It’s a standard trope in Marvel stories for criminals and terrorists to end up getting killed, injured or left for the police individually and in large groups. There are hundreds of crime fighting heroes active in the US alone and Wolverine, Deadpool and the Punisher have killed tens of thousands of criminals individually. Then you add the numerous other heroes who routinely use lethal force like Elektra, Solo, Black Widow, Winter Soldier, X-23, etc. and villains who routinely kill other criminals like Taskmaster, Bullseye, Paladin, Crossbones, etc.
I don’t know if 616 Marvel Earth’s crime/terrorism rate is lower than our world but what motivates a seemingly endless number of people to join gangs and other criminal organizations (AIM, Hydra, etc.) in light of how often they end up killed, beaten or arrested?
The effectiveness of deterrence depends a lot less on the severity, and a lot more on the likelihood of getting caught. Sure, Spidey catches a lot of petty criminals, but New York is very large. The vast majority still don’t get caught, so they don’t care about the chance of ending up webbed to a light pole, because they all think it won’t happen to them.
The Astro City collection “The Tarnished Angel” addresses some of that question. Generally, it seemed to be a combination of being delusional about their chances to make “one big score” and the inability to get any kind of legitimate work after being in prison.
In our world, a cult leader/internet scammer can convince people he’s a conduit to God (or knows “one weird trick” around the legal system), and convince them to do criminal things. Imagine if the cult leader/scammer had actual superpowers validating his approach. The economy might be pretty bad, too, what with the constant destruction of infrastructure and real-estate (hard to get a loan to start a restaurant if insurance has to include “destroyed by Juggernaut”) - minor villainy might start to look good (see “Hench” by Natalie Zina Walschots for a look at this)
(In DC, by the way, there’s a lot of mental illness among supervillains, and apparently they are terribly persuasive, since they keep getting minions (in Watchmen, one “super villain” enjoyed getting beat up, which worked with Silk Spectre (who was mostly non-fatal) but failed with Rorshach)
The one thing superhero worlds have in common is that the police or anyone else trying to enforce the law through legal means is either utterly incompetent or completely corrupt. Yeah, there might be several hundred (thousands maybe?) superheroes, but the numbers are still EXTREMELY favorable for most criminals.
Yeah I’d say that committing the crimes is fairly rational, or at least not appreciably more silly than in our world. But joining a non-superpowers gang makes no sense; you need to be as small a fish as possible in that world.
Let alone the mooks who do anything but surrender when they see a superhero…what’s your best-case scenario for charging at a superhero? You may as well go punch a bulldozer.
ETA: On first draft I said that mooks should run when they see a superhero, but that almost never works either.
I remember when, even as a kid, I read a story where two muggers in a park get busted by exactly who you’d expect, and I thought, look, I’m not saying don’t mug anybody, but I am saying you should probably first catch a bus to one of a hundred cities that aren’t Metropolis.
The whole idea of Dunning-Kruger came from guys thinking that they could get away with robberies by rubbing lemon juice on their faces. Crooks are very often dumb.
Sure, mooks get killed, but if you work your way up to “name” villain, you have literally decades of job security. No matter what you do, a few months later you’re back on the street, living the high life. Sometimes you die, sometimes you come back to life, and sometimes you even team up with the good guys against a bigger enemy. I mean, sign me up!
You go to find a shtick, though. You can’t just be “bank robber #2” - you need a cool outfit and an edgy backstory. If you got those you’ve got it made.
I have long that that superhero comics were very thinly disguised propaganda for a vigilante authoritarian takeover because all the police with real restraint and real Miranda and all the rest were necessarily ineffectual.
Since we can’t really have Superman, can we please, please, please have trump? … was IMO the real message.
Frederick Wertham’s The Seduction of the Innocent is widely lampooned today, but he did note "The Superman type of comic books tends to force and super-force. Dr. Paul A. Witty, professor of education at Northwestern University, has well described these comics when he said that they “present our world in a kind of Fascist setting of violence and hate and destruction. I think it is bad for children,” he goes on, "to get that kind of recurring diet … [they] place too much emphasis on a Fascist society. Therefore the democratic ideals that we should seek are likely to be overlooked.
“Actually, Superman (with the big S on his uniform — we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an SS) needs an endless stream of Untermensch, criminals and ‘foreign-looking’ people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasy themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.”
Wertham argued that one problem with the violence of the comics was it normalized violence against certain groups of people. Given that he ran a clinic for poor blacks in Harlem from 1946-1958, he may have been particularly sensitive to this issue. There was more to him than “comic books cause juvenile delinquency!”
The showier villains are put out as a distraction. The superheroes catch Stilt Man robbing a bodega, and they don’t notice Kingpin looting the gold depository across town at the same time. Stilt Man provides a service, does a 90 day stint, and gets paid significantly more (by the Kingpin) than a bodega heist would net him.
In comic book land, once you develop a superpower you have to pick a side. Fate will not allow those talents to go unnoticed. Either you risk life and limb to do good for others or you risk life and limb to profit yourself. The comic book universe does not allow anything in between. The former choice demands the kind of self-sacrifice few are prepared to make. That leaves a life of self interest (usually crime) for the rest.
