In the Silver Age of Comics (circa 1956-1970), superheroes started out as champions, but wound up as chumps. They went from being self-confident heroes in exalted gratitude to the science and technology that gave them their powers, to fallen idols who doubted and questioned the very authorities that had made them de facto deputies in the fight against evil - an evil no longer delineated in the same black and white terms that had previously defined their four-color existences, but now limned in shades of grey. They went through the same transformation the rest of America's heroes went through in the 60's, when racial strife, political assassinations and the Vietnam War exacted their toll on the country's spirit and vision of itself. Particularly of its heroes, which had been, before the superhero took a place in the American Heroic pantheon, the kind of cowboys and soldiers John Wayne played in the movies; those archetypes all but vanished by the end of the decade, replaced by antiheroes in films like Bonnie & Clyde and Midnight Cowboy, the motorcycle jockeys of Easy Rider, the diffident docs of M.A.S.H. - all soldiers of a sort fighting their own wars against the establishment.