Add new comment

Comic book superheroes are the hybrid children of sci-fi, the Nietzschean Übermensch, and pure profit-driven popularism. The writers want to be financially successful, and to do this they have to make their character uphold the moral order of society. This undermines the most important characteristic of the Übermensch, the creation-destruction of values. So we get that classic American bullshit, a vigilante or lone wolf individualist whose values perfectly align with the herd's.

From this we get supervillains as the inverse of superheroes. @critic's comment is great but goes off topic because the supervillain is not a group, it is an individual. A fantasy individual created to warn against the rejection of the group or society's morality.