When Heroes Go Bad

I’m going to be honest. I LOVE stories where a hero turns evil. I think there might be a sadistic part of my nature, but I love when a noble hero breaks the rules and code he or she has previously lived by. A fall from grace is always interesting.

A while back in the comics, the character of Daredevil was given control of his mortal enemies, the ninja clan The Hand in a storyline that was titled Shadowland. Using this small army at his disposal, Daredevil essentially eliminated crime in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen.

But soon his methods got more and more extreme, turning the neighborhood into a police state but without the police (who are too scared to enter the neighborhood). Instead of just fighting crime he and his private army of ninjas would imprison dissidents in the dungeons below Shadowland, the fortress built on the remains of a blown up housing block. The character reaches a true level of darkness though when Daredevil fights and kills his long time enemy Bullseye in the same manner Bullseye killed Matt Murdock's (Daredevil) former flame, Elektra.

That seems to be the true sign a character has taken a dark turn. When they throw away their moral code and resort to killing (See Previous Blog Entry). Usually the victim is an enemy, as in the case of Daredevil, but it is not long before the hero turns on their allies and friends.

Such was the case of Hal Jordan, aka Green Lantern, in the Emerald Twilight storyline. In that story, Hal Jordan was driven mad with rage after his entire home city was obliterated. In a quest to gain the power to resurrect his fallen friends and family he attempts to drain the power of the Oan power battery, the source of energy for all Green Lanterns. In his attempt to gain this power he slaughters several of his fellow Lanterns eventually gaining the power to rewrite time and wipe out all existence (as revealed in the mega-crossover Zero Hour).

What’s interesting about both these instances is that it is later revealed that it was not a case of the hero turning dark, but a case of the hero being possessed by some otherworldly entity. Daredevil was possessed by some demon the Hand worshipped called coincidently enough The Beast of the Hand and the entire plot of placing him in charge of The Hand is an attempt to bring this demon into the physical world. Same with Hal Jordan who is possessed by Parallax, the entity of fear who slowly started to possess Hal in an effort to free itself from the Oan power battery.

Neither of these heroes have control of their actions and after an exorcism and a bit of soul searching are able to resume their roles as heroes (Daredevil’s road to redemption was a little shorter than Hal Jordan’s who had to both sacrifice his life, take on a new persona and then be resurrected before he resumed the role of Green Lantern many years later). Essentially both of these heroes get to be reaccepted into the hero community by claiming "the devil made me do it."

But sometimes it isn’t always an outside influence that causes a hero to go bad. Sometimes a hero just snaps. While super heroes are blessed with powers and abilities beyond mortal men, they still have the same personality flaws that ordinary humans have. And from time to time ordinary people just snap. So when one sees the horrific damage a single unhinged individual can inflict on the world around him, just imagine if that person had super powers. Two examples of this can be seen in Marvel’s The Sentry and Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. Both of these characters are excellent examples of a super hero becoming unhinged and ironically both the main characters in these stories are archetypally similar to Superman.

Now in Marvel, The Sentry is a hero who, after retconning, has been in the Marvel Universe since its beginning (in actuality he started out as an April Fool’s day joke in Wizard Magazine about a lost creation of Stan Lee). As the first Mini-series starring the Sentry came to a close it was revealed that the Sentry and his arch nemesis, The Void, were both aspects of the fractured personality of Robert Reynolds. Essentially it was revealed that the world’s greatest hero was a schizophrenic and his dual personality was also the greatest threat to the world.

In Mark Waid’s Irredeemable, the hero is known as the Plutonian, another Superman type character. While the Sentry’s fall from grace can be blamed on psychological issues, in the case of the Plutonian it is merely a case of being unable to deal with the constant pressure of being a hero. Being a super hero can most easily be equated to being a celebrity and we have certainly seen plenty of news stories where a celebrity has lost their mind from living a constantly scrutinized life. Now add being able to fly and super strength to the equation and the pressure must be even worse. Thus what happens in this series. The hero decides to become a villain and kill his allies and those who would oppose him, using his powers for selfish gains.

Another great example of heroes falling from grace is Garth Ennis’s The Boys. Of course in that series, ALL the super heroes have fallen from grace. The Boys are a secret black ops team for the CIA whose sole purpose is to monitor super heroes and to take them out if they get too big for their britches. To essentially prevent situations like what occurred in Irredeemable and The Sentry from occurring in the first place. An excellent case of how truly petty and human heroes can be when they’re not posing for pictures after saving a cat from a tree.

It was said best in Spider-Man, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” But on top of that responsibility comes an added pressure. I can only imagine the pressures a super hero would feel. It has to be the most stressful life time job you can have. Just look at the pictures of Presidents before and after they take office. In just a matter of four to eight years these individuals look like they’ve aged almost twenty years. I feel being a super hero would be similar to that level of pressure.