Got this group discussion question in my inbox the other day from The Write Jerry, one of the Geek Friends:

In the Golden Age, the prototypes for many great heroes were created. In the Silver Age, those heroes were reworked. In the Modern Age, those heroes were over worked…

Have any new major superheroes been created in the past 25 years? I’ve been wracking my brain, but all I come up with are retreads, re-workings, resurrections, but nothing new – nothing that will last from this age into the next.

Closest I can come up with is Spawn, and the jury is still out on if he will last much longer.

My response? Thing is, society has gotten wonky. (more after the jump)

Heroes, in the past, were reformulations of classic epics, mythology and religion. Messianic figures in different forms, they all wound up being iconic for what people aspired to be. You could have a Captain America and boys would dream about filling those boots. You could have a Superman and boys would dream about shielding the weak. You could have a Bat-Man and boys would dream about transcending personal weakness to stand tall against the dark.

In the “Bronze” Age, comics sometimes tried to speak into the culture but society was already at the point of looking no further at heroes. Presidents couldn’t be trusted; politicians were known to be liars; the enemy is within us; Logical Positivism had by this time morphed into a generally accepted scientific realism; porn leaped into the foreground as sex was unshackled from utility; the hero became the one who satisfies Me and My issues. The world be damned.

It is sadly understandable why the Punisher and all those other anti-heroes take a stand during that age.

But the Bronze Age ended.

Now we’re in this postmodern fog where the question of aspirations, iconic transcendence, my desires, the greater good, my own good versus the good of the many all live in this epistemological haze. Characters, in general, pop into existence filling some marketing need and pop out again neatly forgotten until the next marketing need arises. Indeed, most of them are small side-bars into society’s confusion. “No one loves me; what can I do! Ah, be loved by also the unlovable—the vampire.” and so forth. It’s sad because now we don’t even have the vestiges of heroism of the Bronze Age. It’s probably one of the reasons why Saturday Morning Cartoons are now nigh non-existent.

Harry Potter might have staying power; I don’t know.  Society’s present philosophy comes with the monkey of short term memory. And it’s not like he’s a comic book hero. I think Disney’s heroes might have staying power (Mulan, Ariel, Belle, Aladdin, Woody and Buzz, maybe The Incredibles if they follow up on it) but that power is because Disney does a good job of bringing them back before society’s eyes—and again, they’re not comics. From the 90’s, Bone might have staying power but not in any sort of mainstream kind of way.

Then again, this might say more about our culture and the comic than it does about society and its heroes. Time will tell.