I wanted to pull this comment from William up onto the main page, because I think it essentially subsumes everything I wrote about superheroes and crime, and is the kind of systemic analysis I reach for on my best days:
It’s not necessarily that urban crime is no longer worth the time of a fully realized superhero. What usually happens is that the moment a hero becomes familiar with his/her powers, they also realize the true scope of the system.
When you’re a little guy, being hassled by the drug dealers on the corner, you see them as the biggest problem threatening your existence. Later on, once you’re enhanced by gamma radiation, you realize that someone is supplying that drug dealer on the corner. In a comic like Daredevil, that leads all the way up to The Kingpin — which still keeps things local and gritty. However, if the same thing happened in a DC comic, you’d find that all roads eventually lead to some corporate mastermind like Lex Luthor or Vandal Savage. Not only is the hero now powerful enough to take things to that level, but he/she also realizes that they can’t really permanently clean up the streets until they clean up the entire hierarchy.
Marvel has always been better with the street level crime, as the battles rarely leave Manhattan. With so many heroes to protect such a limited area, some are going to be relegated to the slums.
I think there’s something interesting going on in our superhero movies at large that I haven’t quite figured out. This attention to crime coincides with a rise in superhero movies as period pieces, about which more last week; in other words, comic books are returning to their origins, even though the context for their origins no longer exists.