Broken Frontier

My heroes have always been bad guys.

From a young age, I realized a cardinal rule of heroic fiction—the villain is almost always cooler than the hero.

Darth Vader casts a long shadow over Luke Skywalker. Buffy’s vampiric boyfriend Angel was more entertaining (and knew better kung-fu) when he turned evil. Randall Flagg, the chief nastiness in Stephen King’s The Stand , was wicked enough to inspire a song by Anthrax. And just take a gander at Megatron and Optimus Prime... well, that might be an exception. Optimus turns into a semi, for Pete’s sake. But Galvatron was sweeter than Ultra Magnus and Rodimus Prime rolled into one. The point is, heroes are defined by the adversaries they face, and truly great superheroes need truly terrible super villains. By their very nature, the bad guys are responsible for some of the most frightening and awe-inspiring events in all of comicdom.

Everybody has a villain or three they love to hate. Maybe you’re a Dr. Doom fan. Or maybe you prefer your villains to have a cause, like Magneto. Perhaps the cosmic might of Darkseid floats your boat. (And did you know old Omega Beam Eyes first appeared in an issue of Jimmy Olsen? Jimmy Olsen !) Or maybe—just maybe—you take your hat off to Lex Luthor, who doesn’t have a power to his name, but still squares off against the most powerful of the DC heroes. 

So, I thought I’d use this column to occasionally spotlight a villain or two who made me worry about the good guys.

Take, for example, Dreadstar ’s High Lord Papal.

Dreadstar was a science fiction tale written and illustrated by Jim Starlin for Marvel’s Epic line (and later for First Comics). The book continued a tale that originally spanned the pages of Epic Illustrated, The Price from Eclipse Comics (later reprinted as an annual of the regular series), and the Dreadstar graphic novel from Marvel. While the original stories, called "The Metamorphosis Odyssey", were wonderful in their own right, the space opera didn’t kick into high gear—for me, at least—until the regular series hit the stands.

What made the series more entertaining? Here we had Vanth Dreadstar, Syzygy Darklock and Oedi, all cool characters, and Willow and Skeevo were nice additions to the cast of rebels. But one character made all the difference—a big albino alien with the righteousness of a holy man and the power of the twelve gods on his side.

High Lord Papal.

You could almost hear trumpets playing a grim death march when he appeared on the page.

The High Lord Papal ruled a religious empire called the Holy Instrumentality. This holy order had all but crushed their chief enemy, the Intergalactic Monarchy, but Dreadstar’s merry band of do-gooders were a major thorn in the side of the would-be victors.

Starlin knew he had to do something big in the first few issues of the series if the High Lord Papal would ever be recognized as a foe to be reckoned with. It was too early in the series to pit Papal against Dreadstar and company. A little tension needed to build before a head-to-head clash. So what did the religious leader do to show a group of rebels he meant business?

Simple.

He nuked a city.

In Dreadstar #3, the High Lord Papal left his mark on the city of Chichano—a crater-shaped mark that stretched for miles.

All great super villains, no matter how powerful, have a weakness, and Papal’s was pretty clear. He hated Dreadstar—hated him for having the gall to plot against the church—and he feared him as the greatest threat his order had ever faced. He hated him so much, he was blinded to all else.

When Vanth Dreadstar and Syzygy appeared in the city of Chichano—two wanted criminals in a place they were sure to be recognized—did the High Lord Papal stop to consider their purposes?

"I don’t like it. What are they doing in Chichano?" he asked, but he didn’t fret for long. "Well, I guess it’s of no real importance. I’ve got them now and that’s all that really matters."

Even had he known Dreadstar was staging a distraction so other members of his crew could steal a teleportation drive, Papal wouldn’t have cared. He had his two greatest enemies where he wanted them. Leaving nothing to chance, he resorted to a rather direct method of problem-solving.

"Attention ships Alpha, Bravo, and Hero. This is the High Lord Papal speaking. Your orders are to climb to altitude level 9. As soon as you accomplish this, you will arm and fire your nuclear torpedoes. Your target is... the city of Chichano. Those orders are to be carried out without question or hesitation."

And he said it all with a calm smile upon his face.

In order to defeat his enemies, he nuked a city.

He wasn’t messing around.

Dreadstar underestimated his enemy’s conviction, and fifteen million people paid the price. Vanth’s reaction as he realized this—and realized there was nothing he could do about it—was heartbreaking.

"I... I just picked up a call from the Lord Papal to the three destroyers above us! He’s ordered them to nuke the city," he cried to his companion. "He’s willing to sacrifice this entire metropolis just to get us! We’ve got to do something! We’ve got to stop them! But how...?"

"There is nothing we can do," said Syzygy, "except save ourselves !"

The mushroom cloud plumed across a full page without word balloons or captions. No explosive sound effect would have reverberated so loudly as the deafening silence of the panel.

Fifteen million people. Gone.

Ya gotta understand, the missiles fell on Chichano in 1983—what was, for me, the height of the Cold War. When I wasn’t visiting comic shops, I was lurking around the dusty, dimly lit aisles of the local military surplus store. I stocked up on Army-issue canned rations and camouflage fatigues. I had a trusty survivalist knife with a compass in the hilt. I read Soldier of Fortune Magazine and S.W.A.T. and the occasional issue of Ninja . And I knew, without a doubt, I would die in some kind of nuclear holocaust.

I lived not terribly far from Fort Bragg and just a couple of miles from Seymore Johnson Air Force Base.

Don’t snicker. That’s the name. Seymore Johnson.

Anyway, I figured I lived pretty much smack dab in the middle of Target Area #1—a place destined to be turned to glass in an atomic inferno, should our enemies ever push the button. So while the destruction of Chichano played an important role in the Dreadstar comic, it also scared the living hell out of me.

Of course, Dreadstar and Syzygy survived. Thanks to a trip to the lowest level of the city’s sewers, Syzygy’s magical circle of protection, and Dreadstar’s energy absorption abilities, the duo lived through the blast. Carrying an unconscious Syzygy, Dreadstar crawled to the surface... and emerged in a crater left by the blast. His march from the center of the crater through the ruins of the city was one of the most uncomfortable passages I’ve ever read.

"Outside the crater it gets worse. The air is filled with the smells of charred metal and flesh. It’s a good mile’s walk before any physical signs of the once living begin to appear. It’s still yet another two miles before Vanth sees his first body. The children are the worst to look at."

My blood ran cold. Along with the release of the movie The Day After (also in 1983), that scene filled many of my evenings with nightmares of atomic aftermath.

The final panels of that issue, after the heroes have made it back to their ship safe and sound, haunt me to this day. We see Dreadstar sitting in his cabin. Rage and sorrow weigh upon him, and tears stream down his face.

"Damn you Lord Papal! Damn your mad war! Damn it all."

My survivalist/better-dead-than-red/survive-or-die-trying fervor reached its peak the following year, when a little movie called Red Dawn hit the big screen. And even at the height of my paranoia, the movie comforted me a little and eased my fears of nuclear war. After all, Colonel Andy Tanner (Powers Boothe) pointed out that the art of war had become very conventional. In the years that followed, my worries over nuclear bombs gave way to worries about mortgages and car payments.

But I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally think back on the fate of the fictional city of Chichano and worry for the future of the very real world around me.

I thank the High Lord Papal for that.