The Death of the Hero: Why We Need Captain America to Punch Hitler Again

In 1941, Captain America’s first comic showed him punching out Adolf Hitler.

It wasn’t a metaphor, an exploration of the complexities of international relations, or a statement: evil exists, and sometimes, you have to face it.

Imagine that cover being pitched today. “But have we considered Hitler’s perspective? Shouldn’t we explore the socioeconomic conditions of 1930s Germany? What about the complexities of pre-war European politics?”

No. Sometimes, evil is just evil.

The Tyranny of Both Sides

Our culture has developed an obsession with seeing both sides, with finding the middle ground, with insisting that every villain is just a misunderstood hero, that every conflict is just a failure of communication, and that every moral stance is just one perspective among many.

This sounds sophisticated and feels nuanced. It allows us to congratulate ourselves on our broad-mindedness, our ability to see shades of gray and our transcendence of simple moral binaries.

It’s also killing our ability to tell stories that matter.

Look at what we’ve lost: Spider-Man used to fight the personification of unchecked power and corrupted responsibility. Now, he fights forgettable threats designed by the committee to offend absolutely no one.

The X-Men were created as a civil rights allegory. Their enemies were bigots, zealots, and supremacists. Now, they battle generic doomsday plots that couldn’t possibly remind anyone of anything real.

Iron Man confronted the military-industrial complex, Captain America fought literal Nazis, and the Fantastic Four faced cosmic threats that represented real human fears about science and progress.

The writers and artists at Marvel are still doing work that takes my breath away. But for most people, these “heroes” don’t live on the page anymore.

They live on the screen. And they’ve been corporatized, sanitized, and focus-grouped into oblivion. They’ve transformed from figures of moral clarity and personal struggle into brand ambassadors with carefully curated personality quirks.