Villains Scheme the Darndest Things

digresssmlOriginally published May 7, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1329

“Villains Scheme the Darndest Things” was the panel topic presented to a panel at Long Island’s I-Con, the panel scheduled to consist of Joe Kelly, Dwayne McDuffie, Dave Roman, Bob Rozakis, and your humble servant. I say “scheduled to” because I only remember four people being there, including myself, but I can’t for the life of me recall who was missing, so I’m playing it safe and listing everyone. Some of the observations and discussion points to come out of it, in no particular order:

1) A hero is only as good as his villain. The measure of the hero is the obstacles he has to overcome. That’s true in life as well as fiction. A New York fireman who made a breathtaking, daring rescue of a man on a girder was hailed as a hero recently. He dismissed the label and said he was simply doing the job.

Perhaps. But it’s a heroic job. I’m no hero in my profession; my greatest obstacles are deadlines and occasional lower back pain. But when one conquers daunting odds in order to save lives and serve the commonweal while putting one’s own life on the line… that’s heroic whether you get a paycheck for it or not.

Same thing with fictional heroes. If there’s nothing at risk, if the villains don’t make them rise to the occasion, then the triumph seems trivial. The hero has to be the underdog in some way, or his achievements don’t reach the levels one expects of the hero.

2) The best villains are those who, in some way, reflect the hero. Think of Holmes and Moriarty. Holmes was rarely nonplussed by any of his opponents; indeed, you would be hard pressed to name even one memorable one, since none of them really presented much of a challenge beyond solving the puzzle.

But Moriarty genuinely frightened Holmes, keeping the master detective in terror of airguns or Moriarty’s men stalking him everywhere. As cunning as Holmes was, Moriarty was just like him… but his exact opposite. And in overcoming both his greatest opponent and his apparent death, Holmes was raised from popular fictional detective to icon.

In comics, it’s one of the reasons why really good villains don’t travel particularly well. Batman, for example, is a hero who may be somewhat nuts. That is, of course, a discussion in and of itself. Did the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne, right in front of Bruce’s eyes, simply focus him on his chosen life’s work… or did it drive him completely around the bend? Is he a dedicated enforcer of the law, or at least vigilante law?

Or is he forever trying to make up in some way for his perceived failure to save his parents, endlessly “reliving” that traumatic moment in an insanely hopeless attempt to please two people whom he can never truly connect with? Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Batman’s pinochle deck is a few cards shy. The Joker is therefore his perfect opposite: Someone who has his own madness, but uses that madness for self-gratification instead of altruism. That’s why the Joker doesn’t work as well when he’s opposite, say, Superman.

Same with Doc Doom. Doom is really a Reed Richards villain, possessed of great scientific genius but using it—as Maxwell Smart would say—for badness instead of niceness. The fact that the rest of the Fantastic Four gets sucked into the battle is almost incidental: The fight’s really between Doom and Reed.

Oh, there’s the occasional exception: The climax of the Battle of the Baxter Building comes to mind, when an infuriated Thing “finally gets his mitts” on Doom. But even that was a battle of polar opposites, with Doom convinced that his technology, intellect, and superiority would easily triumph over the pure brute strength of the Thing. Muscle vs. Machine: It doesn’t get more opposite than that.

3) Why do villains keep becoming good guys? This query was presented by an audience member who seemed to feel that this was a recent development. It was pointed out that sometimes this comes as a result of corporate demand. Here’s Venom, and he’s really a nasty, vicious, irredeemable brute. Pure villainy. But y’know, the kids seem to love him. Every time he shows up in Spider-Man, sales shoot. So the more he gets out there, the more sales Marvel will see.

The problem with being a villain, as any villain will tell you, is that there’s this annoying requirement that you get beaten. If Venom were to appear constantly, and Spider-Man was whupping his butt eight, nine, ten times a year, Venom’s going to start losing any allure for the fans. It’s one thing to lose; it’s quite another to be seen as a loser. To say nothing of the fact that writers may start to run out of convincing or interesting ways for Venom to go down.

But if Venom became heroic, then the balance changes. He can fight other villains. He can even ally with Spider-Man. That means he can be around more, maybe even get his own series, and sell tons of books all the time.

However, villains have a long history of changing and becoming heroes.

It didn’t used to be that way. Once upon a time, if a villain turned over a new leaf, it was purely as a dodge to fool the hero until the villain’s true evil plan was unveiled. Trust it to Marvel to turn that cliché on its ear.

One need look no further than the first major line-up change in the original Avengers. There was Captain America, the sentinel of liberty, the World War II hero. And who were the new recruits? Hawkeye, who debuted as a villain opposing Iron Man. And Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, former members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. You can’t get much more evil than belonging to a group that’s got the word “Evil” right in the name. (And who can forget the Angel’s reaction upon first laying eyes on her: “Wow! If she’s an evil mutant, I want an application blank!”) The line-up looked more like a rogue’s gallery than the roster of the World’s Greatest Heroes.

This observation leads to…

4) Villains aren’t all that far from the Heroes, and vice versa. This concept was stated, pretty much on point, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Belloq said to Indiana Jones, “It would take only a small nudge to push you out of the light.” Granted, Belloq was working for Nazis, but considering the criminal scumwads with whom Indy was associated in the beginning of Temple of Doom, our hero certainly didn’t hesitate to ally with people of dubious morality if it served his needs… which pretty much made him interchangeable with Belloq.

To say nothing of the fact that Indy apparently took advantage of Marion when she was of a rather tender age, or at the very least exploited her trust. (“It was wrong and you knew it!”) And let’s face it, blowing away the swordsman from twenty feet was a huge laugh getter, and very real-world. Any of us, given the givens, would likely have done the same thing. But it wasn’t especially heroic.

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.” The best, most intriguing villains are those who have some human element to them that enables us to connect to them. That way when they lose, we sense both the triumph of the hero and yet experience the loss of the villain, making the denouement all the more powerful because all of us have experienced both triumph and loss.

That makes the conclusion of the conflict work on multiple levels. How much stronger is it when we perceive that the villain might have been a powerful force for good if things had turned out only slightly differently. Think of that classic moment in original Star Trek from the episode “Balance of Terror,” which featured the first appearance of the Romulans. The Romulan commander, played by Mark Lenard, was by story dictates the villain. He was, after all, in opposition to the heroes.

Yet at the climax, just before he blows his own vessel to kingdom come rather than be captured, the commander faces Kirk on the viewscreen. Battered, bloodied, bruised but unbowed, the Romulan says, “A pity. In another reality… we might have been friends, you and I.” We know it to be true, and that truth makes the finale all the more moving.

Indeed, heroism and villainy is best portrayed when the viewpoint is purely subjective. Take Lex Luthor, a villain who, in the Silver Age, was so resigned to failure that he never even bothered to change out of his prison grays. But when circumstances stranded Luthor on an alien world, he became a hero to the highly humanoid race in residence there. Indeed, he was so adored that when Superman turned up to bring him back to earth, it was Superman who was regarded by everyone there as a consummate villain. That story reoriented my thinking as to what when into making a bad guy.

Then again, sometimes it’s possible to have the hero and villain get too close. I’m thinking in particular of Batman: The Killing Joke. I understand what Alan Moore was going for. I can comprehend all the rationalizations. I can even relate to the contention that to say, “A character wouldn’t do this” is highly debatable because in real life, people act out of character all the time. Quiet people who seemed sweet as pie become killers; Killers find Jesus and reform; Faithful spouses suddenly cheat; Good kids go bad. In short, excrement happens.

Nonetheless, the idea of Batman putting his hand on the Joker’s shoulder and sharing a laugh at the end struck me as repulsive and wrong, particularly after the atrocities that the Joker had committed in the course of the story which was otherwise quite brilliant. Blurring the line is one thing. Erasing it is something else again.

5) What if the plan’s too good? One audience member—a would-be writer, by the cut of his jib—was in a quandary. What if the villain put so much energy, so much thought, so much care into a plan that it was literally unassailable? One doesn’t want the villain to appear stupid… but what if, in going to extremes so that he comes across as a master planner, a writer develops a plan for his villain that is so thorough, the hero can’t possibly win? How do you have your hero triumph?

The answer to that writer’s problem is the same that could be given to the average superhero, and indeed is the admonishment that Superchicken gave to his sidekick, Fred: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

11 comments on “Villains Scheme the Darndest Things

  1. Since it came up, what do you think of Grant Morrison’s reading of The Killing Joke, where he suggests that Batman killed the Joker after they shared that laugh?

  2. As to point #5, this was dealt with in one of my favorite stand-alone comic book issues, ASTRO CITY #10, “Show ‘Em All.” In the issue, the villain the Junkman plans the perfect bank robbery — and it works absolutely right. Most of the issue is seeing him deal with his success, which he wasn’t really prepared for.

    Of course, many villains thrive on challenge and not a set victory point; the journey, not the destination. Doctor Doom doesn’t just want to kill Reed Richards, but to prove that he (Doom) is superior. The Joker has more fun battling Batman than getting money or power. In the MAN OF STEEL miniseries, Luthor said he didn’t just want to kill Superman — he wanted to do it in a way that everyone would know Luthor did it but no one could prove it. Most villains want more than simple money or power, and most plans are ongoing. (There was a WHAT IF? where Doom kept the power of the Beyonder and, after conquering the heroes, the world, and the whole universe, eventually wound up as an adviser in a medieval peasant village, starting from the bottom. I guess playing in god mode gets boring.)

    1. Let’s face it, most villains are several chips shy of a RAM array. Look at The Wizard, for example: a ‘B’ villain, yet this guy has invented anti-gravity. That’s anti-bloody-gravity … in devices the size of pizzas. And he uses his gadgets to do the equivalent of rob banks ?!? Unlike the Segway inventor, he really could have revolutionized everything from personal to heavy freight transport. Emergency vehicles need not worry about being stuck in traffic. Rapid troop deployment? No problem. Cost-effective surface-to-low-orbit transit? Sure. Within a few years he could have bought Microsoft out of pocket change. And he robs banks (or close to) instead? Cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo …

      1. In Evan Dorkin’s FIGHT-GUY (which was, amazingly, published by Marvel), the title hero defeats a giant robot that was robbing a bank and then wonders why someone with the money to build a giant robot would need to rob a bank in the first place.

        And most advanced tech in comic books would have an amazing number of real-world uses, from non-lethal ways of stopping bad guys (from Spider-Man’s web shooters to stun rays) to flying vehicles that are apparently smaller, faster, and more maneuverable than most traditional aircraft. Maybe there’s a superhero “prime directive” that keeps them from sharing advanced tech with people who haven’t developed it themselves.

      2. James … One really sour note in an IRON MAN issue dating back to the 90s, if I recall correctly, had Stark talking to his plant A.I. about banned tech which was deemed unsafe to put out to market and I almost gagged at the list. anti-gravity, force fields come to mind among others and it made zero sense because bad guys can misuse steak knives but they’re on store shelves and it is no reason to keep life enhancing/saving tech out of reach. I remember armour wars. Still makes no sense. Or when Parker tried to sell his webbing formula, only to be told that ‘dissolves in an hour’ made it too limited. Hogwash. Even assuming the limit could not be overcome, the number of applications from emergency battlefield dressings to temporary structural re-inforcements at accident sites is off the charts. The latter also applies to Paste Pot Pete (a.k.a. Trapster)’s goop. He could make millions, without risking constant jail time for it.

  3. Battered, bloodied, bruised but unbowed, the Romulan says, “A pity. In another reality… we might have been friends, you and I.”

    “Or perhaps, the father of your friend.”

  4. I’ve always found the villains to be more fun to write. Had a conversation once with another writing friend of mine once. The heroes do the things the reader would, if they could. The villains do the things the reader would, if only they could get away with it.

  5. JAMES LYNCH: The Trapster’s/Past Pot Pete’s foam superglue was developed by the Army for non-lethal crowd control applications several years ago: it was identical in appearance and effect to what was depicted in the comics.

    If I recall correctly, they had to abandon it because they were afraid they would drown/suffocate people if their heads were covered by it, something Smilin’ Stan didn’t think about way back when.

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