The art of the antihero

After seeing Captain America yesterday, it occurred to me that as difficult as it is to do a true hero in fiction these days, it’s also quite difficult to effectively do an antihero. Antiheroes are everywhere in fiction, and have become in some ways more popular than their traditonal hero counterparts. I think it’s that popularity that makes them difficult to do well.

I feel that a lot of fiction these days tends to take a dark and brooding tone rather than bright and optimistic one. I suppose that this sort of blanket statement is difficult to support, but looking around a bit seems to bear me out. When heroes have any personality at all, it seems to be more likely to be the one of a  man with feet of clay, or a dark trickster, or even an outright (usually at least partly heroic) sociopath.

I suppose I’m guilty of this myself. My most recent story arguably has no heroes in it at all. The main character at best could be considered an antihero.

Part of that might be the age that I grew up in. I am a child of the 80s, and so I appreciate a good traditional hero (cartoons of the 80s had bright colors and few dark moments), but when i first started to read comics it was the 1990s. The ‘90s were the age of the antihero in comic books. Characters that had been around for a while like Marvel’s Punisher got a gritty, realistic push as stars of their own books. New characters like Spawn and Cable that were created at the upstart publishers like Image and existing ones like Marvel were the kind to shoot first and ask questions later.

This was by no means a golden age of comics. In fact, when anyone is willing to speak about it at all they’re likely to consider it a dark age. Like it or not though these books pushed the idea of the flawed hero to new places, and comic books weren’t the only medium of fiction to do it.

The 90s gave us antiheroes in every medium is possibly could. Books, video games, movies, and even professional wrestling teemed with flawed heroes who were willing to use nearly any means to achieve their goals.

Now we’ve toned it down a bit. A wave of deconstruction that began in the 80s seems to have crested, but it left behind it’s influence. Not all of that influence is good. The black-trench-coat-wearing badass archetype has been overused to a point beyond parity. The gun-toting superhero likewise. Relying on these as a distinguishing feature is like relying on a silver paint job to find a car in a parking lot.There’s a lot of others just like it out there.

There are other archetypes that are nearing overuse as well. John Constantine is a snarky paranormal investigator. So is Harry Dresden. So is Peter Bishop. This concept was novel in the 80s (though it builds on themes previously common in the Film Noir genre), but now there are dozens of them. Not all (or even most) of the characters that fall under that description are bad, but it’s getting to be a crowd underneath that label.

For the record, I like the Constantine comic. I’ve never read the Dresden Files books (I know! I know! They’re on the list. Somewhere after the Song of Ice and Fire books and before the Harry Potter books. I’m a bad nerd.) but I hear they’re very good. I like Fringe, but I don’t really feel bad skipping the odd episode. For every one of these characters there are dozens that try to capture their success and fail.

They say that there is nothing new under the sun. I suppose to an extent that is true. The concept of the antihero in general has literally been with us for centuries. Because we seem to be riding a wave of them however introducing a new one and making him notable is something akin to becoming a pro athlete. Many will try, but only a tiny percentage will succeed.