Superhero Decadence--Don't blame Moore and Miller

Back when the Watchmen movie came out, there was naturally a lot of reexamination of the comic's influence and legacy. Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns came up a lot in that context, since these comics--so contemporaneous with each other, so similar in ambition, and so mutually reinforcing in their effects--were like a one-two punch that Changed Comics Forever. An irony oft-noted in these reviews and articles is that, whereas Moore's and Miller's masterpieces aimed to raise the sophistication bar for superhero comics with their revisionist, meta-, deconstructionist concerns, the influence that took hold amongst fans and creators was for more "mature" superhero comics--which is to say, superhero comics that are darker and gritter in tone, more "realistically" violent, and sexier. I'm pretty sure I've seen quotes from Moore where he explicitly owns responsibility for the whole trend of superhero decadence, and regrets his role in it.

It makes for a neat fable of Unintended Consequences. It happens, however, not to be entirely true. Between market forces and pressures internal to the genre, superhero comics would have gone down that road sooner or later on its own, and in fact did go down that road sooner by several years. In 1983 (Watchmen and DKR debuted in 1986), DC took advantage of its exceptionally popular New Teen Titans to launch two spinoff titles--Omega Men and Vigilante. These were glossy, exclusive to the Direct Market, and dispensed with Code approval. They represent interesting baby steps to introducing "mature" elements into superhero comics. Notably, they were not part of any separate, dedicated Mature Readers imprint like Vertigo, but bore the DC crest like any other title. Strictly speaking, they were in-universe and in-continuity (to the extent that such labels apply to comics from that time), but they took place in milieus far enough removed from the mainstream superhero action not to pose much risk of contaminating still-kid-friendly flagship properties.

For whatever reason, I didn't stick with Vigilante past the first issue, but Omega Men was an arresting, eye-opening experience for me. Looking back at it now, it's remarkable to me, how completely it displays every hallmark of what's come to be known as superhero decadence.

This early splash page from the first issue clearly signals the kind of grisly violence readers can expect. Just follow the bouncing brain . . .

The character of Tigorr is a Wolverine analogue--specifically, he's meant to answer the question, "What if Wolverine really could be Wolverine?" Part of that answer has to involve a showdown with a Cyclops-like authority figure. Primus, the leader of the Omega Men, fills that role to a T. Remember, this was 1983; even Miller's Wolverine mini-series just the year before gave us nothing quite like this money shot:

Plenty of "realistic" grimness leads up to this confrontation. By the close of the first issue, Primus has horribly botched a mission to recruit a race of giants to the Omega Men's cause (of rebellion against an Evil Empire). Well, those giants turn out to be pacifists. As a result of his overtures and meddling in their affairs, they get nuked. The whole second issue wallows in a Day After-esque aftermath:

With the character of Kalista, wife of Primus, we coyly sneak up to the edge of NUDITY, without ever quite crossing it, in true superhero decadence style:


It's no accident that the character of Lobo was introduced in the pages of Omega Men, originally as a cross between the Joker's scary-clown-ness and the bounty-hunter-cool of Boba Fett:

The issue that introduces him includes the vicious mutilation and "depowering" of kickass female character Harpis:

On a lighter note, it also includes a shout-out to Fred Hembeck:

Whom Lobo horribly murders, naturally enough:

It also closes with Kalista gruesomely assaulted by a tentacled monster that sucks her power and steals her form. In case it's not clear in the splash page below, Kalista's the one on her knees:

The jaw-droppingly ultimate expression of superhero decadence in Omega Men, however, rolled out in issue seven, with the rape retcon of the warrior-goddess X'hal. In Valerie D'Orazio's roman a clef about the editorial decisions behind Identity Crisis, specifically the installment she titles, "We Need a Rape," she emphasizes that "they had to find the most innocent, virginal, good-natured “nice” character they could find" to be raped. Well, Omega Men already got there a long, long time before. X'hal is depicted, pre-transformation, as the very epitome of gentle, innocent femininity:

In case that was too subtle, her son Auron interrupts the telling of her story to declare:

As for what happened to her, well, see for yourself:



I'll just close by noting that there was never a whiff of superhero revisionism, deconstruction, or meta-anything of the sort you find in Watchmen or DKR, in this whole first arc of Omega Men. This superhero comic went there not to make any larger aesthetic point, but just because. Moore and Miller may have hastened things along, but with or without them, for better and worse*, this was the future of superhero comics.

* To be clear, I don't object in principle to mature themes, dark tones, violence, or sex in superhero comics or any other genre or medium. I've certainly enjoyed plenty of superhero comics with these elements (The Boys, to cite just the most recent and notorious example). Despite the negative connotations of the phrase "superhero decadence," I think the trends falling under that label find expressions ranging all up and down the value spectrum. The point of this post is that almost all of the elements associated with it, in some surprisingly extreme forms, were already well in place before the two major comics that supposedly kicked it off.