The Complexity of Evil
An examination of the evolution of evil in comic books and how it reflects the changes in society's ideas of evil. This is a repost of something I wrote earlier.
"Hating someone because of what they are is easy, it's ignorant. They can't help what they are, if you really want to hate someone, you have to study them. You have to know why you hate them by knowing what they stand for, what they believe, and why they do it."
This quote has often informed me and my view of things like evil and hate. I've long since forgotten who said it or in what context, but the quote itself stuck with me. People like to think of hate and evil as simple things. You're either for or against something. You believe something or you don't.
It's a simple and easy way to live, but many situations are never quite as simple as they appear. People are never just one thing, they're complicated and have all kinds of parts to themselves that most people never see. Yet people seem to continue to view the world as a simple black and white thing.
For me though, it's not enough to simply stand against something, whether it's evil or not. You have to know why you're standing there and why it's important to stand there and not somewhere else. Otherwise you might be standing on the wrong side and not even know it. Figuring it out is far from a simple thing to do.
And this complexity is reflected in the art that we create.
Comic books have often been a battle between good and evil. Sides are chosen, lines are drawn and usually the good guys win in the end. On the surface, that would seem to be the end of it. Superman and Batman are the good guys, Lex Luthor and The Joker are the bad guys. Seems easy enough right?
But if you take a longer view of the characters, the lines get more and more blurred as time goes on. Comic books as an art form gained popularity in the midst of World War 2, a time of great uncertainty and moral simplicity. The Nazis were bad and America was good, the superheroes reflected that, often fighting in the war itself against clearly evil characters, which of course the Nazis clearly were.
Heroes like Batman and Superman were beacons of hope and light in an extremely dark time, and their villains reflected that simplicity. The villains schemes never worked and a moral lesson was usually learned. Some might argue that this is a reflection of the fact that comics were aimed at kids in these days. Moral lessons were fundamental because the kids didn't have a clear moral stance on issues comics were dealing with.
However I would argue that while that's true, it was also a reflection of the adults who were most often writing the comics. The real world had drawn clear moral lines and so it was easy to do that in art.
After the war, this became harder and harder to do. The Soviet Union had helped the allies win the war, yet as decisions were made about how the world would operate went on, it became clear that Russia wasn't the ally it had been during the war, more of a looming threat. Comics then began to reflect that too. Increasingly, the kids who had grown up during the war were older and comics became more complex.
Back story became increasingly important to comics characters, most notably in the villains. This is most obvious in the explanation of Lex Luthor's back story, where it was revealed that he had been a childhood friend of Superman's that was tragically caught in an accident which Superman caused. This gave the character depth and motivation and the stories and schemes that the villains pulled off became increasingly elaborate and convoluted.
As tensions around the world rose and became more problematic, so too did it take more and more effort by the heroes to defeat the villains. One consequence being that the heroes would need to develop more and more fantastical abilities to deal with the problems that villains posed. By contrast, Marvel comics had started to gain some steam and introduced complicated heroes, a high school student trying to balance growing up and having super powers, an alcoholic millionaire who turned into a human shaped weapon used for good.
Not only did the villains become more dangerous, but the heroes no longer were as clear cut and moral as they had been. The struggle to define good moral judgment became problematic.
Then came the clear turning point. With the problems of the American system starting to become apparent after scandals like the Watergate problem, things started to get much more grey. With the arrival of seminal works like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke, the lines began to blur. You had hero fighting hero and a violent psychopath in The Joker given centre stage of his own book. This also marked the beginning of a clear divide among heroes.
Instead of the friends that heroes had been historically, you see the emergence of political divisions between heroes. A debate as to who had the clear moral high ground among heroes became central to the stories being told. Was it better to champion good moral judgment with obvious lines between them? Or did we need to be more practical and realistic in the approach to fighting villains?
Heroes would now occasionally team up with villains to fight an even greater threat that had them both worried for the fragile stability of the world that comics presented. Villains of pure chaos and destruction began to emerge like Venom and Carnage, aptly named given their relationship to the hero they fought against and their motivations. More than that was Lex Luthor actually becoming President of the United States. A villain who at one time was purely motivated by things like greed and power, was given the job of being what many saw, both in comics and the real world, as the moral pillar of society and the world.
A villain could now mascaraed as a hero to accomplish their goals.
The goodness of heroes and the moral bankruptcy of villains could no longer be counted on to have clear dividing lines. Characters with bad intentions could have a positive impact, and heroes with good intentions could have a negative impact.
Then came a huge turning point, the death of Superman. Once a paragon of moral virtue that so many would look up to at his height during the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, the great hero would die for the city and the world he loved so much. This event was so momentous, that it was widely covered by major media outlets. When he eventually returned, he would never be the same again, and he never returned to the same status in many people's minds.
Nowhere was this shift from clearly defined lines to a blurry grey area more apparent in the story of Identity Crisis, in which a villain was found to have been created by the heroes in an attempt to cover up a terrible crime. Heroes were now actively creating villains for themselves. They were causing more problems for the world that they would then solve.
The immediately following Infinite Crisis would play this out more broadly, where previously virtuous heroes that had sacrificed themselves for reality itself returned as villains to correct what they saw as the moral failings of the heroes they'd sacrificed themselves to create. Moral authority was in many ways given to the villains.
Spiderman's first foray into the film world would reflect that as well and solidify it in the minds of a wider audience. Spiderman would often be responsible for his villains creation in those movies, most notably in Spiderman 2 where the motivation of the villain was misguided yet noble.
Civil War and Secret War would take the idea even further, where moral authority could not be secured within the heroes at all and the authority over right and wrong was ceded to government control. It was no longer a question of what right and wrong is and more a question of whether power could be used for the good of the government and its people. This causing a fundamental rift between heroes. Secret War then revealing the idea of enemies within heroism itself.
More recently, there's been something of a push back against such morally grey ideas of the line between good and evil, as the reaction to Captain America's rewritten history as a secret Nazi proves. As well as Rebirth in DC more broadly. Classic concepts and moral authority seems to be making a comeback. People seem to be trying to draw clear moral lines again.
But when things have blurred this badly, can such lines ever be clear again? As one of my favourite other quotes says:
"The thing about black and white is that you mix them together and you get grey. And no matter how much white you try to put back into it, you're only ever going to get grey."