10. One of the worst things to do to a comic book super-villain is to render him/her enough of an enjoyable character that the readers delight in his/her exploits as much as - if not more so - they enjoy the inevitable victory of the super-hero. This is because just as it is inevitable that Batman will kick the Joker's ass no matter how much the darker sides of our hearts are thrilled by the clown, it is inevitable that - sooner or later - some dumb-ass editor will grab some dumb-ass writer and ask him/her to write a comic in which the villain is now the main character. Examples of this are legion. Venom. Sabretooth. Doctor Doom. Mystique. Magneto. Thanos.
9. There are usually only two ways to write a comic in which the super-villain is the protagonist because no matter how deliciously dark h/she is, the reader must sympathize with the villain.
The first method, and perhaps the most common, is to either have the villain attempt to reform or to place the villain in a situation in which the possibility that h/she will become a hero is dangled in front of the readers' noses. This holds two big advantages. One, in an age when one the most popular super-heroes is a feral bastard who sometimes descends into complete animal savagery and - even when he's blessed with the calm of Buddha - deals with his enemies by punching steel claws through their skin, readers are always hungry for more super-heroes with a dose of pure
bad-ass. And a villain-turned-hero carries around liters of the stuff. Should his/her title find success, they will eventually walk down the path that even the purest of super-heroes must travel - the part of the series where they "go dark" for a time and threaten to turn to villainy. The walk down this path is not a steady one, and tends to inspire a great deal of rebellion in regular readers. Someone who's been following the exploits of Spider-Man ever since he was ruled by Stan Lee's melodramatic prose is not going to like to see him hammering on already-defeated enemies out of pure bloodlust. But there's no such problem with a villain-turned-hero. The path they walk is familiar to them, and we always knew they would go there eventually. The writer doesn't even have to come up with some complicated scheme about a symbiote alien replacing the villain's costume and slowly usurping his/her mind. All the villain-turned-hero needs is one shitty day - no worse than the one you or I often have because something bad happened at work or we had a fight with a significant other - and we're okay with them going back to bad-guy town.
The second option is to keep the villain the same, but to pit him/her against someone even more hateful. Mark Millar's
Wanted is an (overrated, in my opinion) example of this. The villain who is trained into villainy by both slaughtering those who have done him wrong or just plain annoyed him as well as killing complete strangers, is set on a collision course with a bastard who we learn enjoys killing babies (and we are expected to accept that murdering random children is much, much worse than allowing people to grow to adulthood only to be cut down by some Eminem-wanna-be for no damn reason).
The only way you can escape these options is by writing a comic divorced from a cooperative universe like those of Marvel and DC. This is dangerous however, and almost never works, because while the villain is allowed to remain a villain the series will almost always be crafted by a lesser writer who will allow the thing to devolve into nothing but murder and rape followed by bad jokes. The only exception I have ever found is the absolutely superb mini-series
Empire written by Mark Waid.
8. If there is one lesson all super-hero comics try to teach us - whether or not they ever meant or wanted to, and whether or not there's any truth to it at all - it is that whether we will be light or dark forces in the world is governed by how we react to severe trauma. Marvel and DC comics have taught us that the best and surest way to turn someone into a super-hero is to kill their loved ones - their parents in particular, but not always. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Black Panther, and more than I could name here have the deaths of parents firmly rooted in their origin stories. Even the Hulk is on the list, though the story of his parents and how their deaths made him who he is was retroactively attached to his series close to thirty years after the fact. The Punisher is an exception to the death-of-parents list, though he does become a vigilante after watching his wife and children gunned down. You might even argue that Wolverine is another example, since while his amnesia did not cause the
literal death of his family, it did in the sense that it stole the memory them - and everything else in his life before he awoke with an unbreakable skeleton - from him.
But villains, more often than not, do not suffer trauma from the death of loved ones. They suffer trauma on themselves. Doctor Doom is forever scarred by an accident. Joker is dropped in a vat of chemicals (in some versions of his slippery origin tale, at least). Lex Luthor suffers nothing more than poverty, and murders his parents himself.
So in the world of super-hero comics, to rail against evil that has befallen your loved ones is a good. To rail against evil that has befallen yourself is itself an evil.
7. If you want to know what separates a super-villain from a super-hero - or more precisely what separates why we love super-heroes and why we love super-villains - watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In particular, if you watch nothing else, watch the season 5 episode "Fool For Love" in which we are entertained with stories of the vampire Spike's past. The difference between the villain Spike and the possibly-reformed Spike are as clear as anything possibly could be. The Spike who murders the Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion, and later the NYC slayer in the seventies, has no cares and no worries. He loves himself and whether he's getting the upper hand on his enemy or getting his bleached head smashed unceremoniously through the window of a moving subway - Spike loves who he is, revels in who he is, loves what he does, revels in what he does, and no matter where he is or what he's doing you know that he's exactly where he wants to be and is doing exactly what he wants to be doing. But back in the present with a microchip implanted in his head that stops him from hurting humans, Spike is a shadow of his former self. He cries on the ground, clutching the promised money from Buffy for telling her his past, probably thinking he should go somewhere and drink a gallon of holy water to save himself from his pathetic existence. In other words, he is now more in line with Buffy, Xander, Willow, Dawn, Riley and Giles, in that there is now something integral about being Spike that he can't control and that completely sucks all the enjoyment out of his life.
In other words, we love super-heroes because they suffer like us, because they suffer even when they don't have to and probably shouldn't - like us - because sometimes they agonize over every action they make - like us - and wonder if the everything about them that makes them who they are isn't stupid or worthless or evil or just plain wrong - like us.
We don't love super-villains, as some may suggest, because they do things we can't do or won't allow ourselves to do. We love them because no matter
what they do, they never suffer. They act without the agony inherent in all our actions. Self-doubt and self-loathing is alien to them. They are always where they want to be, always doing what they want to be doing. We love super-villains because they live as if they only have a few hours of life left even though, as super-villains, they will probably still be trapping Batman in giant gumball machines and unveiling those all-too-plentiful rocks of kryptonite when you and I have been eaten by worms, shat by worms, and the worms' angsty offspring are brooding to Nine Inch Nails albums while wallowing in the excrement that used to be our wildest, unrealized dreams.
6. Hulk can kick all their asses. This is a fact.
5. If I could have sex with any super-villain, it would be The Enchantress. She's a Norse goddess with a bone to pick with The Mighty Thor. She boasts an armada of magicks at her command, including super-sexy powers to seduce men into riding her like an atomic-powered roller coaster so they will subsequently go find Thor and punch him a lot. This would be no problem for me. Thor would eventually hand me my bruised ass, but after pounding a goddess all night and then getting to punch Thor in his stupid hippy face, I wouldn't mind that much.
4. The list of reasons why the three sequels to Tim Burton's
Batman weren't as successful as the original are as long as my leg (though I will admit that, unlike many, while I despised both of Schumacher's failures, I liked
Batman Returns). When it comes to super-villains however, the reasons why none of them worked as well as Jack Nicholson's Joker are ironic. Schumacher's villains never worked because they each tried desperately to be like the Joker, and failed. Meanwhile, Burton's Catwoman and Penguin failed precisely because they weren't
enough like the Joker and never tried to be. They broke the rules inherent in reason #7.
3. The problems with
Spider-Man 3 - and again there are many - can mainly be found in its super-villains. Venom was basically just tacked on at the end and never given his chance to shine. For better or worse, the comic book Venom has secured a premiere spot in the ranks of Spider-Man's rogue's gallery, and suffered from such careless, stupid treatment. It would be like just throwing Magneto in at the end of
X-Men for some extra muscle. And then there's Sandman whose depiction was, I feel, carried out faithfully. It's doubtful anyone could've played the villain better than Thomas Haden Church. But where Sandman ultimately provided a fat bucket of fail is in the revelation that it was him who murdered Spider-Man's uncle. As I have said before on this blog, I don't care about differences between the storyies of the comics and those of the films as long as the spirit of the story is unmarred.
This, however, was unforgivable. As I wrote earlier, Spider-Man is one of a long line of heroes in whose origins the death of family plays an integral role. The fact that the death of Peter Parker's father-figure helped to make him a super-hero is not at all unique. But what
does distinguish him from others - one of the reasons why Spider-Man is so terribly fallible and human - is the manner in which that death occurs. Heroes like Batman and Superman and Daredevil suffer guilt for the deaths of their families, even though we all know this guilt is undeserved because they were in situations where none of them could've stopped those deaths. Unlike them, Spider-Man IS in part to blame for the death of his uncle. Unlike the young Bruce Wayne or the infant Kal-El, Peter Parker
could have prevented his Uncle's death with no more than one punch to the head of the bastard who ran past him. Spider-Man's guilt, unlike that of the others, is well-deserved though perhaps not to the extent to which he tortures himself. This is why he's the super-hero who bears the burden of that stupid phrase about great power and great responsibility. But having Sandman kill Uncle Ben took that away and DID mar the spirit of the story.
2. One of the things I like least about super-hero adaptations is how often the director feels the need to kill the super-villain at the end. Sure, part of what I don't like about this practice is that it takes away the potential for sequels featuring the same villain. And there's also the fact that it makes murderers out of those who would never murder. But mainly I don't like it because there is a conceit in it that I find distasteful. It seems that the director is telling us that he/she has given us the only battle that could ever be important between these two characters, as if they have succeeded in perfectly defining the differences between a hero and a villain who have been locking horns for decades, and nothing more need be said.
1. The defining super-villain moment has come and gone. It was brief, but powerful, and can be found in the pages of
Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars #10. Everything that has followed has been, at best, beautiful imitation.
