Superheroes Reconsidered

Superheroes tend to be eh today, in the sense that we know what’s going to happen. That no matter how many times you kill Superman he just comes right back up, with some deus ex machina trick. But the boom or in a way the pebble that fell into the pond and cause ripples was Alan Moore’s Watchman. Moore took our Greek pantheon like ideals of superheroes and made them horribly human, so much so that they became rather frightening. It was like when you meet your childhood hero and they are not what so ever what you expected them to be. The characters in Watchmen are really people you could meet or know in real life, and some of them you really could ever imagine saving your ass. With Moore he explore the consequences of people who became heroes to the public eye, how it affected them and their loved ones and their future generations. The perspective of making a hero human means we have to accept their mistakes and the monsters with in them. It means we have to give a cold hard look at what we at times have looked up to before and realize that we could do the same. We could try to help, even if that inexplicably destroys us; well at least we tried. Which really makes Watchmen interesting now with a second pass, because people who have to go through something that makes them a hero, truly has some psychological damaging aspect.

With Moore we really did get the ball rolling and have gotten new heroes that have become more close to reality than fantasy, in character. Now even our popular superheroes are beginning to be written less like Greek gods and more like people in horrible situations, with some powers thrown in. The idea of our heroes being more flawed than we have realized before is a mature idea. Its an idea that happens as you grow up. So as the older you get the more you see your heroes being closer to the ground than flying in the sky.