Broken Frontier

For the New Year, I want villains.

Real villains. Old-school villains. Not anti-heroes, not misunderstood crusaders, not unfortunate lunatics. Power-mongers, that’s what I want. Warlords and evil tyrants. The type you could pummel and feel good about it.

Magneto? Forget it. Even if we knew he wasn’t an imposter-Magneto (as supposedly he was during Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run), he’s still too decent to outright loathe. The man lived through the Holocaust, saw his own family die, has attempted to reform numerous times, and has recently watch his living children muck with reality. Moreover, like Batman’s Ra’s Al Ghul, Magneto’s fighting for what he thinks is right, not for simply what he wants. (Even though he could have run characterizing his Brotherhood as “Evil Mutants” past marketing first, but what’s past is past.) He may not be a good guy, sure, but he’s no Iago, either.

The same goes for Dr. Doom. He might be more classically power-hungry, but that’s because he believes himself to be the best choice to lead, not because he wants it most. It’s his ego, not his id, making him a supervillain. Sinestro falls into this category, and so does good old Lex Luthor: They’re the best choice to be in charge, and they’ll kill whomever needs eliminating to prove it.

Incidentally, like Magneto, dictator Doom has a nicely traumatic childhood to explain away some of his angst as well (as does Prometheus, one of the most interesting new baddies in recent history). If your mother were stuck in Hell and your family was on the run from the ruling powers, how well-balanced would you be? (Even Doomsday is a product of his Kryptonian upbringing, strangely enough, though, when he “killed” Superman, there was still no knowledge of his backstory.) Of course, both Prometheus and Doom have channeled their tragedies into some pretty unhealthy exploits – destroying the JLA and the FF, respectively – but, while I never want them to win, I’m not sure I want them to lose.

If the Marvel Universe seems filled with traumatized foes (adding in almost all of the Hulk’s horribly victimized gamma-blasted baddies), you need only look at the DC Universe to see what real insanity is all about. Zoom the Reverse Flash is on a lunatic quest to improve his nemesis by causing him real loss (and, thus, by his logic, growth). The Joker, according to The Killing Joke, commits his crimes as a challenge to accepted standards of mortality and reason. Even Wildstorm’s Henry Bendix was never clearly fueled by a desire for dominance as much as for obsessive control. The best madman the Marvel Universe has, it seems, is the Green Goblin, the conflicted, demented alter ego of Norman Osborn and his brood.

Speaking of which, is there is one breed of antagonist the MU excels in, it is the colonizing conquerors, like the alien Brood, the Skulls, the Shi’ar, or even the Kree. Taken more terrestrial, and there are the upstart usurpers like the Inhumans’ Maximus or any of the Sub-Mariner’s enemies (e.g. Attuma, Dr. Dorcas, Warlord Krang, etc.) – which, by extension, also means any of Aquaman’s adversaries, too.

Then, there are the nihilists – the folks who don’t just want everything, they want nothing. Both Marvel and DC have their respective lead-nihilists, Thanos and Darkseid. Match them with all of their underlings and offspring – Nebula, Desaad, Granny Goodness, even the Magus – and much of the cosmic playing board is covered.

How can superheroes be the cure if evil itself isn’t so bad? Sure, these other nasties may sound more realistic, but since when does a power-lust seem so fictional? The Kingpin, the Red Skull, Zod – these are villains more akin to our real-life Enron and WorldCom felons. In the Top Cow world of Wanted, it had been characters such as these who ultimately conquered (and then went about eyeing each other in suspicion, naturally).

For instance, the Purple Man or Black Mask, their appearances aside, should strike a more familiar chord as bastards with motives pulled right out of our everyday newspapers. Yet – perhaps because they seem too true-to-life, too easy, or too immediate – these strike me as the supervillains least populating mainstream stories of late. We, as readers each with a personal sense of relative morality, seem to need even our enemies to make sense. They can no longer be just a “cowardly and superstitious lot.”

Now, their psychologies must be known, their agendas must be understood, and their relationship to the very heroes who thwart them must be closer than ever before. The Masters of Evil could become the Thunderbolts only in this modern era when villainy is given such a benefit of the doubt; Villains United! and Mark Waid’s Empire take full advantage of this blur by giving us stories from the other side of the tracks that, especially in light of Identity Crisis or Avengers Disassembled, could have easily featured, with a few minor twists, our gallant protagonists.

Mainstream villains are being treated too kindly; their humanity is too apparent. Unlike in the early 1990s, this time as the heroes darken, the villains are actually lightening. And while that can lead to good storytelling as the exception to the rule (see New Avengers use of the Silver Samarai), as the new norm, it bores me.

In 2006, put a fist back in the face of some truly bad men. Give us truly sadistic sickos to beat into a pulp. Stop making villainy so understandable, so relatable. Find us the members of society who truly have no right to its protection – or its compassion.

Don’t deliver us from evil – bring evil back!