With Great Power?

It is no surprise that Alan Moore would interrogate the problematic role of the super-powered vigilante, calling the very impulse to intervene into question. Nor is it a shock that Moore refrains from providing an unequivocal assessment of intervention as such.  This is the kind of sophisticated reevaluation on which Moore built his early career.  It also makes sense to see these questions raised by the man who inadvertently spearheaded the "British Invasion" of DC Comics:  from a geographic and cultural distance, it is easier to see just how American this question of intervention, responsibility, and unintended consequences actually is (not for nothing is Doctor Manhattan's conquest of the Viet Cong a turning point in Watchmen's alternate history).

That must hurt worse than being bitten by a radioactive spider

It is far more noteworthy, however, to see just how long the question of intervention has haunted superhero comics: Stan Lee and his collaborators built this problem into the Marvel universe, even if most of Marvel's Silver Age fare seems comfortable with the ethics of vigilantism.  The narrative caption's declaration about "great power and great responsibility" in Amazing Fantasy 15 was a localized phenomenon, and one that could have been forgotten. It is only retrospectively that this becomes a mission statement for Spider-Man, and, by extension, most of the Marvel heroes (especially in the versions developed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe).  This is far from the end of the story, however, for both Marvel and DC. In the next chapter, we will see what happens when the heroes are allowed to ask the question that readers had been asking for years: why don't these all-powerful beings actually change the world?  This is a different kind of "What if?" from the premises explored by Uatu: what if the superheroes actually intervened in real-world crises? What if, in order to make the world a better place, they decided to take it over?

Next: Chapter 2: Meddlers and Editors