Confession time: All of the foundation for my morality system came from comic books. Big shock, yeah? It's all there for an impressionable youngster: with great power comes great responsibility, teamwork, community, not taking advantage of people, avoiding being a bully, respect, knowing when to buck the system, standing up for yourself, fighting for what you believe in, and most importantly, knowing that sometimes, you have to take action to make sure the bad guys get what's coming to them. There are several sources for most of this kind of thing, and even heroes and anti-heroes who complicate and further expand upon the basic points, but for the most part, this is what I had learned - by age 9 or so, about three and half years into being a comic book reader - about morality. A good chunk of what I held to be true came from the lopsided worldview provided by DC Comics cowboy Jonah Hex.
I loved Hex. The first issue of the series, which I still have, and is worth a lot more than I had anticipated, I got used at age seven or eight, and hid it from everyone, because I knew they wouldn't have let me keep it otherwise. Jonah Hex is a horribly-scarred ex-Confederate soldier who was raised, in part, by Apaches. Redemption is right there in his backstory, as he bails on the Rebel army. Jonah Hex had some of the only Native American & Hispanic characters you could find in 70's and 80's comics that didn't talk like Tonto or the Cisco Kid, and who were, often as not, good guys, and sometimes allies of Hex. Hex was a bounty hunter, an excellent career choice for a good-guy anti-authoritarian protagonist. Basically, he gets paid for implementing his own sense of justice. The near-savage Old West is a great backdrop for tales of a lone avenger righting grevious and terrible wrongs, and I ate Jonah Hex comics with a spoon. The dark tone of this and Swamp Thing, among others, established a precedent for the Vertigo line, which came later. Vertigo even put out a couple of Hex limteds in the 90's, but they were funnier and weirder, with less of the baseline morality play about them.
Now there is a new Jonah Hex ongoing series out, and I'm glad. Now, if I can keep my kid from stealing them and hiding them under his bed...at least 'til he's older...