So are there good comics that have the protagonists thinking like supervillains and pull off something interesting? There’s a bunch of supervillains-as-antiheroes stuff of course, but that doesn’t seem to stretch that hard against story conventions. The interesting stuff has the protagonists actually successfully carry out good intentions using supervillain style problem solving. Unfortunately, it’s hard to serialize a comic where problems actually get properly solved very far, and pathologically serializable comics rule the market.
Alan Moore’s Miracleman, started in 1982, is probably the archetypal example of completely ignoring the concern of being able to write and sell the book five years from now when writing the plot. The superman will fix your planet and your children and you and he knows he knows better than you. And it ends up mostly working out okay. Neil Gaiman actually started an interesting looking arc from where Moore left off, with earth having become weird, but the series got cancelled before it got completed.
Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme miniseries for Marvel in 1985 had a superhero group start fixing things and ended up making everything dystopic. J. M. Straczynski made a reboot Supreme Power starting 2003, which was reasonably fun but didn’t end up going anywhere particularly status quo upending before petering out.
Warren Ellis has some stuff. His Stormwatch took a generic 90s comics superhero team in 1996 and turned them into a military unit filled with the standard issue Warren Ellis misanthrope characters, though they still stayed traditionally reactive. The spinoff Authority started in 1999 and upgraded the team into one that doesn’t bat an eye at responding to a military dictatorship popping up somewhere by vaporizing the military dictator, and gave them some increasingly existential threat scale things to fight. Then other people continued the series and it got less interesting. Then the whole comic-book universe it was in had the world end or something and got eaten by DC Comics.
The Ultimates started in 2002 written by Mark Millar as a reboot of Marvel’s Avengers for the Ultimate Marvel line. Millar had a cheerfully nihilistic view of the Avengers as basically a government unit used as big heavy stick of US foreign policy, and consisting of mentally ill superhumans who tend to cause massive collateral damage. Went very uneven after Millar’s initial run.
Mark Waid’s Incorruptible, started in 2009, has a supervillain have an existential crisis when his Superman analogue arch-enemy turns omnicidal maniac, and decide that he’s going to become a hero to even things out. Mostly ends up a reasonably entertaining black comedy.
How about Superman: Red Son? Superman grows up in 1950s USSR and quickly rises to leadership of the country, then takes over most of the world (save for the US) while liberally using lobotomies to maintain power. Nevertheless, he turns the world into a relative utopia, and continues to perform typical superheroic acts literally everywhere. His foil is Lex Luthor, a super-genius and manipulative bastard whose only goal is to bring Superman to ruin. (And then there’s that question… those who have read it will know what this refers to.)
Alan Moore’s Miracleman, started in 1982, is probably the archetypal example of completely ignoring the concern of being able to write and sell the book five years from now when writing the plot. The superman will fix your planet and your children and you and he knows he knows better than you. And it ends up mostly working out okay. Neil Gaiman actually started an interesting looking arc from where Moore left off, with earth having become weird, but the series got cancelled before it got completed.
It’s important to note that the incomplete later segment of Miracleman was apparently going to make things not work out okay.
In the X-Men Comic Cable and Deadpool (2004-2008) Cable makes a a proactive effort to improve things, attempts to create a little utopia. While it all goes pear shaped, I got the impression that was mostly for editorial reasons (actually I only got interested in the series after the cross-over in question de-railed things).
Haven’t re-read it recently, but it got me asking questions at the time about whether a superhero with knowledge of the future could actually make things better.
So are there good comics that have the protagonists thinking like supervillains and pull off something interesting? There’s a bunch of supervillains-as-antiheroes stuff of course, but that doesn’t seem to stretch that hard against story conventions. The interesting stuff has the protagonists actually successfully carry out good intentions using supervillain style problem solving. Unfortunately, it’s hard to serialize a comic where problems actually get properly solved very far, and pathologically serializable comics rule the market.
Alan Moore’s Miracleman, started in 1982, is probably the archetypal example of completely ignoring the concern of being able to write and sell the book five years from now when writing the plot. The superman will fix your planet and your children and you and he knows he knows better than you. And it ends up mostly working out okay. Neil Gaiman actually started an interesting looking arc from where Moore left off, with earth having become weird, but the series got cancelled before it got completed.
Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme miniseries for Marvel in 1985 had a superhero group start fixing things and ended up making everything dystopic. J. M. Straczynski made a reboot Supreme Power starting 2003, which was reasonably fun but didn’t end up going anywhere particularly status quo upending before petering out.
Warren Ellis has some stuff. His Stormwatch took a generic 90s comics superhero team in 1996 and turned them into a military unit filled with the standard issue Warren Ellis misanthrope characters, though they still stayed traditionally reactive. The spinoff Authority started in 1999 and upgraded the team into one that doesn’t bat an eye at responding to a military dictatorship popping up somewhere by vaporizing the military dictator, and gave them some increasingly existential threat scale things to fight. Then other people continued the series and it got less interesting. Then the whole comic-book universe it was in had the world end or something and got eaten by DC Comics.
The Ultimates started in 2002 written by Mark Millar as a reboot of Marvel’s Avengers for the Ultimate Marvel line. Millar had a cheerfully nihilistic view of the Avengers as basically a government unit used as big heavy stick of US foreign policy, and consisting of mentally ill superhumans who tend to cause massive collateral damage. Went very uneven after Millar’s initial run.
Mark Waid’s Incorruptible, started in 2009, has a supervillain have an existential crisis when his Superman analogue arch-enemy turns omnicidal maniac, and decide that he’s going to become a hero to even things out. Mostly ends up a reasonably entertaining black comedy.
How about Superman: Red Son? Superman grows up in 1950s USSR and quickly rises to leadership of the country, then takes over most of the world (save for the US) while liberally using lobotomies to maintain power. Nevertheless, he turns the world into a relative utopia, and continues to perform typical superheroic acts literally everywhere. His foil is Lex Luthor, a super-genius and manipulative bastard whose only goal is to bring Superman to ruin. (And then there’s that question… those who have read it will know what this refers to.)
It’s important to note that the incomplete later segment of Miracleman was apparently going to make things not work out okay.
In the X-Men Comic Cable and Deadpool (2004-2008) Cable makes a a proactive effort to improve things, attempts to create a little utopia. While it all goes pear shaped, I got the impression that was mostly for editorial reasons (actually I only got interested in the series after the cross-over in question de-railed things).
Haven’t re-read it recently, but it got me asking questions at the time about whether a superhero with knowledge of the future could actually make things better.