asylum: Living Hell" series. Which is another example. Slott actually described that stuff as Schadenfreude, so while the other writers may not have been going for that, he was.
I get that at the time it was written people were pissed off about the whole Enron scandal, including Slott, so I guess his temptation to write about horrible stuff happening to a Kenneth Lay stand-in is understandable. But IMHO there's a big difference between giving a bad person a taste of his own medicine, and having the punishment exceed the crime. Warren White was subjected to: routine beatings, having his throat slashed open by Killer Croc, rape (implied, but pretty strongly implied), prolonged sleep deprivation (which isn't the jaywalking in Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking if you know how bad that is if it goes on long enough), being locked in a freezer where he just barely escaped freezing to death and where the cold made his nose and at least one of his ears die and fall off (I forget which) along with causing all his hair to fall out and his skin to turn permanently pure white (no idea whether this is Artistic License – Biology—wouldn't be surprised if it were—but the end result is pretty horrific), and that's just the stuff I remember.
I think that was just a tad excessive, and have a lot of trouble seeing how anybody could read through that entire ordeal and not, at some point, stop taking satisfaction from it and start feeling sorry for White.
What this seems to show is that even if somebody writes something light-hearted or funny and you add their work to your pull list, you might end up unpleasantly surprised at what you get sooner or later.
I was mentally going over the posts in this thread earlier when I was doing something else, and there's one thing which was brought up earlier that got me thinking, and which I started thinking more and more about and going over what I'd say in response. It was this:
I'll get to Catwoman eventually, but let's start with Dr. Light. From what I've read online, the main objection to what Zatanna did to Dr. Light was that she not only changed his personality, but she lowered his IQ. It was like intentionally brain-damaging a guy, and I totally understand why that's disturbing. It disturbed me.
But what if she had done it without that particular side effect? What if the result of her spell was that Light retained all of his intellect, but didn't want to rape anybody any more, or kill anybody any more?
If she'd done that, then basically what we'd be talking about would be rehabilitation via magic. Would that, then, be acceptable? The hope of people who make rehabilitation their goal is that criminals will become different, better, people who aren't a danger to society or to themselves any more. And if they're locked up in a facility which tries to rehabilitate them, they aren't being given any more of a choice than Dr. Light was, aside from the choice of whether they want to work with the people trying to rehabilitate them or resist all attempts to change them. (A possible factor which separates what Zatanna did from what people try to do in real life is that the people she did it to didn't even have that choice.)
I will say that when you compare it to what other superheroes, antiheroes, or villains with standards have done to rapists in other comic book stories, it's one of the least horrifying treatments of rapists in comics. It's certainly less horrifying than when the Spectre did to him after he relapsed and became a psycho serial rapist again.
Now for Catwoman. I may or may not have this right, so correct me if I don't, but as I understand it she did something (we never learn what) which made Zatanna go "That's appalling! Catwoman is pure evil, and I'd better change her the way I changed Dr. Light." Catwoman eventually learned about it, was pissed off (I would've been too, if I'd been her), and retaliated by taping Zatanna's mouth shut and tossing her out a window to fall several stories.
Since I've gone on and on about all the behaviour by comics characters that made me uncomfortable, I just want to say that that didn't make me uncomfortable.
And actually, under the right writer, Catwoman is the kind of antihero that I am most comfortable with, going by how she handled Black Mask. I mean, the stuff Black Mask did was fucking sick. There's not a lot of comic book characters that I would like seeing on the receiving end of torture, but if it happens to a Torture Technician like Black Mask I have a lot less sympathy than I would for, say, the Kingpin. In cases like that, the punishment is exactly like the crime.
Black Mask had slowly killed Catwoman's brother-in-law, and what he did to Catwoman's sister in the same torture session was perhaps even worse. It wouldn't have been at all surprising if she had wanted to do the same, or worse, to him.
She didn't. She just killed the son of a bitch with a bullet to the head.
I've got no problem with that kind of thing whatsoever.
EDIT TO ADD:
Nope. It's weird, because even though I know I'm far from the only person to read Kurt Vonnegut I didn't think there'd be a lot of other people deciding to name themselves after that particular character, but so far I think I've come across five or six, counting this.
edited 5th Sep '12 6:40:23 PM by KilgoreTrout
This thread seems relevant in the wake of the green lantern that was just nuked to hell.
Really, my advice is to drop mainstream American comics all together, or at least stick with one or two that's been consistently written in a way you like, shun the rest and avoid all but the most promising of tie ins.
There are other places to look though, like Birth Of A Nation, Lio, DC's own vertigo line, Image, Darkhorse, Dark Storm...where the likelihood of 180 turns caused by new writers is less likely to occur every 6-12 issues.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack
It depends, really. I read and enjoyed Y The Last Man. There's darkness and there's violence and there's disturbing imagery in that story, sure, but it's not all dark all the time, and out of the three characters the book primarily focuses on I don't think that Yorick or Alison ever did anything really wrong, and 355 usually did the right thing.
On the other hand, Preacher was also a Vertigo book, and it's one I've got no interest in actually buying and reading in full. I've read lots of spoilers, though, and one big reason I don't want to buy the book is: all the things that happen to Herr Starr. I don't remember anybody in Y: The Last Man suffering anywhere near as bad as Starr does in Preacher.
Also, Animal Man was a Vertigo book, and I already mentioned that I enjoyed that one.
As for what I'm thinking of reading in the future, there's Ex Machina. BKV has never disappointed me before. But as long as I'm talking about it here, I'll ask those who have already read it a question: do you think I'd have trouble with any part of the story?
edited 5th Sep '12 10:14:54 PM by KilgoreTrout
One of the problems with superheroes is that they have very naive beginnings. I think when you subtract the naivete, you end up with some darkness.
Superman started as a progressive, Action Comics 1 has him intimidating an arms dealer into shutting down his company. There's a lot of fridge darkness there. Is it ethical for Superman to shut down a legal business on moral grounds? How questionable is it for Superman to intimidate someone in order to enforce his beliefs?
Wonder woman started out as a spy-smasher. While this is still kind of acceptable, it's also pretty dehumanizing to reduce enemy combatants into snickering villains. Even today when super-heroes fight "terrorists", it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Batman is kind of an odd case in that he started off quite dark and got lighter. For some reason there's a persistent preference of Batman, the dark bone-breaker over Batman, the awesome cop.
It's very hard to conceptualize super-heroes and spy-smashers in such a way that they aren't dark because society has different opinions on them now then before. Further, darkness sells really well.
But these are unrelated to OP's main point, which boils down to "Sure, the bad guy should get some kind of comeuppance but why does it have to be so stomach turning horrifying? What's wrong with us that we need to see people who disagree with us meet such terrible ends." To that, I can only say, good point OP.
Yes, it is right to shut down a legal business on moral grounds. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's morally right; the arms dealer was legally doing something immoral, so Superman was in the right.
Also, I really wish people would stop exaggerating the noir tone of 1930s Batman. That lasted for two years tops before it became the outright silly, childish, camp series it was up to the mid-80s. Bob Kane, who created Batman, attributed the comic's longevity to the camp (source
).
And even in 1938, the stories were simplistic and mostly child-friendly; however, DC editorial felt that the tone was too dark to be popular, and the series would last longer if it was more like Superman. They were right.
Ukrainian Red CrossI think the problem with a lot of comics writers (and arguable people in general) is that they equate "Dark" with "mature". Therefore the darker they make their stuff, the more mature and important their work is.\\ Which is my understanding of why a bizarre amount of time is spent making heroes act very out-of-character and amoral at times - E.G Brainwashing both Doctor Light and Batman in Identity Crisis.
Gimme yer lunch money, dweeb.

I've been playing Batman Arkham City lately, although that's not what got me thinking about this enough to make a whole thread about it. I've read comics, on and off, for years. I've also read a lot of summaries of stories, and looked at Wikipedia or TVT articles about certain characters, and so on.
I'm depressed—and hell, kind of upset as well—that so many writers decide to have the heroes be really cruel. Even sadistic sometimes.
I mean, I was reading the Awesome page for Batman a little earlier, and one Moment Of Awesome somebody had written about was the way Bats tortured a team of commandoes. I'm pretty anti-torture. Usually it bothers me a lot more than just seeing somebody get shot to death, or stabbed, because those kinds of deaths are relatively quick and I don't have to read panel after panel, or page after page, of somebody suffering.
Another MOA on the same page described an issue of Secret Six, where half of the team go around killing a group of mercs who've been hired to kidnap and ransom people's children. This doesn't sound all that bad the way I just described it. At least they weren't torturing the mercs, right? Well...if you read the issue, from the mercs' reactions they might as well have been. Just read this quote from the page:
The whole fucking issue is these mercs being pants-pissingly-scared of being killed by Ragdoll, Catman, and Bane, and the three of those guys going around killing people and ignoring their screams and sobs and pleas for mercy.
And later on, the Six did torture somebody. I couldn't read the book any more. And I know, I know, "They aren't heroes", fine...but here's the thing. If you make somebody the star of a comic book, then in order for that comic to succeed the readers have to either approve of what they see the character doing, or they have to be willing to forgive the character for it. So Gail Simone, I believe, was counting on the audience to feel that killing helpless people who were terrified of dying was okay, that torture was okay, etc, so long as the victims were Acceptable Targets. Considering how popular the book was up until its demise due to DC's reboot, I guess a lot of people felt that it all was okay, that they either loved that the protagonists did these things, or were willing to forgive the protagonists for it.
I've liked most of Grant Morrison's stuff that I've read: Animal Man, We3, his run on X Men. None of those stories involved any of the heroes doing anything so cruel that it turned my stomach. There was one part in the first arc of Animal Man where a guy ended up suffering terribly, but it was at the hands of a crazy person, not the hero.
I figured that I could count on Grant Morrison to write heroes the right way, i.e. not having them torture people or condemn them to a Fate Worse than Death. Which was why I was so unpleasantly surprised to read that in a Batman story he wrote, the Dark Knight did exactly that, as this article describes:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19736_6-psychotic-punishments-doled-out-by-famous-superheroes.html
Here's what Batman and Catwoman did, if you don't feel like clicking:
This guy is immortal, but has no other powers; there is no reason he can't be put in a regular jail. Also, it's not as if he can't feel pain and can't die; he can, he just resurrects after a little while, which means that he'll keep dying and resurrecting in an environment with no food, water or air. Forever. (Take that, due process of the law!) If you fancy the idea of returning to life every few minutes to find yourself instantly suffocating and freezing, with starvation pangs and a burning throat to boot, get on Batman's bad side.
Really, Grant?
Then there's what The Flash, Wally West to be specific, did to Inertia. Angry that Inertia had killed Bart Allen, Wally froze the villain in place. So rather than an eye for an eye—which actually would've been more merciful, you know, "You killed somebody I cared about, so I'm going to kill you,"—Inertia is condemned to be a prisoner in a body that can't move, can't speak, can't do anything, and I'm sure that it wasn't very long before every single minute of his existence felt unbearable and he was wishing that he was dead.
For more, look at this page, which was also a motivating factor in me writing this post:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AndIMustScream/ComicBooks
Reading about stuff like this just makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with comic book writers. I don't write a lot of fiction, not professionally and not recreationally, but I've written enough of it to know that I would not be able to write a story like that because...I don't want to. I don't want anybody to be tormented forever, or to die slowly and painfully. Not in real life, and not in fiction. So if I'm in control of things, the way I am when I'm the writer of a story, I don't do it. And I don't believe that you have to make characters burn in Hell for a thousand years (for example) in order to create a good story. There often has to be hardship, adversity, stuff like that, yes, but not on that level.
I wonder what the hell makes a writer say, for instance, "Yes, I do want to write a story that ends with the villain being lowered inch by inch into a vat of boiling water. By the hero. I don't feel sorry for him, and I don't want the audience to feel sorry for him either, and he totally had it coming."
There are some things that nobody has coming.
EDIT TO ADD: Oh yeah, for even more examples, see the comics section of the page where I found the link to that Cracked article:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FateWorseThanDeath
edited 3rd Sep '12 10:00:15 PM by KilgoreTrout