We lost that a long time ago.

You're not far off when you mention that Marvel has been going to this well for quite some time, and have clearly either forgotten what the word "hero" means, or are trying to change it.

Remember back in the 80's when the Mutant Registration Act was very, very clearly a BAD thing? How do we come from that to Quesada, Millar et al telling us that the same idea, now imposed on ALL superhumans, magically is a GOOD thing?

I don't know, was it the Bush Administration that did this? Was it the idea of 9/11 that changed our collective minds? I mean, '24' is still a popular show, and Jack Bauer, the supposed hero of the piece, tortures people, doesn't he?

How does that work? I mean, Bauer IS the hero, right? I do not ask this in jest, I am serious. IS he a hero? It almost seems like a harkening back to the 60's and 70's when anti-heroes like "Dirty Harry" Callahan and "Death Wish" Paul Kersey do "what has to be done," only without even the small amount of thought that at least went into those stories (Callahan had a line he wouldn't cross, as seen by his opposition to younger cops executing criminals, and Kersey becomes violently ill after killing his first assailant -- although both series would become more cartoonish later, I think the first incarnations were well-reasoned, at least).

Now, Marvel had their anti-heroes in Wolverine and Punisher, but it seems that ALL their characters are at best anti-heroes now, but without the self-awareness to admit it (to themselves OR the readers).

Great post, but I think that, at least at Marvel, it'll fall on deaf ears (unless Dark Reign actually changes this, but I'm not holding my breath).

Take it and run,

I think that it's clearly the case that the Registration Act is, in the context of the Marvel Universe, both a bad thing and seen as a bad thing--the weight of the authorial thumb is on the balance in favor of Captain America and against Iron Man at every point in the last two years. (That isn't to say that Iron Man/Stark isn't given the opportunity to say some reasonable things to promote his position.)

However, having Jennifer "I'm Actually a Lawyer" embrace the idea that "enemy combatants" can be tortured, killed by torture, and then resurrected to be tortured to death again, legally, is shameful. It's hard to believe that there's not some ironic undercutting here, but even having those words put into the mouth of that character is hard to credit.

The whole point here is that being a hero means doing what's morally right, whether or not the powers-that-be agree with you. Is it shameful that "enemy combatants" aren't given legal rights? Yes, but the fact is that actually happens/happened and it is all quite quite legal. (Not to mention, not everyone agrees with it's shameful, hence "24" is such a popular TV show) That it is "traditional" for superheroes to uphold the law doesn't mean it's their priorty; even the characters who are written as popular and beloved in their worlds often use illegal methods to accomplish the greater good, and depending on the story the powers-that-be may or may not accede to this (E.g. The Gotham City PD isn't too distressed that Batman habitually engages in burglary and aggravated assault, whereas the NYPD is trying to arrest Spiderman). Therefore, if Jennifer says "by all legal measures I'm a bad guy" she's speaking the truth and letting her allies know that what the heroic nature of her rescuing her friend may have to be extra-heroic because it is illegal.

O HAI DARK REIGN.

You're just wrong, ravensron. In addition to "by any legal measure", Jen also characterizes herself as the villain "by any reasonable measure". And in the rest of the discussion not excerpted here, she's planning to turn herself in. She appears to genuinely think she did the wrong thing.

re: Wolverine...in X-Force..a book about a mutant team that goes out and assassinates the bad guys, while he does kill, he questions and wonders about what they're doing, and is in many ways the moral center of the book. It's in many ways the Wolverine of old, rather than the I like beer and killin' Whedon/Bendis Wolverine

It's surprisingly one of Marvel's best written and most nuanced books.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what's going on here as I've not read the issue in question or many other Marvel Superhero comics lately. But one thing that strikes me is that if the whole "Superhero thing" of breaking the law is OK if you think it's morally justified, then isn't the guy inflicting the torture being heroic?

If a superhero can flaunt the laws that the rest of us have to obey when he or she feels the end justifies the means then where do we draw the line? One man's Superhero is another man's Villain.

Tim, the big difference, and where we draw the line, is that we can see who's right and who's wrong. The vivisectionist may think he's morally justified in repeatedly killing a sapient being (though he's taking far too much pleasure in it--one of the cues that he's doing wrong), but he's wrong by the ethical standards of the reader.

Superheroing is not "might makes right", because that gets the causation backwards. You have to be right before you get to be a hero. There are dozens of stories about Superman or Captain America or whoever inspiring a normal person to take a heroic moral stand.

One of the things that pisses me off is the attitude that anything the US does is justified because we're the good guys. That's exactly backwards--we're the good guys if and only if we do the right thing. And we have been doing truly villainous things for several years now (and throughout our history, don't call me naive, but it's been bad the past several years).

(This is why Jim Henley calls superheroes "the literature of ethics".)

Greg,
You and I don't seem to actually have a disagreement. We certainly agree that the government not only can but has been doing things that are wrong. We certainly agree that heroism is doing what's morally right not what's legal - that some things are always wrong no matter who does them or whether the doing of them comports with current law. But not everyone in the US of A agrees with us.
That our heroine here is conflicted doesn't mean she's not heroic or that she believes torturing her friend is acceptable because "it's an alien threat to national security." Without presuming to speak for a fictional character's unspoken thoughts, particularly since I haven't read the rest of the comic book, I'd say though that it is "realistic" for her to have doubts about what she is doing. She absolutely 100% knows she must save her friend, but also knows it is absolultely 100% illegal to do so; the supervillain herein is the very government she's grown up respecting and believing in, is tangentially associated with as a member of the bar, and she has previously taken for granted isn't a supervillain.

Ravensron, I'd be more inclined to agree if She-Hulk hadn't said BOTH things, that she was a villain "by any reasonable measure," which I think is pretty obviously not the case, and "by any legal measure," which is at least somewhat correct.

I guess my point is this; Stan Lee (or Jim Shooter, or whomever the EiC might have been at the time) never told me that Reed creating a prison in a hellish dimension was a good thing, and that he was a hero for doing do. Quesada, on the other hand, has pretty much done just that, more than once.

Marvel's "heroes" aren't even making it clear anymore that they are right. Captain America gives up when a few buildings are smashed. Norman Osborn is made the head of a new organization that replaced SHIELD.

She-Hulk SHOULDN'T be conflicted, here. She knows Jazinda is innocent, and that she is being tortured. Super-heroes used to do the RIGHT thing, not the legal one, and they were heroes BECAUSE of it.

That's something Marvel seems to have either lost, forgotten, or is trying to deny (or, admittedly, something they are trying to reclaim, but since they were the ones that took it away to begin with, that doesn't cut them much slack even if that IS what they are doing).

I don't think these things are making for better stories, I think they are ruining the idea of real (super)heroics, and I'd love to know the reasoning behind it.

I mean, in the X-Men in the 80's, it was pretty clear the government was the "bad guy" insofar as mutants. They were written that way, the characters acknowledged it, and the letters page (the closest I can come to the internet of today) didn't contradict that.

Today, we have the government doing scummy things, our so-called heroes doubting themselves (and I don't mean in a complex way, I mean in a dumb way, like Jenny above with her "by any reasonable measure" statement), and the online "voice" from Marvel, the tone if you will, agreeing with that evil government (see the Civil War discussions).

There's a massive disconnect here, IMHO. That's the problem I see. I do agree with your points, but I do not think Marvel themselves are nearly that clear anymore. Today's Reed Richards wouldn't have taken that spaceflight, and if he, Ben, Johnny and Sue had tried and then been shot for stealing government property, Reed would be agreeing with them before the bullet killed him (all IMHO).

I know things grow and change, but I just don't see most of Marvel's stables as "heroic" anymore (with exceptions like Hercules).

I don't know if I made anything clearer, or just muddied it up some more with my aged ramblings :)

Take it and run,

I haven't been following the series and haven't read any more than what Greg provided here, but the whole thing is muddled. If She-Hulk thinks she's a villain for saving her friend, she must assume that it was the wrong thing to do. But if it was wrong, then why did she do it? The only reason to do such a thing (outside of being paid or blackmailed into it) is because it's the right thing to do. But if it's right, then she wouldn't be a villain "by any reasonable measure" (by some legal measures, perhaps, but not by any reasonable measure we might want to use). So maybe it's wrong. And now we're back to where we came in. The logic makes no sense.

Maybe then it's a matter of imprecise semantics in the character's speech, and that could be either the character herself written to be imprecise/confused/conflicted or the author not realizing our heroine saying she's a villain "by any reasonable measure" suggests the logical impossibility Doug points out: "If I'm wrong how can I be right but I am right so how can I be wrong but I'm wrong...."

I can't disagree with Earl that current Marvel heroes are displaying traits and ideas that don't fit the traditional heroic mold, "these are not your father's superheroes" but I don't see why that automatically means the stories are defective. Not talking about whether any given, individual comic by any particular author/artist happens to be a good story. Rather, suggesting that there's no heavenly mandate that comic book characters must be one-dimensionally pure good guys; just because 20 or 40 years ago "noble hero good, mutant hater bad" doesn't mean you can't tell stories in which the protagonists are conflicted or confused or indecisive, or where the government is suspect (E.g. Norman Osborn as the superhero version of J. Edgar Hoover). The world is a complex place. Maybe there is a need in the superhero world for heroes to invent hellish interdimensional prisons..just as there was a need in our world for the USA to invade Iraq. That you and I might not make that choice doesn't mean nobody else ever would. It isn't whether the activity happening in the story is itself "good" or "heroic"; it's that you can write stories about the activity, and how it affects people, and the effects might not always be so heroic. Sure you can always present a comic book character as an unmitigated villain. But it is equally valid for the someone to not be an unmitigated villain, to be one but he (and maybe your next door neighbor) thinks he isn't.

She-Hulk is just plain wrong, and as a (former) lawyer she should know better. The torture depicted here is not right by either a reasonable *or* legal measure or standard. And all those who even wrote legal opinions saying that it *was* legal are criminals, too.

But then, she apparently never read the entire text of the SHRA (given that she was actually surprised when drafted by SHIELD), so how can we expect her to know the ins and outs of things like the International Convention on Torture?

Jonathan Hickman addresses Reed Richards' culpability in the new Dark Reign: Fantastic Four mini- he seems to indicate Reed blames himself for everything that's gone wrong and is trying to make amends. Hickman is scheduled to take over the FF with Dale Eaglesham after Millar and Hitch, as well.