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RANT ALERT
It does seem that the heroes are suffering needlessly, even incomprehensibly since Identity Crisis. That series just killed my enjoyment of these characters. Hopefully, ALL STAR SUPERMAN, just like the JLA Classified series, will be like a shot of Classic Coke in this New Coke world.
These are super-heroes, not cops. Mindwiping someone who will definitely kill your family if they get the chance (and they always get the chance) rather than killing them is DEFINITELY what a hero would do.
What else EXACTLY could they do? Put their families and other innocent people at TERRIBLE risk by not taking away those memories? How would that be more heroic?
At of all the options available, mindwiping the villains was the most heroic. It was the only choice short of killing them WHICH is exactly what the villains would do to anyone (hero, civilian or little baby) who put them at risk. So there is still no comparison, no blurring of lines, between who's a hero and who's a villain.
The heroes have a duty to defend the innocent, protect the weak and punish the wicked. If they have to make ethical sacrifices so that others don't have to suffer, then they are still heroes and far preferable to those that they fight.
My question is why didn't Zatanna take away their powers while she was wiping their memories? Hell, there is absolutely NO REASON Dr. Light deserves to keep his power.
Also, the sheer concept is terrible in that the villains suddenly ban together to protect themselves from the heroes that they've been trying to destroy forever. They don't NEED a reason to want to mind-wipe the heroes. They are villains - destroying heroes is what they DO!!
The whole thing implies that since the first Crisis, the heroes and villains have been playing this ludicrous game and actually holding back. It means that everything we've read has been reduced to irrelevance or insignificance prior to this crisis because until now, no one's taken this seriously.
In the end, the whole "crisis" in Identity Crisis is a failure of the editors and writers to provide a believable moral alternative, and it is not a failure of the heroes. They were written into a situation where they could kill a person who they caught red-handed raping and torturing a close friend and who would use his contacts to do the same to their friends and family even in prison. So, they could kill him, they could simply put him in jail and wait for the phone call about which of their loved ones were tortured to death or they could mindwipe him. Since that's all they could do, they made the choice that left him alive and protected innocent people from suffering.
Should they have then quit? Given their city's to the villains because they weren't allowed to find a completely ethical solution?
No, of course not - this is what a hero is all about. The focus on this as a crisis is really a manufactured device that would only work if the heroes were given another even more ethical option.
IF DC’s stories had been taking place in the world Grant Morrison made it in JLA (especially the EARTH 2 mini series/TPB) where good eventually always wins out in this universe, then maybe it would be okay to just let these guys go without tampering with their minds. Because, in that universe, as long as you made the most ethical choice in every situation then you’d But didn't some hero's mom end up in tupperware containers in the refrigerator? IDC set up these villains as having no moral compunction against any horrible act. The death penalty certainly should be applied to these guys, BUT since no one can die in the DCU, to perform the duties they've sworn themselves to WITHOUT simply killing the villains (like they really should) then what else, really is their choice?
Essentially, we readers have gone along with the fact that none of the villains die simply because it leaves them alive for good stories, but editorial concerns have twisted that and made it part of the problem all of a sudden. What should have happened is that Dr. Light and all these villains are treated like clear and prensent dangers to the state, tried without given any contact to the outside world and executed immediately. I mean, they are superpowered mass murderers who've threatened entire cities. But since editorial has chosen to ask us to suspend disbelief in this regard, how can we even buy that lobotomizing instead of killing one of these creeps to protect people who are actually good is morally worse than leaving them capable of doing more damage? How can that put our heroes anywhere close to the level of Luthor, Light or even Deathstroke? Where are the lines blurred?
On top of that, then all the villains get like "now the gloves are off!"
“NOW!” the gloves are off?!
Why have I been reading all this sissy crap for the past 20 years if only now they're serious about it? Really, the villains’ feelings about the mindwiping should be irrelevant.
If IDC is at all valid, then we have been reading the wimpiest crybaby comic universe since the first Crisis. The villains don't need a reason to hate or kill the heroes. Hell, that's how this all started with the Dr. Light business. Why was he raping Sue Dibny? Why was he going to destroy their families when he next got the chance? He didn't need this mindwiping business to get him going in the first place - why do all the other villains need it? When they went out to destroy a city or burn babies alive were they just doing it so Superman or Batman would show up to foil their plans and show them what a true hero is?
NO! If they were serious villains, they did it because they wanted power or money or vengence or anything else, and they want to kill the heroes because they are standing in their way. NOT because they have betrayed the hero's code.
However, in Villains Unite, Gail Simone pulls off the society in a very interesting way. If you look at all the extraordinary people, good and evil, as their own class, then they'd need a society, rules of order. Of course, it makes no sense to expect these truly evil people to forge any stable society, but that was the whole point of Villains United. Unity is impossible among these creeps, so only six of them (chosen by the most brilliant of them all) can throw a wrench in the whole thing.
In a perfect world, IDC would never have happened and Gail Simone's VILLAINS UNITED would have taken place entirely separately from this Crisis fiasco. It could have been DC's answer to Millar's WANTED (which was much more entertaining and reasonable than IDC) in the same way that THE ELITE and THE ULTRAMARINES were their answer to THE AUTHORITY and ULTIMATES.
The villains would have formed their society simply out of the direct and reasonable desire to finally do away with the heroes. In the end, Mockingbird would have turned out to be Luthor, but not the real Luthor vs. the Alternate Luthor. He would have been the nihilistic Nietzschean Luthor we all know and love who was manipulating both sides to distract and destroy his rivals and enemies in a war of attrition from which he would emerge the sole survivor.
To deal with the limitations of the basic premise leftover from IDC, Simone used a few very interesting concepts to drive the central action of the story. First, that the extraordinary beings of the world would eventually be forced to form some kind of society to find a stable balance. That a society composed almost entirely of immoral and amoral people, no matter what their power, who evetually tear itself apart and be incapable of facing even the most minor adversity. And, most compelling, the most powerful individual in this group would be Luthor simply because he is by far the most strategically adept.
That, really, is the basic conflict between Superman and Luthor. They both want to be the only Man of Tomorrow. Luthor's advantage and downfall perhaps is that he won't tolerate any rivals or alternatives. |
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