Echoing Matt, I hate that Bendis, Fraction, Millar and alot of the "hot" writers think that those are features that make these characters interesting. Not being heroes. The final straw for me with Iron Man was the Point One issue spent at an AA meeting. Bendis tried to rehash alot of the "abuser" stuff about Hank Pym in his Avengers titles. And of course Millar took two of the worst characterizations of the two and made them the emphasis of their personalities in the Ultimates. I just don't get how that makes them compelling.

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Roger Stern used to say of one writer, years ago, that he could not write superheroes because he could not conceive of anyone more noble than himself -- himself not being very noble at all.

These days, I sometimes get the impression that's actually REQUIRED of people who want to write for Marvel or DC. The concept of the "antihero" has been stretched so far out of shape, we no longer find the right thing being done for the wrong reasons, we find the right thing, when it happens at all, being almost accidental!

I was genuinely surprised to find the nu-52 Aquaman first issue containing a scene of the hero... stopping a bank robbery...

I literally couldn't remember the last time a mainstream comic had a hero actually fight a crime in progress. So much of the current output deals with avenging mass slaughters or genocides or have the villains eleven steps ahead of the heroes to the point where killing three or four of them over the course of an arc seems pathetically easy. Why did we in the audience ever think these do-gooding nobodies were up to the challenge of Osborn, or Sinestro, or Superboy-Prime, or Black Adam...? Seriously, they're lambs led to the slaughter every single time. Whatta buncha goofy-lookin' cannon fodder...!

The notion that they could actually accomplish something beyond mere survival doesn't seem to have crossed the mind of a modern writer in the past 15 years or so...

I bought two of the early Marvel trade paperbacks within a couple of weeks of one another: "The Uncanny X-Men" and "The Power of Iron Man." The similarities between the two were striking I thought at the time. Both dealt with long-standing Marvel characters becoming corrupted from within and without as a sub-plot over the course of a number of issues, doing the unthinkable, and coming to a head with them having to face the consequences of their initially blithe, careless responses to their encroaching downfall.

Jean Grey doesn't tell anyone about her "timeslips" into the body of what she assumes to be a bad-girl ancestor... Why? Well, because it's kinda kinky fun, suddenly finding herself courted by this dashing, charming, if slightly skeevy gentleman of earlier times, and being shown off to his kinky compatriots in fetish-gear, brandishing a whip... Hey, what Scott and the gang don't know isn't going to hurt them, right? Who's she hurting (well, non-consentually, anyways :-) by going along for the ride when these fugues overtake her every now and then...?

Tony Stark is drinking a little bit more at parties these days... Maybe having one or two in the office. Hey, his job's tough... Competitors moving in on him, problems with some outside entity gaining access to his armor's weapons systems... A really nice ambassador's blood on his hands... Hey, who wouldn't drink, right?

As the subplots built, neither seeks help from anyone to deal with what they each consider an escape from their current reality, and a pleasurable escape at that. Here, the difference in theme begins to take over, as Jean's descent into corruption empowers her while Tony's begins to lessen his effectiveness, causing him to screw up and make embarassing errors in judgement...

Eventually, the "broken" version of themselves that they've been nursemaiding into existence through the subplot arrives full-blown on the cover of their comic, Jean as Dark Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #135, and Tony's "Demon in a Bottle" on Iron Man #128...

As such, the sight of the hero at their worst didn't seem out of place on either cover to me at the time, although Jean's certainly had that element of fetishtic thrill while Tony's was just ugly and demoralizing. Again, the themes were different, one gaining unimaginable power through their walk on the wild side and loss of self, the other losing everything through their self-indulgence and weakness. The story progression, however, more-or-less synced up.

Both covers feature the "bad guy" the hero (or heroes, in the X-Men's case) must fight next... Dark Phoenix, shatterer of worlds, in one case and in the other, that guy looking back at Tony from the mirror who has dragged him into degradation and ruin.

Jean's problems, being more super-hero/space operatic in nature, appeared less jarring, although no less tragic. Her cover shows a sexy super-villain for the team to fight. Tony's ills, being set more in "real world" of business, finance, and high society, were more ugly. His cover-featured villain is particularly unpleasant to look at, even today.

Being merely one of many X-Men, Jean's road to ruin didn't impact the central thrust of her book to the extent that Tony's did, (although Claremont's unwillingness to let the matter drop makes that open to question.) Both storylines, however, altered or "ruined" the nature of the character to the point where, in 25 years or more, neither has had a storyline since that didn't in some way reference these two pivotal events.

Much of that impact, I think, had to do with the sight of those characters appearing so very much altered on the covers of those two issues. I can see where routinely cover-featuring sub-plots could be an ill-considered move, but in these cases, the creators waited until the sub-plot fully manifested to become the main storyline beforehand and in so doing, for good or ill, made comic history.

Tim, by and large, I agree with you. Supporting casts and characters written specifically for certain storylines are far preferrable as the focus for these sorts of story experiments.*

Daredevil's character-redefining story arc and major 80's event was the Elektra saga, in which the degradation and corruption happened to the love of his life and not to Daredevil himself. Daredevil was shown to be something of a lovestruck fool throughout, allowing a ruthless assassin to get the better of him on multiple occasions out of love for her, but when the story was done, grief and resulting mental instability notwithstanding, the character dragged through the depths of corruption and self-destruction was not the title character.

When Miller returned and did "Born Again," he did take Daredevil down a dark, apparently hopeless path, one that smacked of irreversible character damage, but in the end, he allowed him to re-emerge as strong as ever, rededicated to his cause, the resulting damage occuring mainly to his supporting cast (Karen Page especially) and to his law practice. Daredevil himself, while potentially unstable, was still the hero of his own book.

*Again, Jean being merely "one of many" amongst the X-Men, I think, makes her "supporting cast" material and hence, a more appropriate choice for this sort of thing than Tony, the main player in his own franchise.

I agree with Brian here, in many respects...

   My biggest beef with the whole matter with how heroes are written these days is the emphasis on what I've heard called "deconstruction".  Perhaps the "con" should be removed from the word to make it destruction.

   Per John Byrne's reiteration of a statement that one of his Marvel editors made concerning the worth of certain writers in superhero comics, it seems that the "new normal" is for that type of person to be writing material once considered acceptable to all ages, though focused primarily at pre-teenage boys.  As it turns out, the current generation of writers have dragged the heroes of our youth down into the mire until they've become even sleazier than most of the villains they're supposedly set up against.  Back when the word "anti-hero" actually meant something, I found it acceptable for Wolverine to be an otherwise-noble figure who grudgingly accepted the leadership of a "boy scout" like Cyclops, the Punisher to be a tragic figure whose focus on fighting crime went beyond what was acceptable for American citizens, and the Hulk to be a monster unleashed from within Bruce Banner when overwhelming circumstances beyond his control overtook him.

   No longer.  We can now say that the heroes have become ciphers, more like Hollywood celebrities and sports stars than characters with some grounding in the noble ideals that they once represented for us.  So much for the golden rule (which the cynics have more or less suborned).

My example involves the X-Men and some of their spinoff titles, things which I had for some reason never dropped when I should've (by the time John Byrne left in 1981):

   Referring to Garry's comment about the heroes basically taking the easy way out under certain writers, I saw the X-Men going from fighting the good fight (publicly opposing both would-be genetic supremacists like Magneto and anti-mutant loonies like Henry Gyrich and Project: Wideawake) to behaving like an armed camp of militants holding out in the X-Mansion waiting for the bad guys to break in and knock a few of them around.  After the third time, it should've become obvious where this was going, and yet I came back again with the "New X-Men: Academy X" spinoff in 2003.

   The straw that finally broke my camel's back came in early 2004 when I jumped back on following the "House of M" crossover expecting things to revert back to the way they were, never knowing that in the conclusion to that gimmick Scarlet Witch had basically turned into God and wished all but 200 mutants away, leading into the whole "Decimation" story arc that greeted me in NXM:AX (now with a new creative team that replaced the one that attracted me to the title in the first place).  The X-Men proved to be more ineffective in dealing with a revived Reverend Stryker and his goons than a kid with a toy archery set against the 103rd Airborne with air support...

   This was the "new tone" of superhero comics on steroids.  After a few minutes of rage, I finally quit.  I haven't come back to Marvel since, and have glimpsed at enough to make me realize that it continues to be that way.