Let me get this out of the way up front.  I’m a fan of Bill Willingham, and lean conservative/libertarian politically.  That said, I had a few issues with Willingham’s editorial on Andrew Breitbat’s new conservative-leaning entertainment site: Big Hollywood. (I also had a lot of issues with some the comments to Robot6’s news post on it, but that’s a story for another day.)

Those are but two examples [Cap's death and Superman not using the old "Truth, Justice & the American Way" line anymore] of the slow but steady degradation of the American superhero over the years. The ’super’ is still there, more so than ever, but there seems to be a slow leak in the ‘hero’ part. There’s even a term for it, coined by (I’m not sure who, but it might have been one of two respected comics journalists) either Dirk Deppey or Tom Spurgeon. Folks, we’re smack dab in the midst of the Age of Superhero Decadence. Old fashioned ideals of courage and patriotism, backed by a deep virtue and unshakable code, seem to be… well, old fashioned.

A very thoughtful argument, but one I’m going to have to disagree with on a few points.

First off is something I see way too often while browsing the political blogs in the morning: the assertion that something or another is ‘un-American’ or ‘unpatriotic’. Both sides of the political spectrum engage in this tactic, but I’m going to have to say that the Right engages in this more than the Left (and remember, I’m a Right-leaning individual). Now the writers of Superman Returns leaving off the end of “Truth, Justice & the American Way” in their script was a chickenshit move and they deserved the scorn heaped upon them for doing so. But not everything is some grand conspiracy to indoctrinate kids in a political philosophy you disagree with. Civil War was a story first (albeit a “big event” story) and a pamphlet of Mark Millar’s political leanings second. It was a bit heavy handed at times, but if you look at it in context it was no more so than the Lee-Kirby creations who gave birth to the Marvel U. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a Skrull is just a Skrull. Millar’s use of real world situations in The Ultimates and Civil War were no different than Stan Lee using the Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation as a shorthand when creating the Hulk and the FF, or Bob Kane and Bill Finger using the almost universal fear of street crime during the Depression when creating Batman.

Now back to Willingham’s core argument: that we’re in an age of Age of Superhero Decadence, and that this is a bad thing. First up is the assertion that the era we’re in now is defined by characters who lack moral codes or virtue. In short: sort of. We’re in what can be generously described as the modern era; the era in which the full range of modern storytelling were fully integrated into the medium. Remember, from the 50s through the early 80s the industry was dominated by the Comics Code, which outright prohibited the bad guys from winning even a little bit. Once the medium was free of that choker, it was able to expand. You can’t tell me that comics are a worse place for characters like Ozymandias, Wolverine, Deathstroke, The Authority, The Punisher and Spawn. So yes, I think this era is populated by characters who indulge in “Superhero(ic) Decadence”, but it’s a consequence of the changes more than the actual change.

Second is his assertion that this change, this new era, is bad. To that I say no, but with a caveat. This new era of dramatic complexity and depth is what has driven the industry forward from it’s simplistic roots into a medium which supports such a wide variety of stories. How much depth could you have if the good guys are always pure as the driven snow and the bad guys are just evil for the sake of evil? How much drama could you have if (as the Code used to require) the bad guys are always caught at the end of the story, and no authority figure could ever be portrayed in a negative light? Now there are discordant notes here. Comics from the Big 2 nowadays are almost oppressively grim ‘n’ gritty, with little room for humor, fun or levity. And you could blame that lack on Superhero Decadence but even if you do, so what? Did the action movie kill the film musical, or did it simply replace it?

I’m going to say to Bill the same thing I said to Robert Kirkman when he published his Manifesto last year: it’s not an either-or situation. Morally ambivalent conflicts are a staple of higher fiction, and therefore belong in comics. At the same time there’s no reason to label all heroes with an unshakable moral code as ‘old fashioned’. One does not preclude the other from the marketplace.