In its initial incarnations (especially Superman), the superhero was a powerful form of wish-fulfillment for its creators, mostly young Jewish men escaping from persecution in Europe to a Land of Opportunity across the ocean.
This aspect, combined with the fact that children (read: boys) were the primary audience for comics for decades, led to thousands of stories of black-and-white morality, in which the villain(s) and his villainy were easily identified, and the hero's task was simple: the application of brutality.
A couple punches, kicks, or Batarangs, and justice is served.
No muss, no fuss.
This was good enough for the first twenty years or so, especially when the Nazis were such easily accessible villains for Superman, The Human Torch, or Captain Marvel to beat up again and again.
And of course, the propaganda potential did not go unused, especially in the case of Captain America, which led to the openly-espoused idea, previously just left as a given, that the application of brutality is somehow inherent in the American system of.....government?
Economy?
Geography?
No one took the time to clarify this connection because the country was at war, and no one clarified it afterwards because we felt like masters of the world.
Even so, it became part of our culture, especially as generations of boys and girls ate up the black-and-white morality tales.
As the seventies rolled in, writers at DC and Marvel, the last two remaining comics companies after an idiotic senate subcommittee investigation, began attempting to address deeper issues and more human concepts (and an older audience) than the "punch now, ask questions never" approach of their predecessors.
DC's Green Lantern/Green Arrow explored drug addiction, gang violence, Native American exploitation, pollution, inner city racism, and a myriad of other contemporary debates raging in the halls of college campuses and Congress alike.
Marvel took a different approach, creating more three-dimensional superheroes (beginning with the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man) who had to deal with real-life problems that the whiz-bang characters of the thirties and forties never touched. For example, the Fantastic Four at one point faced bankruptcy because they refused to bank on their fame or inventions.
Spider-Man was and is probably the best example of this shift, being the first true teenage superhero, and being the first example of a comic book character who has a hard life, and that life becomes even more terrible after he becomes a superhero. This would never have been accepted in the two-dimensional morality tales of the previous decades.
But even with these deeper explorations into real-life issues and complexities of the seventies, superheroes remained paragons of the application of violence as a primary means to dispense justice.
It wasn't until 1986, a watershed year in the history of the comic book medium, that anyone set out to truly delve into the inherent nature of the superhero.
The seventies had given rise to the deliberately campy Batman TV show starring Adam West, which had been designed as a deliberately campy satire of the then-current state of the comic: an irrelevant bit of fluff glossing over a truly dark character. Frank Miller saw the darkness, and resolved to bring it to light with The Dark Knight Returns. He started with a Batman who'd started fighting crime in 1939 (when the character was created), and by 1986 was past his prime, living in a Gotham City that had gone to hell in his absence.
This isn't the Bruce Wayne with a smile on his face. This is the guy who saw his parents murdered as a child, something the Adam West show and the comics which inspired it apparently just forgot about. This is Batman walking the streets and seeing a new generation of cold, calculating killers replace the ilk of his parents' murderer, and they're barely old enough to shave. The "hero" is portrayed here as a murderous beast which possessed young Bruce, which was given free reign starting the night of his parents' murder. He does not brutally take down criminals because of some absolute moral duty; he does so because he is haunted, possessed, and in his honest moments admits he loves every minute of it. Especially in contrast to Superman, who is portrayed as a super-sheeple in thrall to a pastiche of Ronald Reagan, blindly obeying orders and carrying out secret wars in Central America.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were hired by DC to craft a story involving several older characters from the then-recently-defunct Fawcett comics. What resulted is Watchmen, a magnificent work of art and a damning indictment of the concept of the hero. Moore created a realistic facsimile of an alternate 1986 America, in which Nixon has remained president for multiple sets of presidential terms by intentionally accelerating the Cold War to the point of walking the razor's edge of Armageddon, and masked heroes are a fact of life.
The comic, a true "graphic novel" (meaning, it contains over 40,000 words, and thus fits the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's definition of "novel"), deconstructs the idea of a person who would put on a mask and fling violence upon those they deem criminals, portraying each of its vigilante characters as socialyl disconnected, impotent, apathetic, sociopathic, and psychotic, respectively.
These are portrayed as the qualities necessary for a person to not only have a black-and-white sense of morality, but to inflict that morality upon others.
Alongside these two books and others came the first ever full-company comics crossover: DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. In what became a fairly regular event at DC, and which Marvel found its own version of, the entire decades-old DC universe was re-written, and much of the light-and-fluffy, easily-digested morality elements were removed in favor of more mature, three-dimensional characters and storylines.
The breakout success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and the results of Crisis spurred the genesis and development what comic historians now term "The Dark Age of Comics," when the happy-go-lucky punching and kicking and funny gadgets were replaced with grim sociopaths packing heat, a willingness to kill, and a deeply scarred and/or disfigured psyche.
This led to some competition for DC and Marvel for the first time in years as comics publishers like Dark Horse and Image took advantage of the darker-and-edgier trend to market their own characters.
Writers who had grown up with the fluffier versions of the characters eventually rebelled against the trend, resulting in a synthesis of blind traditionalism and superhero psychoses.
This synthesis began in 1996, with Mark Waid and Alex Ross' iconic collaboration, Kingdom Come. In a world filling up with unstable superpowered individuals, Superman and his generation of heroes come into direct conflict with the heat-packing sociopaths of the Dark Ages, all witnessed (and eventually influenced) by Pastor Norman McKay, a completely un-superpowered old man granted visions of a coming superhero apocalypse and guided through them by the Spectre.
As a result of the growing dissatisfaction with the Dark Age concept of the hero, and Waid's humanization of previously-cliched heroes like Superman, the superhero evolved into its current form: individuals with wondrous abilities attempting to make the world a better place, but who are human first, struggling and feeling and able to connect with readers who reach out for some reassurance of stability in an increasingly unstable world.
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