> ...most modern action heroes are 100% righteous, which is a similar thing...

That's too postmodern for my taste, but it's a perspective I hadn't considered yet. Thanks for the elaboration.

In my mind, this should be contrasted with Superman battling a scenery-chewing mad scientist who unleashes Destruct-o-bot to enslave Metropolis. All of golden-age Superman villains were clearly in the wrong and Superman invariably did an admirable job of cleaning things up. The narrative wasn't about how hard it is to do the right thing, how cleaning up messes made more messes, or the tension between vigilantism and justice.

A lot of the stuff early Superman did also wouldn't fly today. In many of those 30's and 40's comics, he has a habit of simplistic "might makes right" behaviors like clobbering low-level villains or simply threatening to kill or endanger them(e.g. "I'll drop you out this window -- now TALK!") in order to extract a confession in the next panel and move along the plot, and the narrative does nothing to critique his application of violence or suggest it's anything less than heroic and justified.

Here's a thread with some examples:

[0] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/superman-165/golden-ag...

Or the scene in Iron Man 3 where his (privately-owned) autonomous drone-suits bludgeon a bunch of rogue veterans to death on a boat.