Writing for our sister site, Anime Vice, has given me a lot of perspective on these comics I love so much. For instance, I recently asked “When is it OK to Root for the Bad Guy?” in my Almost Otaku column; the topic stemming from an anime show called DEATH NOTE about an unusual kind of vigilante. Rather than put on costume to fight crime, the main character Kira (a teenage class president) kills scores of criminals simply by writing their name into a magic notebook. There’s much more to the show’s premise than that, but I’m bringing it up because there’s been a discussion amongst the Anime Vice lunatics over whether viewers should root for this anti-hero protagonist Kira, or his various lawman antagonists.
Kira’s somewhat of a supernatural Punisher, but I’m not interested in a debate about whether heroes should uses lethal force or not. I’m more interested in extending this discussion of “When is it OK to root for the bad guys?” to comics. == TEASER ==
See, I never really liked crime movies when I was younger because, back then, my answer to that question was a definite “never.” However, as I got older, I realized that was something of a double-standard. Some of my favorite comics characters are the villains: Thanos in THE INFINITY GAUNTLET, the Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT (and the first BATMAN movie, really), MAX's Punisher, the various iterations of SUICIDE SQUAD and THUNDERBOLTS, the monstrous sociopaths in THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN and basically all the characters in SIN CITY. Their exploits are utterly compelling to follow, because you really can’t predict what they’ll do next and there’s usually a lot more complexity to their characterizations than what you get out of heroes.
I suppose the difference here is that, as evil as these characters ever get, they’re still far enough removed from reality. SIN CITY’s a crime story like the ones I didn’t like as a kid, but nobody’s going to describe it as street-level realism. But what do the Comic Vine maniacs say? When have you rooted for the bad guys?