Moral expectations

Why do heroes always win and villains lose? I'm not denying villains are evil in comics:but why should Evil lose??

Is this an archaic relic from more puritanical eras of America, where Virtue had to be prevalent over Vice? I think humans are pretty bad, yet;why do comics portrary heroes as ,precisely heroes?
Suppose DC suddenly made stories of the bad guys killing the heroes, then comics about them, doing crimes and stuff;how would people react?
just a random thought about comic-writing and modern reality. We rarely discuss comics beside discussing them as such on here

Priest is actually trying that on Deathstroke right now, intending to write it as a pure villain book without getting anti-hero with it. I don't think you can do it with the entire universe though since that's not why most people read or write about a superhero universe.

Because its an ideal to aspire to. Did you know comics can be considered a form of escapism?

>Suppose DC suddenly made stories of the bad guys killing the heroes, then comics about them, doing crimes and stuff;how would people react?

Well, apparently, people would forget about it pretty easily.

Let's be honest: 99% of superman readers would just conquer the qorld and be tyrants if given super-powers.
Who would escape into the life of,say-spiderman? a trouble youth who has to suffer in his personal life to fight crime and protect ungrateful citizens?

Garou pls

>Suppose DC suddenly made stories of the bad guys killing the heroes, then comics about them, doing crimes and stuff;how would people react?

It would be Sup Forums's Best Graphic Novel™ of 2013

Garou is the most honest manga character.
real life kids love the villains, not the silly heroes.

Suicide Squad. You are looking for Suicide Squad.

Lex Luthor literally wasn't doing anything wrong till superman butted in

There have been plenty of stories where villains won a battle over the hero. If not physically than emotionally.

but i'm surprised that's the minority
what makes humans aspire to "heroes" as the center of the story?

That's why Xanatos is still the best villain. You believe how he became a god among billionaires -- even when he loses, he still wins.

>Why do heroes always win and villains lose?
Because when villains win people bitch and moan.

>why doesn't batman just kill the joker?

since the idea that good triumphs over evil is one of the deepest and most ingrined concepts, we continue believing it since if evil concistently won, there wouldnt really be a point to living. we want to believe in a world where good is powerfu. regardless of whether its true or not, we all act as if it is, because we dont want a self fulfilling prophecy, if we acted as if good winning was a lie, and stopped being good, then evil really will win. we reinforce this particular belief because we need it to be true if want people to be good

They would want to think they would be morally upstanding though

Its harder to write villians as equals to heroes. The joker could be written as batmans equal, but that would require coming up with plans and consequences. Its much easier to tell us hes his arch nemesis, have a scheme, then get defeated only to escape prison and do it again. Its like how everything goes back the same at the end in tv shows. You dont need to keep writing new characters and situations. When the hero wins nothing happens.

Johns is by far the worst example of that, he cant write villians as bad guys.

On rare occasions he can. Like his Thawne is pretty evil. Most of the time it is just dindu nuffin husbandos.

The old-school answer is that these are hero-myths and moral parables of the modern age: they only exist to teach us that being good and following the rules will end well for us.
Then there's the crass market demand equation: more people buy comics with happy endings.
But true comic geeks know that modern comic heroes don't win. Not really.
And villains would realize that they've already won if they would just stop greedily grabbing for more, holding themselves to standards of victory that they can never fully achieve.

Lex Luthor, Richard Fisk (The Kingpin), Norman Osborn (GreenGoblin), and some other baddies are millionaires. Petty obsessive revenge schemes are the only things they lose at.
Joker, The Penguin, Magneto, Sabretooth, The Red Skull, and such types always pull some evil crazy shit time and time again and their lives are no worse for it.
Carnage and Doomsday don't give a damned if they get defeated at the end of the day, they are monsters who live for the destruction they always manage to cause.

Meanwhile Spiderman watches loved ones die every few years, Captain America has a repeating narrative about disillusionment, the X-Men are eternal pariahs watching generations of their children die, and nobody will LEAVE HULK ALONE!
Then there's the "heroes" like Tony Stark, Professor X, Reed Richards, and Carol Danvers who make these horrible bad calls that are clearly villainy to anyone who would notice.

Bad guys win but don't settle for it.
Good guys suffer and die ... and die again to maintain a holding action.
And some heroes are just villains who don't get held accountable.

good post senpai

...

His Lex is a murderer, his Sinestro is a self-aggrandizing despot who empowers monsters and killers to conquer the universe, his Black Adam has an Old Testament morality, is frequently hypocritical, and his sense of justice lethal and collective, and his Black Manta casually kills people all the time.

His black adam is a hero who maybe lets it go to his head a little at times.

People just hate that he kills.

Interesting that johns killed off silvana so unceremoniously but the ashes spreading was a great page.

You're so fucking stupid, holy shit.

That said your right about the other things.

Wait!

Xanatos vs Doom?

Because we get the comics that tune into the universe where the heroes generally win.

If you want comics where the heroes generally lose, then look for those Ultraman, Owlman, Power Ring and Superwoman books.

a villain who wins ends up being a hero anyway

Because comic books are written for children, with a child's perception of how the world should be in mind. What you are complaining about is essentially that someone wrote a story for a demographic you don't belong, with out considering your wants and expectations.

You might as well be complaining that people don't get shot enough on sesame street.

Xanatos becomes prime minister of Latveria, conflict over.

Xanatos wins. It turns out he was only up against a doombot

>9% of superman readers would just conquer the world and be tyrants if given super-powers.
that's why Superman is popular. He represents an antithesis to 'power always corrupts', an icon that one can wield power altruistically without succumbing to corruption, because we want to believe that it's possible, because the alternative is depressing

Casual, this isn't 1940, we aren't talking about the latest issue of Casper the friendly ghost.
If you know nothing about comics, you should not be embarrassing yourself here and wasting our time with your idiotic posts.
There's another board for that.

And that ethical and moral certitude is the very thing that makes him so characteristically alien.

Not at all, friend. That's the dark path of Snyder you're walking.

Superman represents the ideal of the best people can be. He's a good man first and foremost.

>Who would escape into the life of,say-spiderman? a trouble youth who has to suffer in his personal life to fight crime and protect ungrateful citizens?

Pretty much everyone considering how massively popular Spidey is.

Spidey and Supes represent two different kinds of audience appeal. Supes is the fantasy of being the perfect good guy, Spider is relatable reader stand-in. Peter Parker is the everynerd that comics readers could identify with.

Well, it's not binary. The rule of who wins isn't a function of "Good/Bad" (however that might be defined). It's a function of how good the player is at the game that is being played.

And now that OP has mentioned that, I would like to see a comic where the impossible odds actually can't be overcome by the hero because the villain is just better. Not because I'm cynical, but because I think it hasn't been done that often. And I don't mean like some Mark Millar shit, but stuff like complicated thieveries and getaways or stuff like that. Batman should have a question mark above his head at the end.

I dunnoe, that sounds pretty alien to my experience with humanity...

fuck off mark millar

>And now that OP has mentioned that, I would like to see a comic where the impossible odds actually can't be overcome by the hero because the villain is just better. Not because I'm cynical, but because I think it hasn't been done that often. And I don't mean like some Mark Millar shit, but stuff like complicated thieveries and getaways or stuff like that. Batman should have a question mark above his head at the end.

It's not done very often because it's boring and makes for terrible stories.

You can do stories where the thieves get caught or the detective fails, because those stories can focus on the telling of the story, the characters, their emotions, etc. than the story.

But those kinds of stories can only be done sparingly or they lose their impact. Meanwhile, in general, stories where characters overcome obstacles and succeed are going to be more interesting.

It has nothing to do with "how good the player is at the game that is being played", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. These are fictional stories written to entertain, and everything is towards that purpose.

Conquest sounds like way to much work even with super powers. Any attempt of me administrating a country or larger sounds like a disaster. I'd just fly and do cool shit.

Is it any wonder that supervillains always seem so unimaginative?

Why don't the villains win? Because they'd kill the heroes and the story would be over! Or they'd conquer the world the the status quo would shift too much. It's that simple.

Lex Luthor does have considerable success usually, but he won't be allowed to kill Superman.

well in Superman's defense, one of his powers is that he is literally unbeatable as defined by Morrison

I think your just to pessimistic.

And how!

Then you must be like 16.
The world is not as shitty as you think it is.
A majority of people are decent to good people, if this wasn't true you could never go outside.

Is that why they dress up as Superman instead of asking to get their heads shaved to look like Lex?

Do they lose, really? Guys like Joker get caught sure, but they always break out and wind causing more harm. There have been some.stories that confronted that idea. That as long as some heroes let certain villains live, that evil will always come back and worse than last time.

*wind up

They lose because they get caught and their nefarious schemes are thwarted. They get out because comics wanna reuse a villain to make money.

>doombot
OMFG I HATE THE DOOMBOTS! They are his bullshit out for EVERYTHING every time he fucks up. Imagine if Lex Luthor operated this way: "Bwahaha Superman you didn't defeat ME you just took out LexBot #7008!" That shit would get old fast.

*AHEM!* ... Toyman does that. He might have even done it first.

>but why should Evil lose??

Comic Code.

Xanatos wipes out a recent family photo that shows his mum, who is very much alive and not being tortured in hell.

>A majority of people are decent to good people
No. Majority are mediocre to moderately (in a shit person but not a complete psychopath sense) shit people. Then again I'm a slav, my experiences may be different from you first-worlders.