Pesto Comics - Audio Edition

Deconstructing the Anti-Hero

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Deconstructing the Anti-Hero

Are bad guys really bad guys? (Yes.)

Adriano Ariganello

May 04, 2025

Transcript

Welcome Back (00:00)
From Parts Unknown #4 in Prelaunch (01:47)
Antiheroes in the Golden Age of Television (02:26)
Antiheroes Have Levels (04:09)
When Murder is Justified (06:16)
Charisma Covers the Crime (08:00)
Is There a Lesson Here? (08:41)
Kickstarters to Check Out (09:44)
Sizzling Substacks (10:03)
Coming Up on the Pesto Comics Substack (10:21)

Welcome Back

In the last edition of Elsewhere in the Universe, I set up a poll asking whether you liked the new format, if you preferred the one I had started with, or you if wanted me to do something new altogether. Based on the results, I'm not sure which way to go.

50% of you decided that you prefer this new format, where I'll continue to do a deep dive into some random topic that has nothing to do with Pesto Comics directly. Another 33% want me to do something different entirely.

For the last 17%, I think you still get what you want, you just have to scroll past my story that I worked hard to put together. It’s okay. Feel free to skip to the bottom and enjoy the links.

I'll keep going with this format until you guys tell me otherwise. I have Elsewhere stories queued up until September, so we'll review then if this is worth continuing or if I should do something different entirely.

There is some room for experimentation given there's no real limitation on the length of the newsletter. I'll continue with the deep dives in the meat of the posts and I'll leave room for the experiments.

Here’s an experiment! Does putting Taylor Swift in a post about “antiheroes” juice some SEO?

I thank you guys as always for the feedback. It means a ton as this part of the newsletter is an experiment in itself. I have lots of plans for the rest of the year, not just with this newsletter, but with comics and novels - and a couple more things that aren’t quite ready to be talked about yet, but should be a lot of fun.

I’ll very likely tell paid subscribers what it is, if you’d like to meet me there!

We'll get into this week's story in a minute, but before we do that, I’d like to push one thing on my end.

Project Updates

From Parts Unknown #4 is in Prelaunch!

I shared the news on Wednesday that the prelaunch for From Parts Unknown #4 is live and collecting followers. It's still early days, so we have nearly the whole month before May 28th to get this prelaunch as high as possible. My hope is to get this to triple digits before we launch. We're about 1/4 of the way there.

If you haven't yet, help us reach this goal by clicking the Notify button on Kickstarter. It's free to do, and even if you don't intend to back the campaign, it helps us with the algorithm and gets in front of people who may want to back this campaign.

Follow From Parts Unknown #4

Thanks as always. Let's get into it.

Main Story

Antiheroes in the Golden Age of Television

If I was writing a book about this topic, I'd be looking at the films of the 70s and the rebellious nature of the auteurs behind them. However, we only have so much time in this short newsletter, so I'm deciding to start in an era that I actually grew up in: the Golden Age of Television.

In a lot of cases, it's hard to pinpoint a specific starting point of when an era of art begins. You usually have to pick a few pieces that exemplify a subtle shift which, as a whole, creates a movement. With the golden age of television, and more specifically the antiheroes of television, there is one seminal piece that kicked this whole thing off: The Sopranos.

HBO was already known for their high quality content, but The Sopranos was something different entirely. Getting to see the life of a gangster, warts and all, without the glitz and glamour that you would get in a typical Scorsese movie had us appreciating Tony Soprano in a whole new way.

We were able to see a level of depth that no movie runtime would allow for. Although Tony could be absolutely awful, as one would expect from a mob boss, you couldn't help but sympathize with him in some way.

He was brash, he was hair-triggered, he didn't have any kind of clear cut morality (like some antiheroes will talk about soon) or any altruistic motivation. Even when he’d claim one existed, usually when trying to absolve himself of guilt, his actions proved he had none.

And yet, you would cheer for his survival and success right through to his very abrupt end.

Sidenote: I'm still not sure how I feel about the show’s ending. It's gimmicky and a little bit tacky now that you look back at it. Yet, it may have been the best ending for this show that was possible. Anything else may have just been too cliché, which would betray the series entirely.

Antiheroes Have Levels

HBO set the bar for what television could be. AMC, more than any other studio, took their ball and ran with it with two series in particular: Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

There's only three reasons to pair these shows together:

They both aired on AMC.
They came out around the same time.
They both have antiheroes as their main characters — but the style of antihero are entirely different in each.

Mad Men might be the best pilot episode of a television show that I’ve seen. What begins as an interesting look the life of a Manhattan ad executive proves to be an alter ego of a man who has a wife and kids dutifully waiting for him at home in the suburbs. It’s an ending that’s subtlety hits you like a truck.

Don Draper's absolute lack of a moral compass shines through in nearly every action he takes, but you don’t know until the end. On the first watch, you just think he's a captivating gentleman going about his business. Instead, he's a tortured soul that, as the series goes on, does more and more to alienate those around him. Anytime someone gets close, he’s quick to spiral into self sabotage.

Speaking of spiraling and self-sabotage, Breaking Bad is an entirely different show in the way that it kicked off. The pilot was nothing to write home about. In fact, the first time I watched it, I stopped watching the show for a while as it didn’t really grab me. If it wasn't for my brother telling me that it's a must watch, I may never have returned to it. Boy, I'm glad I did.

Breaking Bad is arguably one of the best shows ever to be on television. The character arc of Walter White is so well thought out that even though he is so far from the man he was in the first episode, you still feel that attachment that you felt then even in his final moments where he has truly turned into a monster.

Objectively speaking, Walter White is a terrible person. Where Don Draper maybe a bit self-centered and not what most of us would call a “good guy”, he’s nearly forgivable.

Walter White, on the other hand, is irredeemably evil.

Even so, by the end of the series, Walter White may have some blood on his hands, but he didn't take the glee in it like our next antiheroes have.

When Murder is Justified

We all know Batman’s stance on murder. It’s a line not to be crossed. His moral stance makes him so interesting. He could off the Joker and “save” Gotham, but his code sees him suffering endlessly, regardless of the pain it may cause. That’s what drives his story.

That's not to say your it’s what drives everyone’s story. What makes Dexter interesting isn't just his disconnection to humanity, but the fact that he does his best to abide by a moral code, as twisted as those morals might be.

He only kills those that deserve it, those who have evaded the justice system but not Dexter. It’s the ultimate revenge fantasy. That, of course, goes off the rails time and time again, but his desire to be a good person even though he believes himself to be a monster is what makes it so compelling.

Sometimes it's not so much a moral code as wanting to do the right thing by someone you love. Even if you don't know them at all.

In You, Joe Goldberg demonstrates this as he does his best to keep his various obsessions safe. He thinks everything he does, right up until the moment that their relationship inevitably ends in kidnapping and death, is for their best interest. He never wants to kill, he just finds himself doing it - constantly.

Even when he finds love, he finds himself chafing against it and finding a new obsession. This allows him to justify even more horrible deeds, even though he has earned his prize.

Both of these killers have their own motives, their own reasons, but they’re inarguably evil people. You has tried to reconcile this where Dexter has continued to lean fully into the fantasy where the antihero is beyond reproach.

When we’re talking about television, specifically, all of these antiheroes have one commonality.

Charisma Covers the Crime

In every single one of these shows, the leads were expertly cast.

From James Gandolfini to Jon Hamm, Bryan Cranston to Michael C. Hall to Penn Badgley. Every actor is charismatic in their own way. They all give you a sense that they’re the type of person that you want to spend your time with - or maybe even be them yourself - even though you know their dark secrets.

For both Dexter and You, that charisma extends to the source material as well. Dexter and Joe Goldberg have a sardonic wit and a view on the world that makes you empathize with them like no other.

It's an advantage that they hold over all of the other series that you know exactly what they're thinking, via voiceover, which should be even more terrifying and yet endears you to them even more.

Is There a Lesson Here?

There should be.

In fact, I think the age of the antihero may be ending. With everything that's happening in the world, we seem to be driving more to just straight heroism. We need it more than ever.

The morally ambiguous or self-indulgent hero doesn’t feel sufficient. We've seen too many people succeed in real life this way for us to want to see them succeed in our fiction. At the very least, if we do back the antihero for a while, we want an acknowledgment that these are bad people who should not be admired.

Look no further than Succession and The Penguin for evidence of that.

The bar for antiheroes stories have been set pretty high. Simply having an antihero isn't enough nowadays. Where in the early 2000s, just having a morally corrupt lead was interesting enough. Now, there needs to be even more depth and thought behind it than there would be for a conventional hero.

I don't think that the antihero will ever go away, but you’ll need to keep peeling the onion to the core if you want to hit the heights of these examples.

What do you think? Did I miss any antiheroes? Am I wrong about them?