Superman V.S The Elite

[Karha of Honor]

How do you know?

Because it has happened every time a hegemony has declined and weakened. First with the Second Hundred Years' War after Spain began to go under between France and Britain, then the World Wars when Britain's decline began and Germany challenged their position which ended with the peaceful baton passing to the US as Germany was dealt with, then the fallout of that right after in the Cold War as the Soviet Union challenged the US (the USSR's ability to do so earlier interrupted by WWII and Germany's continued challenging), which was prevented from going hot through nuclear weapons that arose at the very end of the last period of instability.

It's not just nukes.

[Garro]

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I thought that Stormwatch was destroyed because they found out that their leader the Weatherman was actually a supervillain who had been using them the whole time to further his crypto-ultraconservative political agenda? And he got exposed when going overboard trying to stop The High and his superhuman cohorts from trying to take over the world and turn it into some sort of utopia, which is what ends up inspiring Jenny Sparks and others to form The Authority in the first place?

(ironically this last story of Stormwatch was the first I read).

That's actually the midway point of Warren Ellis' run on the comic, and he penned a few arcs after it. Once the original Weatherman - Bendix - was badly wounded and sent on the run, Jackson King took over in his stead. Bendix had done a lot of damage, so Stormwatch was left working overtime to fix the PR problem while actually doing the job they had been formed to carry out. This involved fixing a lot of the problems Bendix had created, but also preventing alien incursions from gaining a foothold on Earth, helping to ease two of Bendix's supersoldiers back into a normal life (Apollo and Midnighter, before they were convinced to join the Authority), and destroying an effort by the USA to create a secret army of superpowered psychopaths to enforce government law. They were actually banned from operating within the USA because of that little detail, and had to typically find multiple excuses to carry out their job in America.

The series ended with two arcs which explored Stormwatch's flaws: First was that they were thinking on the scale of small incidents and restraint over the use of power. The second was that they were engaging foes typically in skirmishes rather than full-scale battles, and their organisation had been built with this in mind. This led to the demise of a parallel reality's Stormwatch, despite offering a word of warning from the "main" reality's one, and then Stormwatch itself during a xenomorph infestation. Yeah, that happened. There was a crossover.

The xenomorphs massacred most of Stormwatch's team members when they showed up en mass, and were able to get onto their orbiting station. This became so bad that the Wildcats, then disbanded, were forced to reunite in a ditch effort to investigate the attack and then evacuate the survivors. Of the entire team only the covert ops team, Jackson, and three others survived. One of who died shortly after by piloting the station into the sun in order to end the threat. Unfortunately, the sheer cost of these losses combined with Stormwatch's poor standing with some countries thanks to trying to do the right thing led to a vote to disband them, downscaling the entire organisation to a small crisis monitoring office. Having been absent during the invasion and aftermath, Jenny Sparks hunted down and killed Bendix at long last, before leaving to form the Authority.

Sorry if that is overly fan-splainy, but I wanted to give you as full a breakdown of what happened leading up to the Authority without spoiling most of the individual arcs.

[Beastro]

How do you know?

Because it has happened every time a hegemony has declined and weakened. First with the Second Hundred Years' War after Spain began to go under between France and Britain, then the World Wars when Britain's decline began and Germany challenged their position which ended with the peaceful baton passing to the US as Germany was dealt with, then the fallout of that right after in the Cold War as the Soviet Union challenged the US (the USSR's ability to do so earlier interrupted by WWII and Germany's continued challenging), which was prevented from going hot through nuclear weapons that arose at the very end of the last period of instability.

It's not just nukes.

Care to elaborate?

Only thing that comes to mind is the break the USSR needed after WWII which they'd badly needed (One could say they never fully recovered from WWII in the Cold War), one which the US wisely used to shut down the cottage industry level of hand crafted nuke production to build proper factory assembly lines which took the latter half of the 40s to set up and get going.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

sorry to post on this subject again but..

1: Do I hold this character up to be a role model.

funny you should say that. my two fictional role models growing up where Goku from Dragon Ball Z and the version of Optimus Prime from the Unicron Trilogy.

wile Goku tried to spare the tyrant Frieza, he eventually tried to blast him when Frieza still tried to kill him. and when Frieza turned out to not be dead and planned to commit wanton genocide on Earth just to hurt Goku, it's heavily implied that mercy wasn't even going to be on the table for Frieza this time if someone from an alternate future didn't show up to kill the lunatic for Goku.

and Goku didn't even consider mercy in regards to the bio mechanical android, Cell. and Cell was a genocidal maniac too who at the point he was killed, was going to destroy the entire solar system in one go and then repeat the process all over the universe.

and for Optimus Prime. in Transformers Cybertron, he killed Galvatron at the end of the series, even giving a speech about how Galvatron was a worthless piece of shit that no one cares about before doing so.

[BBally81]

and again, you said Superman and Batman know they can't hold others to the same moral standards as themselves, when was that point made? maybe it's because I am more familiar with adaptations like cartoons but from what I see, they do force everyone else to be exactly like them.

There was one classic Pre-Crisis Legion of Superheroes story, where one of the Legion members was stripped of his powers by a villain and he had to kill said villain in order to survive. The issue is that the Legion follow a no killing rule so they put him on trial and to everyone's surprise Superboy (young Clark Kent) came to his defense saying that they're able to honor the no killing rule because their abilities give them the capability to search for other resolutions that don't involve taking a life while the legion member on trial was stripped of his powers and was in a kill or be killed situation.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

still, if it's society's responsibility to put supervillains to death, why don't they? I refuse to believe it is because they don't like the idea of the death penalty, the only reason people in real life are generally against it is because crime rates are at an all time low and they were never as bad as they were in comic book universes anyway.

[CrypticMirror]

still, if it's society's responsibility to put supervillains to death, why don't they? I refuse to believe it is because they don't like the idea of the death penalty, the only reason people in real life are generally against it is because crime rates are at an all time low and they were never as bad as they were in comic book universes anyway.

And because killing people, no matter the reason, is morally wrong. That is why people are against death penalties. Because murder is morally wrong, even if the murderer is sanctioned by the government.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

still, if it's society's responsibility to put supervillains to death, why don't they? I refuse to believe it is because they don't like the idea of the death penalty, the only reason people in real life are generally against it is because crime rates are at an all time low and they were never as bad as they were in comic book universes anyway.

And because killing people, no matter the reason, is morally wrong. That is why people are against death penalties. Because murder is morally wrong, even if the murderer is sanctioned by the government.

Oh yeah then how do you weigh that against the 10s of people that the supervillain kills? Makes ya think.

[CrypticMirror]

still, if it's society's responsibility to put supervillains to death, why don't they? I refuse to believe it is because they don't like the idea of the death penalty, the only reason people in real life are generally against it is because crime rates are at an all time low and they were never as bad as they were in comic book universes anyway.

And because killing people, no matter the reason, is morally wrong. That is why people are against death penalties. Because murder is morally wrong, even if the murderer is sanctioned by the government.

Oh yeah then how do you weigh that against the 10s of people that the supervillain kills? Makes ya think.

You don't weigh it. You take each crime at a time, that means it is still murder even if you kill the clown. Going murderhappy on supervillains is how you end up with half the midwest irradiated.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

still, if it's society's responsibility to put supervillains to death, why don't they? I refuse to believe it is because they don't like the idea of the death penalty, the only reason people in real life are generally against it is because crime rates are at an all time low and they were never as bad as they were in comic book universes anyway.

And because killing people, no matter the reason, is morally wrong. That is why people are against death penalties. Because murder is morally wrong, even if the murderer is sanctioned by the government.

Oh yeah then how do you weigh that against the 10s of people that the supervillain kills? Makes ya think.

You don't weigh it. You take each crime at a time, that means it is still murder even if you kill the clown. Going murderhappy on supervillains is how you end up with half the midwest irradiated.

We're not talking a killing spree. It's just one super villain, how bad can it be?