WildStorm's new Eye of the Storm imprint reached its fourth title last week with the release of Ed Brubaker and Colin Wilson's POINT BLANK #1. It's a miniseries about Grifter. You know, the one in WILDCATS who used to wear a curtain on his head.

Broadly speaking, the remit of the Eye of the Storm imprint is mature readers superhero comics. As most people reading this site will be aware, there is a school of thought that says this is a contradiction in terms. That might be why Ed Brubaker spends part of the letters page insisting otherwise. He says, basically, that it's a mutating hybrid genre, and that it's changed down the years. "Deciding to do Mature superhero books allows us to see outside the artificial restrictions imposed on the genre and simply tell stories, and that's what I like to do."

THE PRO, by Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner, also came out last week. At first glance it seems to have a slightly different view on matters.

Garth Ennis' limited work with superheroes has generally been about taking the piss out of them for having such a ludicrous premise. Even in AUTHORITY: KEV, Ennis cast the Authority in the role of faintly absurd Justice League stand-ins, and wrote a (very funny) comedy story about them being killed. His secret, heartfelt adoration of the genre was equally well disguised in PUNISHER KILLS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE.

THE PRO is about a prostitute who is given superpowers by a cosmic entity on a bet, and who is then drafted into the League of Honor, an extremely thinly disguised parody of the Justice League of America. Near the end, exasperated by her ridiculously Silver Age teammates, she launches into a rant about the entire concept. The thrust is that the central message of traditional superhero comics - that the good guys will always win and everything will turn out just fine - is complete nonsense and that it's the wrong message to be sending. "We need people who don't know shit about hope."

Some say 'mature readers superhero comics' is a contradiction in terms. The issue ends by advising its readers to grow up, followed by a deadpan announcement that the story is dedicated to Jim Steranko. Steranko, of course, put out a press release last September where, on the basis of the solicitation alone, he condemned THE PRO as "psychotic, nihilistic garbage" produced by creators "who clothe their contempt for the rest of us with tragically-cool posing and bubble-gum arrogance."

The full hilarity of Steranko's argument cannot be captured in summary form. I strongly recommend that you read it yourself. But essentially, he calls for a return to the good old days when comics espoused traditional American moral values. The Silver Age, in other words.

Despite some passing references to the death of Superman and the Knightfall ubercrossovers, THE PRO's superhero parodies are based on the two-dimensional DC Silver Age heroes. Ennis is, of course, quite right in saying that these characters have traditionally been used to send a message that the world is an ultimately just and fair place where good inevitably triumphs over evil, and that this is a comforting fairy tale but little more. He's certainly right that it's a message that is entirely inconsistent with any kind of "mature audiences" storyline.

Of course, we'd all like to believe that the world was a basically fair place where the good were rewarded and the bad were punished. It's a very attractive and reassuring idea. It lies at the heart of most religions (who usually try to reconcile it with reality by explaining that the scales all get balanced out in the afterlife).

Nonetheless, the "just world" hypothesis has not been a universal theme in superhero comics for some time. Arguably, it hasn't even been a predominant one. The "grim and gritty" wave of 1990s superhero comics was hardly sending the message that the world was a lovely place where everything would work out just fine. The world view in those books was relentlessly negative. Most superheroes have spent the last ten years or so having a thoroughly miserable time, and silently cursing Frank Miller. The X-Men's theme for some twenty-five years was that their good deeds went totally unrewarded in a thoroughly unfair universe. It's been a central part of Spider-Man's stories since his inception.

NEW X-MEN is often very good, but it's not a radical break from the past. Now, don't get me wrong. I am certainly not contending that these are examples of deep moral thinking or philosophical complexity. Nonetheless, the rose-tinted version of the superhero comic that Ennis is attacking in THE PRO is one that dates to around 1960. It's hardly the be-all and end-all of the genre, even when you look at the most mediocre entries in the superhero mainstream. And no doubt Ennis is quite aware of that. The targets of his parody in THE PRO are the Justice League of America, characters so old that they predate modern Marvel Comics, and the "back-to-basics" values of people like Steranko.

At times it seems to me that some comics readers who gave up on superhero comics some time ago are operating under some bizarre misconceptions about what the genre has been doing in their absence. I was quietly amused by those returning superhero readers who decided to try NEW X-MEN because it was by Grant Morrison, and appeared to be under the delusion that there was somehow something unusual and new about elements such as, for example, putting the X-Men in uniforms rather than spandex.

Even within the X-books, it was not a novelty. The movie had already done it. X-FORCE did it several years earlier. X-FACTOR did it in 1991 and stayed that way until its cancellation. Depending on the writer, Wolverine almost never wore his costume for large chunks of his solo book, dating back to the late 1980s. Spandex costumes have been on the way out for years now. Even THE AVENGERS dumped their spandex in favour of leather jackets during the nineties. And that was when Bob Harras was writing them.

In this and other respects, while Morrison's NEW X-MEN is often very good, by no stretch of the imagination is it a radical break from the past. It merely appears so because many of the superhero comics in that ongoing progression slipped under the critical radar. Granted, in some cases that was because they were mediocre. In others, it was because many "serious" critics won't touch the X-books with a ten-foot bargepole unless somebody like Morrison turns up to write them. This is not the way to get an accurate impression of the development of a genre.

The rose-tinted version of the superhero comic dates to around 1960.

The argument that you can't do mature readers superhero comics is generally based on a misapprehension of what the genre involves. If you define the superhero genre in a Silver Age fashion, then certainly you would have great difficulty writing mature readers stories in those guidelines. But a quick flick through Previews will show large numbers of superhero comics to which those genre rules plainly do not apply.

It is increasingly difficult to identify quite what the superhero genre is these days. The classic model - man with dual identity who fights crime and has a love interest - was long since abandoned as hopelessly stale. Technically, all that you need in order to qualify as a superhero comic is a character with powers above the ordinary (not necessarily superhuman, since that definition would exclude Batman) whose story has some kind of action element to it. But an increasing number of comics, at all levels of quality, are branching out into the surrounding grey areas.

X-STATIX is manifestly a superhero comic, but violates the formerly unimpeachable ground rule that the lead characters should be likeable and driven by heroic impulses. Then again, LOBO was doing that for years, as was PUNISHER. Or SUICIDE SQUAD, to a point. Or ELEKTRA. Or HULK.

AUTOMATIC KAFKA bills itself as a superhero comic, albeit with a certain degree of irony, and it does at least satisfy the requirement of having a superhero protagonist who fights villains. Irony aside, why shouldn't it qualify?

Or take the genre hybrid books - POWERS crossing superhero with police procedural. YOUNG HEROES IN LOVE and NOBLE CAUSES with soap opera. SIDEKICKS and GEN13 with teen drama. CATWOMAN with crime.

Books whose protagonist isn't a superhero at all, like CHASE, STORMWATCH or ALIAS? Or BROTHERHOOD, a comic about a mutant terrorist organisation? Granted, it was crap, but that's not the point. Any of these books, individually, could be dismissed as renegade experiments beyond the usual genre boundaries. But the truth is that there are so many of those excursions that the boundaries long since moved outwards to accommodate them.

And within those revised boundaries, yes, there is plenty of scope for mature readers superhero comics.

Like THE PRO. After all, what else is it?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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