In superheroes comics, the heroes always win in the end. That’s one of the core aspects that’s true for well over ninety percent of all their stories. Superheroes make the world better, after all, they help people and save the day, so if the day isn’t saved yet then the story can’t be over. In DC especially, the heroes are almost always victorious, and I love that, but at the same time, it might be that the heroes are winning too often. Some of the best stories in comics come when the villains, at least temporarily, come out on top, and because DC never lets that happen, it feels like they’re handicapping themselves from creating some of the best stories ever.
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When something happens too often, it gets repetitive, and when things get repetitive, they get boring. So every now and again we need something to shake things up, to remind us that endings don’t have to be foregone conclusions. If DC would let their villains win at least a little bit, then trust me, that would do massive amounts of work towards keeping the audience guessing, engaged, and entertained like never before.
Why Villains Need to Win… Sometimes
Villains winning is, by the very nature of superhero comics, the exact opposite of what you want and expect to happen. Superheroes are supposed to win, but if their victory is such a forgone conclusion, it robs the story of a lot of its tension. We obviously know that ninety-nine percent of the time the hero is going to win, but if we’re so used to that then we can’t even pretend there’s a chance at something going wrong, and that can make a lot of the conflict presented feel superfluous. There are real ramifications to that, like how people assume Superman is boring because he’s strong enough to always win, or how the “Batman always wins” reality has become a meme that’s left a negative impact on his character with the Bat-God misconception. Heroes always winning can make the story a bit weaker. Villains taking the day disrupts how things should be, but that’s what makes it so powerful.
Putting our heroes on the back foot and forcing them to contend with the fact that they failed opens the door to so many possible stories that we normally don’t get to see. Some of DC’s most beloved stories, from The Dark Knight Returns to Kingdom Come are stories about heroes who have lost and are rising up to show us the strength of hope and perseverance. These stories can’t happen without the heroes having been defeated prior, you can’t rise without having fallen, and we all love a good underdog story. Because heroes always win, it’s very hard to reasonably paint them as the underdog, instead seeing their victory as assumed until proven otherwise. Knocking them down lets us see them pick themselves back up and inspire us to keep fighting in face of all adversity, which is an important message that all superhero media tries to tell us at some point. It becomes infinitely more effective when the heroes have been knocked down themselves.
When superheroes win, things go back to the status quo, how they should be, but supervillains win, they can change everything. Look at some examples of when villains won battles, how that fundamentally changed the comic book landscape around them, and how exciting that feeling was. When Lex Luthor was elected president, that was the start of a dozen stories, and we saw Superman more angry than we’d ever seen him. The Absolute Universe and entirely of the All-In era of DC is built around the idea that Darkseid won, and the heroes struggling against that inevitability is what makes these stories so impactful and new. Heck, Crisis on Infinite Earths is one of DC’s best ever stories, and even there the Anti-Monitor didn’t completely lose as almost all of the multiverse was wiped out. Letting the villains win, only to see the heroes claw their way back, undeterred and full of hope, makes for some of the greatest stories ever told.
DC doesn’t let the villains give lasting consequences often enough, and while a stagnant status quo is an entirely different problem, villains winning battles is something that can definitely happen. Events like Year of the Villain often fall on their butts because even if the villains win, things are immediately reset to normal within the same story. Letting villains steal wins from under the heroes builds tension and credibility, and makes the comeback all the cooler. After all, even if heroes lose a battle, we all know that they’ll win the war, but the doubt of those victories seeded by the losses we’ve already seen will keep us on the edge of our seats the whole time, and that sounds like a really awesome time.
Do you think villains should win more often? Let us know in the comments below!
