Brians Superman Post

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

World ruled by alien tyrant who is unstoppable! That's a good plan!
Hey look the Joker is killing people anymore but Superman is!

Wow look at the hundreds of people who didn't die because the mass murderer who always escapes prison and kills people is dead.

World's a better place!

Go superman! You did the right thing.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I'm glad you agree with me.

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

I'm glad you agree with me.

Yeah killing the Joker is by far the sensible thing to do.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Here's the thing: The only reason that preventative retributive justices works in comics is because we can divide people in good and evil people. What's the difference? Evil people kill people. Goodpeople don't.
If good people can kill people, hoshit you are in the real world- good people aren't universally good, evil people aren't universally evil, and thus villains can be cured.

[krogothwolf]

That would be bad for the villains, they have no incentive to be cured right now. They have a pretty cushy life. Kill and rob people, get thrown in a weak jail for a few weeks, escape and do the same thing over again. It's an awesome life.

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

Here's the thing: The only reason that preventative retributive justices works in comics is because we can divide people in good and evil people. What's the difference? Evil people kill people. Goodpeople don't.
If good people can kill people, hoshit you are in the real world- good people aren't universally good, evil people aren't universally evil, and thus villains can be cured.

Well technically there's all kinds of evil doods who never killed anyone and then gotten beaten up so yeah. Oh and it's worse to be in comics land because then you're saying Well, it's ok for me to send this guy to the same jail he just broke out of after killing forty people and now that I've done that I better help clean up this fifty people. That's incompetence.

Also also. Villains can't be 'cured.' People can choose to change but they're not cured because that would imply they're forced to be good. Superman lobotomizing them in the Justice Lord dimension is a cure.

[Dracorion]

Superman doesn't kill all the bad guys because then the writers would have to keep coming up with lame-ass new villains for him to fight every week and then you'd be bitching about that.

I think the point you're really looking to make "is the comic book medium is broken" or some such.

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by Odjn

Basically this.

Originally Posted by Odjn

Everything else Odjn says.

You missed like, the entire point of that thing I said that you quoted.

That guy that Wonder Woman killed, isn't dead.

The world is, thanks to Wonder Woman's act of murder, in no way whatsoever safer from Maxwell Lord. Who is alive, and like, out there endangering the world.

[Amake]

I could make some sort of argument about how cool Superman can be, here. But honestly everything I could possibly say about the character, All-Star Superman already said better.

All-Star is probably as good as Superman is ever going to get. And that trailer is a grave disappointment in comparison.

Anyway All-Star Superman is pretty sweetthe last Superman comic anyone should even need and I think everyone should read it. Especially anyone feeling that Superman is lacking as a character.

Heck, I used to think most of the ongoing comics were done to death about thirty years ago. But now it's hard to argue that since All-Star Superman makes every last Superman comic published before it into build-up, and it's the payoff. And it's worth every one of those, at a guess, 15-20 000 pages to have reached this pinnacle.

A bit tangential perhaps but it's hard to pass up a chance to gush about All-Star Superman.

[Fifthfiend]

I mean we already did this on the fartzorarium but that never happened so I'll resay it here.

Originally Posted by Odjn

Also a great deal of the things his morality solves are contrived anyway so that he can solve it without killing or doing anything morally dubious.

You're making an argument against contrivance which relies entirely on contrivance, because the biggest, dumbest, most relentless contrivance of superhero comics is that you put people in a high security prison, and then of the people in that prison, any of them can just walk out of it any time he wants, because ~lolz~.

There's nothing wrong with Superman's morality because in 'non-contrived' comics he just puts people in jail and they stay there, and in 'contrived' comics people escape death as easily as jail, because characters coming back has nothing to do with Superman's (or Batman's) morality and everything to do with the fact that writers want to write comics about Lex Luthor and the Joker.

If everything in comics is contrived - which it is - then the only differences is whether your contrivances serve the characters or break them, and contrivances which contrive to have Superman adhere to his perfectly reasonable morality do the former, and contrivances which throw that out in order to accomplish, ultimately, nothing different than if he did adhere to his morality, don't.

EDIT It's worth noting that every version of "Superman except he also murders" has not-incidentally been terrible, except for Apollo and that was only because of the heartwarming lulzy assfucking.