When Heroes Go Bad

I assure you it wasn't his fault that an alien presence infected his mind and made him do all of those nasty things.

The Dark Phoenix Saga began it all. Created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne (from an idea by Steven Grant¹, and with some last-minute editorial interference by Jim Shooter that locked in the tragic ending — without which it wouldn’t have worked as well), It was, by any metric, a masterpiece of comic book storytelling, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.

Once the Dark Phoenix story arc made everyone in the funnybook world sit up and take notice, once that fateful door was kicked wide open, everyone working in comics wanted to do it, or something like it. We’ve been doing one “superhero goes bad” story after another ever since.

Helped along by the cinematic vogue of the anti-hero, which led into the (still ongoing today) trend to make superheroes grimdark,² maybe it was inevitable that the next logical step was to make outright villains of the heroes. Dark Phoenix got there first, but perhaps it was inevitable, no matter what.

Longtime comics writer Roger Stern described the situation this way (I paraphrase): “We get so many less than noble superheroes these days because few writers can even imagine someone more heroic than themselves.” I heard this second hand, and I’m certain he phrased it more elegantly than I was able to. But inartfully expressed or not, the quote holds true.

I won’t try for an exhaustive list of all of the formally-noble superheroes who’ve gone bad since Phoenix led the way. Superman got tagged by mind-controlling villains ridiculously often, even once being forced to do pornos with Big Barda. Skipping over whether or not doing porn is formally evil or just bad form, it certainly isn’t up to Superman’s usual Boy Scout level moral code.

Mostly the superheroes who go bad do a lot of killing and breaking nice things, and then get forgiven once they snap out of it.

But let’s go into detail on one or two incidents, mostly because I had some involvement in them, which makes me one of the perpetrators, a contributor to the corruption. High time to take my well-deserved lumps.

Emerald Twilight: In which we witness the fall of Green Lantern.

Initially Green Lantern didn’t turn evil in this story arc because of demonic/alien possession. He just had a really bad day — maybe a couple of them (it’s been a while since I read it). He had such a bad day that it broke him mentally. At first he tried to fix things the way only a madman would (that’s the issue I helped perpetrate), and then he started the killing, and the breaking. Later on, perhaps realizing that we’d ruined a great character, DC retconned the incident so that Hal Jordan was possessed by a powerful space demon. Problem solved. Hal snapped out of it. It was never his fault. He’s forgiven and all is good again.

I got involved because someone else dropped the ball and the editor, Kevin Dooley, called me out of the blue and explained, “I need you to draw an issue of Green Lantern right away — as in days, not weeks.” I accepted the job without asking any of the sort of questions, in hindsight, I probably should have asked. I did so because: A) Green Lantern was my favorite comic book character of all time; B) Dooley was a friend, and when a friend needs help, you help, and; C) I’d been the one to drop the ball with DC work so often, at that time in my career I needed to mend some fences, and couldn’t afford to turn down the increasingly rare offers of work. But perhaps I should’ve asked, “By any chance is this a story in which my hero of all comic heroes wigs out and becomes a deranged psycho killer?”

One of my pages from Green Lantern 48.

Having accepted the job I knuckled down and drew it — and got it done in days, rather than weeks. Believe it or not, there was a time when I was reasonably fast as a comic artist, able to complete three or four pages a day.

So yeah, I helped tarnish a great character.³

The Annual, Traditional, JLA-JSA Crossover.

Later on, at the height of Fables’ popularity, I was asked to take over writing JSA, which I did. About a year later, just as I was getting comfortable in the job (it takes me a while to get to know characters I didn’t create, and get them into position so that I can begin telling the stories I really want to tell — and please note, this is not a good quality in freelance writers) the traditional JSA-JLA Crossover was about to happen. As soon as I found out the proposed story was: “they all get mind controlled to turn evil” I reluctantly had to drop out of the project, bringing a premature end to my run on the JSA.

By that time I’d grown so tired unto death of “hero turns evil” stories, I just couldn’t bring myself to participate in another one.

Too bad, because I was really getting to like some of those characters.

But enough is enough. Evil Superheroes is a trope that’s been done to death (usually the death of innocent bystanders) and it needs to be retired. Yeah, I know, the idea is they were not in their right mind, and not responsible for what they did during those times, but it begins to become problematic when it happens so often to so many. Maybe about the third or fourth time Superman gets his mind kidnapped long enough to do some foul bit of business, folks might grow tired of forgiving him. They might begin to ask if it’s truly worth having this guy around, doing his good deeds, if it comes at the cost of him turning into an evil super killer every year or so.

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1. I believe it took place in a New York bar, when a bunch of comic folks were out drinking, as they sometimes do. Byrne and Claremont were waxing vocal about what to do with Phoenix, who’d now become so powerful she overshadowed the entire rest of the X-Men team. “Make her a villain,” Steve offered. “Problem solved.” and the rest is history.

2. The “grim and gritty” era of superheroes is given its formal start date, according to most comics historians, with two milestone publications: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns (DC Comics) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (also DC). This has led to many readers, fans of some of my early work, to complain that my series Elementals (Comico) never gets its due credit for being the real first step in making superhero comics more mature (which is how we kindly described the grim and gritty movement back then), because Elementals preceded both Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. While this dating is technically true, it’s the history that’s wrong. Before Dark Knight Returns, and well before Elementals, Frank Miller did a long run on Daredevil wherein he laid much of the groundwork for Dark Knight and the grim and gritty era. Before Alan Moore did Watchmen, also well before Elementals, he did Marvelman (Warrior Magazine), which laid much of the groundwork for ideas that would be further explored in his later Watchman series. And long before either of those works, Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil did their iconic work on Green Lantern-Green Arrow, culminating in GA’s sidekick Speedy shooting up heroine on the cover, changing the comics industry forever, and giving us the real start of the grim and gritty era of comics. I fondly recall Speedy’s heart-rending monologue about how his mentor didn’t give him enough cookies and attention, so that he had no choice but to start shooting up. But let’s not get off track. So then, as flattered as I am that some have tried to include me among the trailblazers of the books that created the modern era of comics (for good or ill), I don’t deserve the credit many kind souls try to give me. My efforts came long after those pioneers. I trust this corrects the faulty history for ever after.

3. The original Green Lantern character was created by Martin Nodell, a truly fine fellow who got the inspiration for GL whilst riding the subway out of Manhattan. Delayed in a tunnel by a red light, warning of danger ahead, he saw the light turn green and realized, “The green light means it’s safe now. That’s my superhero. When he shows up, and people see the green light, they know, no matter how bad it’s been, now they’re going to be okay.” I love that story. I love the imagery of the light that signals the danger is over. How long since one of the many writers of any iteration of Green Lantern has worked that into a story?