The scene takes place fairly late in the story.

The hero is escaped convict Jean Valjean, who spent two decades in prison for stealing the loaf of bread he needed to feed his starving family. The villain is that ultimate hard-ass cop, Inspector Javert, who has spent the subsequent two decades trying to put the poor guy back there.

Since Javert has not only made Valjean's life miserable, but has also contributed to the death of a poverty-stricken woman named Fantine and orphaned her young daughter Cosette, he doesn't come across as the kind of incredibly likeable guy readers want to cuddle.

In fact, it's pretty fair to say that they've been waiting to see him get his head handed to him.

Preferably violently.

So. On the eve of fleeing the country altogether, Valjean finds himself inadvertently caught up in a violent revolution whose leaders have captured the police spy Javert. They hand Valjean a pistol and essentially tell him to go off the pig.

Make no mistake: Valjean has every reason in the world to go through with it. If he lets Javert go, the ungrateful bastard will have him arrested in the morning. But if he kills Javert, not only does he get revenge for everything he's been through, but he also eliminates the one man who can identify him as a convict and have him thrown back in prison for the rest of his life. It's fair to say that everybody encountering this scene for the first time—whether in the epic novel by Victor Hugo, or the terrific 1935 movie with Fredric March and Charles Laughton, or the even better 1978 TV adaption with Richard Jordan and Anthony Perkins, or the even better stage musical now playing in about a zillion cities around the world—prays that Valjean will "do the right thing."

And if Les Misérables were an action movie starring Arnold Schwartzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or a comic book written by half the creative talents in the field today, he would.

But Valjean isn't an action hero—only a heroic man.

And so he doesn't do the practical thing. He does the right thing.

He lets Javert go.

And somehow, we aren't disappointed in him. Because right and wrong aren't illusory concepts, and because mercy is not, as Javert believes, the moral opposite of justice. Valjean becomes more of a hero in that moment than any character published by DC or Marvel could ever hope to be.

Of course, we're comparing apples and oranges here. (Hell, not even apples and oranges—apples and pork chops.) Jean Valjean isn't an action hero: he's the protagonist of one of the world's great works of literature. And no amount of good writing could ever put a simple super-hero anywhere near his league (which is a good thing—nobody wants to see schoolchildren in the 22nd century lining up to buy Blue Beetle Cliff's Notes). But he does embody an important aspect of heroism that we've tended to forget in the closing years of the twentieth century: that heroes are merely people who, faced with a moral decision, do the right thing even if that means giving up something important to them. Even, in the final extremity, if that means saving the lives of people they have every reason to want dead.

There are a few of these in pop culture, if you look for them.

Rick Blaine, from Casablanca, who had many opportunities to win back the woman he loved, but rejected them all because saving her marriage was the right thing to do.

Will Kane, from High Noon, who upon learning that three outlaws were coming to town to kill him, delayed his honeymoon by one day to gather up a pose which he hoped would drive them away without bloodshed and who, upon learning none of his so-called friends were willing to stand by his side, risked his marriage and his life to do his duty anyway…because it was the right thing to do.

Captain Kirk, from Star Trek, who might have been a pretentious blowhard with a toupee, but who repeatedly attempted to make peace with his enemies, including one who'd just brutally murdered his son… because it was the right thing to do.

The Lone Ranger, who carried two six guns, but who always shot to disarm, not to kill… because it was the right thing to do.

Daredevil, who pulled the unconscious Bullseye from the railroad tracks… because it was the right thing to do.

Even Commissioner Gordon, as portrayed in The Killing Joke, who despite being brutally tortured and seeing his daughter crippled and possibly raped, ordered Batman to capture the culprit alive, because it was the right thing to do.

These heroes were morally superior to their enemies, because they did the right thing even when that meant intolerable sacrifices. They made the correct decisions even when that was painful to them, and they made an honest attempt to avoid bloodshed, even when their hearts were screaming out for vengeance. Even those who did eventually use deadly force against the bad guys did so only when they were backed against the wall. They were heroes because they were people worth emulating.

Contrast them now with heroes who murder.

Please note: I'm not saying "the heroes who kill." Heroes who kill do so only because they're placed in deadly situations where people shoot at them. If we condemned them, we'd lose not only just about every cowboy hero, but also every heroic cop or soldier. We'd also have discount movies like Die Hard, which despite its high body count, clearly shows that the good guy played by Bruce Willis would rather be anywhere else than in a hostage situation trading lead with bad guys… or Straw Dogs, in which milquetoast Dustin Hoffman, pushed against the wall, assembles a pretty little stack of corpses in the process of courageously defending a guilty man from a lynch mob.

Heroes who kill can be defended, if only reluctantly, on the basis of simple necessity. But heroes who murder are another story entirely. Easily as brutal as the bad guys, they'd rather kill than not kill.

Consider:

Arnold Schwartzenegger, dangling an unarmed man over the edge of a cliff by his ankles, dropping him, and making a joke about it.

Charles Bronson, holding an unarmed (naked!) suspect at gunpoint, calling him a punk and then blowing him away.

Mel Gibson, chaining a wounded man to an overturned automobile, and then setting it on fire.

Bryan Brown, crazy-gluing an empty machine guy to the hands of a screaming old man, and then kicking him out the front door of a house surrounded by cops who slice him to pieces with bullets.

Sylvester Stallone, shooting another unarmed suspect, then beating him up, hanging him from a big metallic hook and slowly lowering him into a blast furnace.

Rutger Hauer, taping a grenade inside a helpless adversary's mouth, handing him over to the police in chains, and then, just because he feels like it, pulling the pin.

The various incarnations of James Bond, killing people left and right—including helpless people begging for mercy—and finding it a big hoot, rife with all sorts of bad puns.

The Elliot Ness from Brian DePalma's version of The Untouchables, who, in a scene that blatantly and without any sense of self-consciousness libels the memory of a man who's arguably a real American hero, throws his helpless prisoner Frank Nitti off the roof of the Chicago Courthouse building.

The Batman of the movie, deliberately dropping the helpless Jack Nicholson into the vat of acid, then later, blowing up a chemical factory with a dozen criminals inside without giving them a chance to evacuate the building.

The Batman of the comics, barricading a bad guy inside a room and leaving him there to starve.

Green Arrow, shooting muggers through the neck.

The Punisher, at the end of his first mini-series, finding a villainess trapped in a car that's dangling over the edge of a cliff, hearing her pathetic cries for help… and walking away.

Wolverine and Haywire, standing atop piles of dismembered corpses, utterly unbothered by the carnage around them. Totally at home there, in fact.

Scimidar, slashing naked female opponents across their perfect breasts.

Don't tell me that any of the victimized bad guys "deserved it." They might have. There are evil people in the world, and these were some of them. I'll grant that. But there are evil people and bad people and misguided people and people who merely make the wrong choices, and treating evil people as if they're an entirely different species, worthy only of extermination, is dangerous. It's the kind of attitude that leads to fascism.

More to the point, we now have heroes who are admired by their audience, not for championing justice, not for standing up for their ideals, not for demonstrating simple human decency, but for the cool neato ways they kill people. Read the letter columns in the comics. Whenever a hero saves or spares a bad guy's life, the editor gets outraged letters calling him a wimp. On the other hand, whenever a hero gives in to his darker side—in other words, does something senselessly brutal—"Wow, what a great issue!" Questions of morality, of nobility, and of right and wrong just don't enter into it anymore. In the 90's, we just want to see butts being kicked. So we idolize figures like Wolverine or the Punisher or some of the cop characters played by Arnold Schwartzenegger, who burst into a room knowing that they're going to kill everybody in it—and seem positively excited at the prospect.

This leads to a vicious circle. In order to justify the good guy's murderous tactics, writers are forced to make the bad guys more one-dimensionally evil. Stories lose whatever depth they might have had, the killing and violence come to mean less, and audiences are left screaming for something more, only to be given more blood. It doesn't matter whether it's a good guy or even an innocent civilian who's being killed: witness the cheers now greeting Freddie Krueger or Jason VorHees whenever they graphically splatter somebody. And the sense that bloodshed might not be a good thing—might, in fact, be something a genuine hero would try to avoid—is lost.

How do we reverse the trend?

Simple. By keeping five simple insights in mind when we write future stories, we not only elevate their appeal over simple bloodlust, but render them deeper, more satisfying, and much more memorable.

Those insights:

This should be rather obvious, but not so—we prefer to portray them as faceless members of that degenerate subspecies known as "human scum." We forget that they, too, have pasts; they have their likes and dislikes and fears and petty kindnesses and firmly grounded reasons for every despicable thing they do. Understanding what drives them doesn't stop us from wanting them to lose, but it might stop us from hating them, and, in the best stories, it might even induce us to hope that they change their minds and join the side of the angels. And even if they are "human scum," then at least they're real human scum, scum we can believe in, and whose deaths, however deserved, cannot be taken lightly.

Comics contain so few three-dimensional portrayals of bad guys that I'm forced to travel outside the medium for my examples. Take the best-selling novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. Red Dragon, which was beautifully filmed as Manhunter, is about the hunt for a serial killer who savagely murders entire families; his crimes are unspeakable, but we understand him so well that we spend the entire middle of the book praying for his redemption through love, and then mourn when he fails to find it. A subsidiary bad guy in both books is mad psychologist Hannibal Lechter, who kills people and then eats them. A more frightening individual you'll never find in fact or fiction but, mixed in with the inevitable fear, he also manages to arouse the reader's pity. As readers and human beings we want these fun-loving fellas locked up (away from us!), but we don't sit there in our easy chairs screaming for blood. They're more exciting, more rewarding by far, than they ever would have been if we only wanted to see the villains crushed under hydraulic presses.

In real life, when a cop shoots a crook dead, he usually doesn't make a light-hearted joke about it, not if he's worth a damn as a cop. In real life, he usually suffers months if not years of shattering guilt, even if the shooting was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Today's most loathsome pop-culture cliché—the "good guy" who arms himself to the teeth with assault rifles and assault weaponry, lights a cigarette, and, grinning, says something like, "hey, it's time to rock and roll."—isn't a hero; he's a sociopath who loves to shoot people and has found a supply of acceptable villains. And there's no reason you can't write or read stories about such characters as long as you recognize them as sick people, not heroes.

Take Rambo, for example. As originally created by author James Morrell in his novel First Blood, he wasn't a hero but an object of horror and pity, and he was utterly acceptable as such. The first Stallone movie actually captured that fact on film. The sequels, wherein Rambo's warno-graphic rampages are light-hearted fun leavened with erotic close-ups of glistening biceps are, quite literally, war crimes.

Or take Rorschach from Watchmen. Creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were clearly portraying a depraved psychotic killer only slightly redeemed by his wafer-thin veneer of nobility, and recognizing him for what he is shouldn't lessen your enjoyment of that brilliantly told story one iota—but totemizing him, making him a hero, and wanting to see more heroes like him is a horrifyingly unhealthy trend that speaks volumes about the ways we've allowed our values to be twisted.

This is actually frequently recognized in super-hero comics, if only in the most one-dimensional and hackneyed way. It appears most frequently in X-Men, wherein each issues designated pretentious speechmaker gets a chance to pull a blood-crazed teammate off the bad guy, saying "we can't kill (name of villain)—we're supposed to be better than the scum we fight!" And though the principle is a good one, super-hero comics have reduced it to a knee-jerk response more automatic than heartfelt.

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's vow against killing during the years he was being edited by Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz was so absolute, so closed to compromise, that it actually made him one of the few super-hero characters whose nobility was a demonstrable fact. At times it was almost Gandhian; I can recall one story where he agonized over accidentally causing the death of an alien amoeba. And then there's Batman: Year One, wherein the caped crusader repeatedly risked everything to save the lives of "bad guys;" from two corrupt cops who had happily left him bleeding from multiple wounds in back of their patrol car to a burglar who had fallen off the edge of a fire escape.

But in comics by and large, when heroes decide to rein in their more savage impulses, it's a relatively easy decision for them. They're risking nothing…not even when somebody's making a pretentious speech about it.

This does not have to be so. Witness Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in which the not-so-good-guy of the title fights a spectacular battle in an arena with his entire future at stake…then, upon rendering his opponent helpless, simply refuses to kill him, knowing that means dooming himself instead. And witness an otherwise terrible movie from last summer, Ridley Scott's Black Rain, an empty exercise in style that redeems itself from total worthlessness only because the film brings us up to the point where we're absolutely certain we're about to see the bad guy die a deservedly horrible death…and then, instead, cuts away to Michael Douglas, bringing in the bad guy alive. Audiences booed, but it was absolutely… the right thing to do.

These days, writers arrange the death of a villain automatically, without even thinking. Witness Santa Claus: the Movie, which ended with a bad guy drifting off in outer space, screaming in terror while the audience is supposed to cheer (so much for the healing spirit of Christmas). But stories don't have to end that way. In the first place, bad guys don't always have to lose, and stories can be immensely satisfying when they don't. But even when they do lose, there are other definitions of losing. There are defeats more satisfying than getting blown away by a shotgun. Sometimes by being humiliated. Sometimes by losing something important to them. And sometimes, as in Les Misérables, by being forced to confront the unpleasant truth about themselves. Coming up with a precise method may require more work than simply putting a gun in the hero's hand and a bullet in the bad guy's head, but it'll also be worth it: witness the Gaiman/McKean Black Orchid mini-series (unfairly, and unbelievably, excoriated in the mass media as a "sick" comic), in which the heroine wins her life-or-death battles without spilling blood or even throwing a punch.

Finally—and this in an insight that has infinite applications, not only to the limited world of comic books, but also to the survival of the real world in which most of us live—

It might not always be possible. Certainly it's usually difficult. But when it can be done, it's also important beyond belief.