Via the very good comic newsblog Robot 6: Bill Willingham, who is a conservative superhero comic book writer probably best known for his Sandman ripoff series Fables, has a post up calling for superheroes to act more heroic. Unsurprisingly, to Willingham, "heroic" means "conservative," and his statement that superheroes have been getting more "decadent" means that they're acting more liberal.

Borrowing some wisdom from the famous parable of the mote in one fellow’s eye, and the whole beam in another’s, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to make any call for our industry to clean up its act, until I’ve first cleaned up my own. I’ve already made some progress down that road. In my run writing the Robin series (of Batman fame), I made sure both Batman and Robin were portrayed as good, steadfast heroes, with unshakable personal codes and a firm grasp of their mission. I even got to do a story where Robin parachuted into Afghanistan with a group of very patriotic military superheroes on a full-scale, C130 gunship-supported combat mission. And in my short run on the Shadowpact series I kept to the same standard (but with less success as several story details were editorially imposed).

But ’some’ progress isn’t enough. It’s time to make public a decision I’ve already made in private. I’m going to shamelessly steal a line from Rush Limbaugh, who said, concerning a different matter, “Go ahead and have your recession if you insist, but you’ll have to pardon me if I choose not to participate.” And from now on that’s my position on superhero comics. Go ahead and have your Age of Superhero Decadence, if you insist, but you’ll have to pardon me if I no longer choose to participate.

I'm not sure that sending Robin to Afghanistan is such a good idea. (UPDATE: As übernerd Jonah Spangenthal-Lee points out, the last time Robin went abroad, he got killed.) On a side note, that Rush Limbaugh quote is a real keeper. I hope he gets that tattooed on his forehead.