The Unmaking of the Anti-Hero

Any casual scholar of classical Mythology can tell you two things about it: 1. the God sure do like to fuck, and 2: they played pretty fast and loose with the idea of heroes. In fact, most of the figures they called heroes were what we would call anti-heroes. The selflessness and flawlessness of a John Wayne are purely modern inventions under the hero label. Hero, in the old days, seemed to have a very different definition. When the Greeks and Romans lived, the world was still a hostile, mean, largely uncharted place, and it was even more so for the spinners of tales that came before them. Accordingly, heroes weren't virtuous people who always fought the good fight. They were raiders and adventurers who braved the unknown, an act that naturally required them to commit a a little theft, a fair bit of fornication, and perhaps even cut a man or two down in cold blood. They were more Conan the Barbarian than John Wayne.

What I wonder is why such people have to be labeled anti-heroes now. Yes, a fair few writers have put the idea...and the label...to good use. But if someone tries to murder someone and, say, The Punisher breaks their neck, does that make him an anti-hero...or just a hero? This question, I think, is especially prevalent in a society that is increasingly aware that laws aren't always fair. Take the current economic crisis. If a CEO runs a company into the ground, costing the livelihoods of many dedicated workers, and then bails out with a few million dollars in severance, and the law allows this, does that make ir right? We've all either been directly affected by current events, or been close to someone directly affected. Who among us hasn't fantasized about a bloody-handed Robin Hood, cutting such people down and distributing their ill-earned cash to people who need it? Search yourself, and decide whether you would really be outraged if this did happen.

It is true: we've got most of the surface of the earth pretty well mapped now. The need for warriors to take sword in hand and venture out into untamed lands, with perhaps the survival of the tribe or city depending on them, has mostly evaporated. Even the Greeks, for the most part, idolized these mythological heroes while instituting, and abiding by, all sorts of laws that protected very corrupt people from soldier's swords. I just wonder what would happen if vigilantism were more present in our society. Would we label those people anti-heroes, or even villains? Or would we welcome it?

A story in the works by Adam Witt and myself reveals a lot about our position on valorous, clean-cut heroes, including some stuff I didn't know about my own preferences. Turns out the more vices a do-gooder has, the more I enjoy writing them. Our main character has super-powers...in fact, he is the only one in the world who does, and the world is falling slowly apart. He's the last hope, and all that. He also drinks, beds men and woman liberally, and shoots up. In our society, two of these things are frowned upon and one is illegal. But he also protects. The split fascinates me more than the John Wayne vision (outside of things like "The Searchers") ever could.

When I talk about anti-heroes that I think are just plain heroes, I'm not referring here to people who are 99% virtuous but may have a little secret in their past. I'm talking about characters whose vices ride shotgun with them while they are out heroing. Sometimes they are even quite public about it; they often don't see their faults as faults, even though they know others do. So you stole something or killed someone in the past but you're clean as a whistle now? Bo-ring. Bad people doing good things are infititely more fascinating than good people doing bad things.