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Hero originally was a term of the mythology which defined a child of a God and a mortal human being. The hero classical concept, however, is from the Greek literature, in which the terms denominated a “subject recognized by his fighter deeds, his braveness, tenacity, abnegation, magnanimity, etc.”. Hero also is the one who “endangers his life as a duty or as a benefit over somebody else". Anti-hero, on the other hand, because of the prefix “anti”, that means “as opposed to”, denominates fiction characters “who hasn't got physical and or moral abilities typical of classical heroes”. Therefore, in a very simplistic concept, anti-hero would be a hero with some “imperfection”. It’s important to notice the imperfection which turns somebody into an anti-hero doesn’t necessarily need to be moral, it can also be physical or any other kind. This would make, for instance, even Spider-Man could be considered an anti-hero, since he is a looser that nobody likes (classical concept of the character).
Base exclusively
on these concepts, as an example, we will see some known characters, besides
Lobo, would fit: The great problem is that in the comics people use the different concept to define each character: They assume hero is the one who practices good things; villain practices evil things; and anti-hero is that guy who, in spite of practicing the evil, is a cool character. Therefore, Spider-Man, although not having the “physical features of a Greek classical hero” he is considered a hero. Following the same way, Lobo, though not always having the evil, is defined as an anti-hero.
After all this complication, there are still people
who want to worse things and make Lobo a hero. His participation in L.E.G.I.O.N.
was close to that many times. Although in the beginning he had characteristics
of an anti-hero, some posterior authors left him in the limit of heroism.
Of course for many people it would be more comfortable if Lobo was a hero, even if he maintained a little of his violence (which, technically, made him an anti-hero). Fortunately, the mayor part of readers prefer Lobo to keep as he is, being an anti-hero (although, technically, what he does correspond to the characteristics of a villain). Who don’t like it, merely doesn’t read it. Actually, it doesn’t matter if Lobo is considered as a hero, anti-hero or a villain. After all, this kind of techniques which define the quality of a character of comics, literature or any other artistic work (wow, Lobo is art!) What matters is that the coherence of the character is maintained and, consequently, he keeps amusing all of us.
text: Lucio
Luiz | ||
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Lobo Brasil,
providing indispensable to the internet since October, 29th, 1997. |
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Is
Lobo a hero, an anti-hero or a villain? “Anti-hero”, maybe most of people would
say. “Villain”, some said. “Hero?”, many asked. If you think it’s impossible to
have doubt about that, perhaps it would be better to know the real definitions
of each of these terms. I say “real” because, as we will notice afterwards, not
always what we think about the meaning of a word correspond to the truly sense.
Finally,
villain is the term which defines that one who is by the side of evil. There can
be some blinks of kindness oooooonce in a while, but he “makes part of evil" and
that’s all. You can check all these in the dictionaries.
Even
the first studies for the production of a Lobo film (it’s not the short film of
a student of Cinema that was made last year. A truly film) something like that
has occurred. A first version of the script, analyzed by Keith Giffen, made the
writer claim people want to make Lobo "the main hero”.