Cruel Summer Finale: Five Underrated Bad Guys

Over the course of the last couple months in my Cruel Summer series, I’ve had a good time picking apart and analyzing some of my personal favorite comic book villains, as well as bad guys I thought called for a bit more scrutiny.

Well, all good things and all that, and with this being the last day of August, it’s kinda the end of summer in my eyes, so I thought I’d finish off with quick hits on five baddies I think get the short shrift and deserve more exposure and/or recognition.

AHAB
Based on appearance alone, Ahab freaked me the heck out as a kid. I was just thumbing through back issues at a store or something, came across Days of Future Present, and this guy just looked horrifying. I gathered bits and pieces over the years and the fact that he was basically the end boss of Marvel’s nastiest dystopian future and that he could reduce heroes like Cyclops and Invisible Woman to mindless “hounds” just upped his creep factor. Having actually read the event that introduced him now, I think all the pieces are there for a really memorable X-Men villain, but also that his best stories are still to come. I also think one of the cooler things done in the waning years of Excalibur was to introduce Rory Campbell as a young idealist, then slowly and agonizingly drag him down the path to becoming Ahab that he knew was his destiny but so desperately hoped to avoid. Great-looking villain and neat personal connection that make for a character who shouldn’t be sitting on the shelf.

KANTO
There are a lot of New Gods villain who are vastly underused and underrated—I’m not sure if Orion’s mother, Tigra, really counts as a “villain,” but it sure seems like making her one would be a neat way to have a short-term Darkseid stand-in—but my favorite may well be Kanto, the guy so bad ass that the ruler of Apokolips, who can pretty much kill anybody any time they feel like, employs him as the official assassin of the most evil planet in the galaxy. I also love that rather than be the typical tough-talking, scraggly-bearded cliché you expect from such a job position, Kanto is this dashing dude dressed like a fop who insists on maintaining his sense of style while running around trying to get Mister Miracle in a death trap; more of this fellow, please.

TOYO HARADA
I never read much Valiant as a kid, but I did get the re-release of Harbinger a couple years back, and one of the many things that impressed me about the book is just how scary Toyo Harada is. For one thing he’s immensely powerful; for another, he truly believes he’s the good guy and that he’s saving the world by taking it into his capable hands, which always makes for more interesting villains. In many ways, Harada is a lot like Lex Luthor in his immediate post-Crisis incarnation as the beloved businessman of Metropolis only Superman and a few others really know as a scumbag, but with off-the-charts telepathic abilities rather than just money and gadgets. The thing that really got me with Harada though was how he never would tip his hat as far as exactly how much of Sting’s life he was manipulating, which just added a sinister edge; he was evil and powerful in a way only Pete truly understood since the potential for both was in him as well, and to me the burden of knowing the world’s most benevolent man is a wolf in sheep’s clothing being solely on a kid is such a perfectly terrifying scenario.

COUNT VERTIGO
In many ways, one could see Count Vertigo as a Doctor Doom knock-off of sorts, sharing the standing as European nobility as well as the arrogance and contempt for anybody not him. On the other hand, where Doom is a self-made man who clawed his way up from poverty and sports the literal scars to prove it, Vertigo was born with the silver spoon in his mouth and never had to strive for anything until years later. The missed opportunities I see with Vertigo is that here’s a major player with extremely substantial powers and impressive pedigree who for some reason spends most of his time bugging Green Arrow and Black Canary. Sure there’s some novelty to this pampered royal being taken down by an archer and a girl in fishnets, but wouldn’t he be better served going a few rounds with Superman or The Flash? I’d hone in on the stuff that made Vertigo’s best Suicide Squad appearances, specifically his need to prove he can indeed earn things on his own, and work that into a self-loathing of his underachiever status in villains and renewed motivation to take on the big guns.

MISTER HYDE
Here’s a character who not only appears pretty regularly throughout the Marvel Universe but also has a pretty solid pedigree of decent stories; and yet, he’s really only ever been a random bad guy who switches dance partners every time he shows up, where I think he’s got the potential to be a great consistent foil for some hero. Hyde’s got a brains and brawn combo gimmick that reminds me of Blockbuster during the halcyon days of Chuck Dixon’s Nightwing, but he both predates that run by far and also has a not-yet-fully-tapped elegance and depth I feel beyond his DC counterpart as well. I thought of him for this list in large part because of his recent appearance in the first two issues of Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger. If you need even more reason to check out that book (which you shouldn’t), that kick-off story is the perfect blueprint for elevating Mister Hyde to prominent status in Marvel pantheon of evil. A schemer and kingpin who can also be his own muscle as well as a character conflicted as the one he takes his name from, Hyde could do great things if given the chance.

Cruel Summer: Super-Skrull

The Skrulls, introduced in only the second issue of Fantastic Four way back when, exemplified one thing differentiated FF from so many of the standard super hero series to come and also made it the perfect bridge from the 50’s era of genre fiction to the true Silver Age: they were a science fiction concept that would have been right at home in Strange Tales or Tales to Astonish five years earlier, but they would end up being great foils for the tights and domino mask crowd well into the present. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby weren’t exactly riding a wave of high concept with the Skrulls as they were full-on “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” knock-offs; the types of shape-shifting sinister extraterrestrials you’d find any weekend at the local drive-in.

That, however, is what makes the Super-Skrull so cool.

Kl’rt, the Super-Skrull, made his debut in Fantastic Four #18. He was the Skrulls’ greatest warrior, and as a result, selected to undergo genetic manipulation that gifted him with all the powers of the hated FF in addition to his own natural shape-shifting abilities. In fact, not only could he do all the stuff his foes did, Skrull science made him just that much better than them in each category. This was truly a villain worthy of the World’s Greatest Comic and seemingly an unstoppable ass-kicker.

The FF still won, of course, but only after getting thrashed pretty soundly and Reed Richards basically cheating by figuring out Super-Skrull was getting his powers augmented by a low-orbiting satellite and jamming the frequency; they couldn’t beat him, but they outsmarted him and his dummy superiors.

Super-Skrull has always had a fierce look, courtesy of Kirby. The Skrulls look freakier than your run-of-the-mill bad guy aliens to begin with, but pasting one of those ugly mugs on a body that can do everything the FF does is just a no-brainer when it comes to rad designs. For all the crazy cool neo-Super-Skrull designs that Leinil Francis Yu and other churned out during Secret Invasion—and oh how fun that must have been—I think the original still stands out; there’s something about that rocky Thing arm on fire and/or stretching that’s undeniably neat (I think the biggest challenge any artist faces when drawing Super-Skrull is feeling like they need to somehow incorporate the Invisible Woman’s less visually cool powers in).

Of course after an awesome first appearance, the problem with Super-Skrull became obvious: how can a guy this cool keep losing to everybody? I mean, if the Fantastic Four themselves are one of Marvel’s premiere teams and able to thwart off such tremendous threats from Doctor Doom to Galactus, how come a guy who can do everything they can do better than them and also change shape and also has super hypnosis (by the by) loses to Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel and Iron Fist? Mister Fantastic’s ol’ “block the satellite” trick became a tired deus ex machina and a villain who should have been ferocious dropped sadly into the same category as the Rhino or Abomination in terms of being the dude heroes beat on when they needed to establish bonafides before fighting true big league baddies.

It would take 43 years before somebody came up with e idea that Super-Skrull could actually make a pretty decent hero—or at least anti-hero. Keith Giffen, Andy Schmidt and the other great minds behind the 2006 Annihilation event hit on this notion and tasked Javier Grillo-Marxuach with crafting a four-issue limited series working Kl’rt into the proceedings.

In Annihilation: Super-Skrull, Grillo-Marxuach stays quite faithful to the established characterization of Kl’rt from all his previous appearances, he just casts him on the side of angels in this particular adventure, and in the process demonstrates that he was never so much a villain in the classic sense as a proud and dedicated warrior who happened to be working for the guys fighting our heroes. Super-Skrull remains ornery and arrogant throughout the series—he alienates his key ally, a young Skrull who hero worships him, just by being a jerk, and drives him over to the bad guys’ camp—but he also possesses many qualities we’d number as virtuous, such as his determination and even selflessness when it comes time to make a huge sacrifice in order to stop Annihilus from advancing on the Skrull homeworld. Even Reed Richards himself, whom Kl’rt reluctantly turns to for help in his mission, muses on how it really is the circumstances that shape our opinion of a being like the Super-Skrull.

For his part, Kl’rt of course does not care how he’s ultimately viewed so long as the job gets done. To borrow from pro wrestling, he’s “Stone Cold” Steve Austin: he could care less whether or not the fans cheer him so long as he wins the World title, and in having this attitude, he just becomes more popular.

Annihilation and its sequels have done wonder for Super-Skrull as they have mostly been war stories at their heart, and Kl’rt is a soldier. He did fine as a cackling super villain for a bit, but as I mentioned, it got played out and he was being used more to put other characters over than for his own virtues. His dedication to the Skrull Empire and willingness to do whatever it takes to see it prevail plays way better in a story where they’re part of a coalition battling Annihilus or the Phalanx than it does when he’s trying to conquer Earth through Hollywood or something; it renders him a far more three-dimensional character. Likewise the war-time camaraderie he has formed with guys like Nova and Star-Lord allows him to display a more relaxed side of his persona that makes him more appealing.

For me, aside from the look and the powers and the other stuff Super-Skrull has going for him, I’ve always just enjoyed that he often seems like the sole tough guy in a room full of weasels. The Skrulls are all about subterfuge and these long-form infiltration plans like Secret Invasion; Super-Skrull is their greatest champion, yet he’d prefer to walk right up to you and punch you in the face. He could be disguised as your wife or best friend, and yes, he does use those powers on occasions, but more often than not, he’s content to be an inconspicuous green monster that can still kick your ass because he’s a bad, bad man.

If they made a movie of Annihilation or about the Skrulls, you’d need to get a guy from The Expendables to play Super-Skrull, and there’s not much higher compliment I can offer than that.

Cruel Summer: Poison Ivy

The femme fatale is a character archetype as old as fiction itself. So long as there have been virtuous male heroes (and that’s stretching all the way back to the days of myth), there have been sultry women of questionable repute there to tempt them. For every Samson, there was a Delilah; of a slightly more recent but still formative vintage in the medium we’re dealing with, for every Spirit, there were a dozen vixens trying to steal his heart and his wallet, and pretty much every other pulp or comic author followed Will Eisner’s lead with their own creations.

Batman received his token bad girl in 1940 in the form of Catwoman. Though she would be squarely on the wrong side of the law during her first five decades or so of existence, Selina Kyle always carried a torch for the Caped Crusader that made her reform at least a possibility, and our hero seemed close to reciprocating on each occasion they met.

26 years later, the Batman Rogues Gallery gained its second-most prominent female member in the form of Dr. Pamela Isley, aka Poison Ivy. In her early, pre-Crisis appearances Ivy didn’t differentiate all that much from Catwoman in terms of being a hot lady who made out with Batman nearly as often as she fought him. However, as the grim 80’s dawned, comics became a bit more serious, feminism rose in stature and Catwoman edged closer to being a hero, Poison Ivy began to take on a harsher tone and represent a new breed of femme fatale for her genre.

In her modern incarnation, Poison Ivy stands out from the crowd of sexy seductress types because while she will flaunt her sexuality to achieve her goals, said goals never have anything to do with attracting the attention of a man, either on the surface or subconsciously. Catwoman and most of her ilk talk a good game about using boys as playthings, but there’s always that one unattainable dude—generally the hero of the piece—who can turn the tables on her.

There is no man for whom Poison Ivy would give up her mission.

That mission is one of ecological extremism, as Pamela Isley values plant-life more than humanity, and would gladly eradicate the latter to protect the former. The origin of Poison Ivy came about when appropriately a man—in this case Jason Woodrue, aka Atom and Swamp Thing villain The Floronic Man—seduced a young Pam and transformed her into a walking toxin capable of—and partial to—killing with a kiss.

When I first got into Batman, I always found Poison Ivy to be more interesting than Catwoman—and yes, more attractive, since I was after all a pre-teen boy—precisely because she was so unattainable and aloof. With Catwoman, you got the sense that if Batman really wanted, he could turn her to the side of good, which made her no real kind of threat. On the other hand, Poison Ivy was fully aware that with her green one-piece and overflowing sensuality every hot-blooded male she came into contact with including Batman felt like they were climbing the ropes in gym class when she showed up, but while this amused her, it didn’t interest her outside of how she could exploit her physical attributes to gain pawns and achieve her goals.

It’s one of the oldest romantic clichés in the book: the girl you can have you don’t want, but the girl who you’ve got no shot with is the one you think you need.

My all-time favorite portrayal of Poison Ivy came from the same place many of my favorite Batman-related things come from: Batman: The Animated Series. Series co-creator Paul Dini has never made a secret that Ivy’s one of his favorite characters—he’s utilized her several times in his comics work, most recently as one of the stars of Gotham City Sirens—and he clearly understands what makes the character work and keeps her unique from similarly motivated or powered villainesses.

Dini and the rest of the B: TAS brain trust demonstrate perfectly their grasp over Ivy in the episode “House and Garden,” where she seemingly reforms, gets married, and endeavors to live a normal life, fooling everybody including possibly Batman (he always seems at least a bit suspicious). It’s all a lie, of course, but via Ivy, the writers really lure you into rooting for and wanting to believe this character can be good only to harsh that buzz decisively in the end. Indeed episodes—and comics—where Ivy displays a false humanity only to pull that “Gotcha” moment in the end only underline how truly monstrous and detached from being a feeling person she really is, and make her that much more intriguing along the way.

Ivy pulls a similar trick in her first B: TAS appearance, “Pretty Poison,” where she seems to be Harvey Dent’s perfect fiancée, only to reveal her uncaring interior with an assassination rooted in revenge for his financing a construction project that unwittingly killed off a rare breed of flowers. In another episode—the name of which escapes me—Ivy tricks Alfred and Leslie Tompkins into attending a sort of spa weekend for the wealthy, then turns them and several others into trees as vengeance for their neglect of ecological issues, a visual which stuck with me a long time.

The people who worked on B: TAS got the essentials that make Poison Ivy work so well as a villain in my mind: first that she has a more complex reason for committing her acts of crime or terrorism than lust for power and one that she can justify in a way that readers must recognize as at least rational on some level (she’s trying to save the world, albeit in a complete insane way), and second that is a beautiful woman who recognizes her own assets and derives a sadistic glee from using them but not one that comes from being validated by men or a single man.

I actually don’t think Uma Thurman was too far off from creating a decent Poison Ivy in the reprehensible-to-the-masses Batman & Robin, in that she got the first part of that equation right and seemed to at least try to portray a certain lack of interest in her male pawns, but the makers of the film seemed to push her—or maybe she pushed herself—too far in the willing sexpot role, and never pulled back to the cold-blooded predator the way the cartoon did.

Of course as with any comic book character who has a significant backlog of appearances, Poison Ivy’s portrayals over the years have hemmed and hawed as far as quality, but as mentioned, there’s a pretty basic formula for getting her right that many writers latch onto nicely. Dini writes a great Ivy in his books and adding the element of her bizarre but passionate friendship with Harley Quinn certainly freshened up her dynamic. Of course I dug her role in John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad, particularly in regard to her giving the arrogant Count Vertigo his comeuppance by making her his slave and in turn being metaphorically spanked by maybe the one character in the DC Universe who can pull such a thing off, Amanda Waller.

However, even in her most banal of appearances, it seems creators have enough of an understanding—respect?—for Poison Ivy that she never falls head over heels for Batman or decides Nightwing is hunky enough to trump keeping the world’s plants alive. That’s a good thing, as we always need at least one femme fatale who’s a bit more fatale than the rest.

Cruel Summer: Ultron

Most killer robots that populate the ranks of villainy in comics and just about every other form of action fiction come across their creepiness by being cold and emotionless; terrifying because there’s no way you can hope to reason with them.

Ultron goes the other way.

While he may come across visually with the best of science fiction’s malevolent automatons thanks in large part to his simple but sinister design by the great John Buscema, Ultron is brimming over with emotion. This is a case where the book not even remotely matching its cover defies your expectations and makes for a great villain.

Ultron is Oedipus in the Greek tragedy that is the life of Hank Pym (aka Ant-Man, aka Giant-Man, aka Goliath, aka Yellowjacket, aka The Wasp). Created as a stab at artificial life by Pym using his own brain patterns, Ultron would rebel beyond the control of his “father” and spend the rest of his “life” hating him in a slightly more extreme fashion than most angsty teenagers do their parents. Ultron would go on to try and create progeny of his own in The Vision as well as two would-be brides in the forms of Jocasta (whose brain patterns he based on Pym’s wife, the original Wasp, thus going back to the whole Oedipal thing) and Alkhema; all three would turn against him, with Vision and Jocasta both becoming part of daddy’s team, the Avengers.

Every time Ultron shows up, he’s seething with rage; anger towards Pym, toward the Avengers, towards his “children” and against humanity and general. He really is the classic adolescent dressing in all black and listening to Nine Inch Nails except he’s got adamantium skin and several death rays in place of Hot Topic accessories.

The artists who best portray Ultron—Buscema, George Perez, etc.—have gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that his expression never changes and holds the same Jack o’ Lantern shape as he screeches “Die Avengers!” or cries out in agony because The Scarlet Witch is hexing him to “death”; it’s quite haunting.

As I’ve mentioned more than a couple hundred times on this very blog, I grew up reading comics in the early 90’s, and for me, that meant not too much Ultron to be seen. The Avengers comics I read had them battling Proctor and only Proctor pretty much every issue with occasional respites to team with the X-Men against Fabian Cortez or battle pissed off Kree and Shi’Ar expatriates. Ultron may have appeared in Avengers West Coast, but I didn’t buy that book until the last issue; I also know he played some role in a Vision series that came out at around this time, but again, I didn’t read it.

So I more or less had no idea who Ultron was outside of the passing mention in a Wizard article or Official Index to the Avengers. Sure, I fought him in the Captain America & The Avengers video game, but I didn’t know him as Ultron, just a weird-looking robot who had a strange laugh. I was also out of the comics game by the time Avengers: United We Stand—currently airing on Marvel.com—where he was the main villain took the airwaves, so no dice there either.

My first genuine exposure to Ultron was Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s “Ultron Unlimited” which was one of the bigger epics from their golden period on Avengers in the late 90’s. The story unfolded in 1999, though I wouldn’t read it until a few years later, picking up the trade as I was trying to assemble the whole run.

The entire first issue of the arc is the Avengers and special guests Black Panther and The Wasp running around chasing leads after Hank Pym gets kidnapped by a robot army. One of the cooler things about the first chapter is how hesitant the Avengers—a group that is at full power and includes Thor, Iron Man and Captain America at this point in time—are to even mention Ultron by name, because they’re that scared of him and you can really feel these fictional characters clinging to some hope against hope that he’s not the guy they’re up against; the anxiety crosses the line and even makes you pretty tense with anticipation.

The Avengers actually end up finding Alkhema first and for a second almost breathe a sigh of relief because maybe she’s behind it all (and she’s not so tough)—then they turn on the TV and see Ultron massacring the entire nation of Slorenia, lighting fires across the country in the shape of his face. The whole story is full of powerful imagery like that, and of course nobody does it any better than Mr. Perez.

As we learn, Ultron has kidnapped Pym, as well as The Vision (his “son”), The Scarlet Witch (Vizh’s ex-wife), Wonder Man and The Grim Reaper (Vision’s “brothers” and thus family in some weird way to Ultron). He also grabs The Wasp for good measure and we’ve got a family reunion. The endgame for the bad guy is that he’s going to swipe the brain patterns of his “relatives” to program a new species of self-aware robots that he’ll use to replace humanity. It actually sounds like a standard super villain plan except that fitting with our theme it’s more akin to a kid who feels neglected wanting to run away from home and finding refuge with replacement family figures be they rock stars, movie idols or just like-minded teens.

Also, Ultron committed genocide just to provide a distraction, so there’s that.

As you’d expect, the Avengers end up spoiling Ultron’s fun, battling through a literal army made up of his previous models in a great action scene then busting down the wall so Thor can get the great line, “Ultron, we would have words with thee…” off. In the end, Pym himself gets to score the much-needed kill shot with an assist from Justice, who figures out Ultron has a weakness to vibranium and tosses the good doctor a pair of knucks made from the stuff so he can pound the crap out of his “son” and vent about how he’s not a failure in a most cathartic manner.

“Ultron Unlimited” is certainly Ultron at his best: Shell of a killer robot, insides of a disenfranchised youth and power of a small army, not to mention a well of resentfulness and ruthlessness that can never run dry.

But while Ultron has traditionally been an Avengers heavy through the years given his close ties, he has branched out elsewhere in the Marvel Universe as well pretty successfully. I loved his run as a cosmic big bad during Annihilation Conquest where he took over the Phalanx and led them on a campaign to assimilate the cosmos; the motivation from “Unlimited” remains the same, as he’s still searching for that surrogate family, he’s just widened his scope on a massive level.

It’s fitting that Ultron has expanded beyond the Avengers in terms of who he’s willing to fight, as he’s a unique take on a common theme whose look has become fairly iconic and whose anger towards his “dad” can pretty easily be redirected at whoever is standing in his way as easily as the kids I’ve been referring to this whole entry seem to be fairly pissed at the entire world.

Of course in most cases, disgruntled young adults grow out of that phase and move on into either grown up happiness or dissatisfaction depending on the situation, but Ultron being a robot—and a comic book character—will never get over it, which is just another way he’s one of a kind.

Cruel Summer: Cyborg Superman

I totally thought it was Steel.

When Reign of the Supermen was going down I was 11 and very much caught up in the fervor of trying to guess which of the four newbies was the real Superman. Even though Superboy was my favorite, he came right out in his first appearance and said he was a clone, so he was off the list (and besides, I always figured he’d end up as Superboy some way or another). The Last Son of Krypton actually seemed the logical choice as a new more violent Superman would seem par for the course in the 90’s and fitting with what audiences at the time were into; but call it my youthful optimism or the spirit of heroism I admired about comics to begin with, I just didn’t think a shades-wearing, bone-breaking Superman would last (and again, I was 11, so I absolutely thought one of these guys was going to be around to stay).

So yeah, I thought it was Steel. I bought the argument put forth in one of his issues and then expounded upon in letters columns that John Henry Irons died during Doomsday’s rampage around the same time as Superman and somehow inherited his soul at least in part. I thought it seemed cool and warmed to the idea that an armored black man with a big ol’ hammer was going to be the new Superman.

I was of course wrong (though the real guy being a fifth latecomer was a total gyp), but there was one thing I was entirely correct about: I knew it couldn’t be the Cyborg, because that guy was bad news.

Even when they were trying to make all four guys seem like heroes and even though I was just a kid, I never had any doubt that the Cyborg Superman was a villain and would be exposed as such. Dan Jurgens did too good a job in his design making him terrifying as a bizarre perversion of such a familiar, iconic and reassuring figure like Superman for me not to distrust the character.

Yet despite the fact I was waiting from day one for the Cyborg to go bad, the issue where he beats the piss out of The Eradicator and then yells out “Earth be damned!” as Mongul nears before him and Warworld descends on Coast City is one of the coolest heel turns in comics history from where I recline.

And more credit to Dan Jurgens in that while the Cyborg was very creepy as an enigma wearing half of Superman’s face, he became even more sinister as he was—excuse the pun—fleshed out using the creator’s own prior stories to tell his origin. Hank Henshaw’s role as the Reed Richards of a tragically doomed Fantastic Four analogue was perfect as, quite frankly, Reed is only a step or two away from being a fantastic bad guy himself. Jurgens’ twist of the screw for Henshaw’s motivation, that Superman tossing The Eradicator into the sun may have caused the solar activity that doomed the flight and ultimately killed the future Cyborg’s friends and wife was also brilliant as it gave him a totally legitimate reason to hate our hero plus a tie to another important character in the whole saga.

That driving impetus, Jurgens’ design work and even the way Henshaw initially embraced technology over humanity as way to communicate with his wife following his demise but ended up driving her to kill herself, making his new powers another layer of tragedy, all worked for him, but let’s be honest: at the end of the day, those were just contributing factors to the Cyborg’s quality as a villain whereas the thing that pushed him over the top was that he was the big bad at the end of the entire Death and Return of Superman opus; anybody who got that spot was going to get major cred.

What I saw as the Cyborg Superman’s undoing early on in his villainous career, however, was a result of that same earned cred. He was such a hot commodity after his Reign of the Supermen role that he was rushed back into circulation way too quickly in my opinion. There are of course some classic super villain like Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor who can show up every other month and still be great because they’re that awesome, but those guys are few and far between; for the most part, if you’ve got a really special bad guy, you need to rest him between appearance so the next time he shows up the situation really has that “Oh shit, if this guy’s back it means trouble” feeling.

This is particularly true with villains who are the epicenters of big events. For two decades following Crisis On Infinite Earths, we didn’t see The Anti-Monitor again, and that only made his legend grow. Apocalypse only comes around ever few years if that in the X-Men books and when it happens, it feels special. Contrast that to something like Eclipso getting his own regular series following Darkness Within or The Beyonder going from disembodied voice to bopping around every Marvel title in his leisure suit and you get what I’m saying.

The Cyborg returned almost immediately after his big defeat in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey and I always felt that was a big mistake. To begin with, a story that already has Doomsday—another great villain who came back way too soon and too often—and Darkseid is not going to be one in which Hank Henshaw can really shine. For another, it at least felt like it took years for Superman to beat the Cyborg the first time around, so the fact that we knew it would only take a few issues the second just cheapened him.

After that story, I think the Cyborg quickly became damaged goods. What should have been a money confrontation with Hal Jordan after he destroyed his city and wrecked his sanity was relegated to a five-page side confrontation during Final Night. Then for years Henshaw would show up with annoying frequency either as the predictable mastermind or unwitting foot soldier in whatever big plot was menacing Superman that month; a real fall from grace.

However, in 2006, it was Geoff Johns to the rescue.

Noted villain rejuvenator Johns brought Cyborg Superman firmly over into the Green Lantern mythos to serve as a foil to the reinvigorated Hal Jordan which felt long overdue. He spun Henshaw into being the mysterious new Grandmaster of the Manhunters following months of buildup, restoring that sense of danger and grandeur from those early appearances nice and quick. Johns gave him weight by making him one of the first characters aware of the 52 alternate universes following Infinite Crisis and didn’t cheapen him as a threat since it took several Green Lanterns working together to bring him down.

But it was Johns’ follow-up in the classic Sinestro Corps War storyline that has really given Cyborg Superman the staying power I think is going to sustain him.

In that arc, Cyborg Superman joins with Sinestro and his new ally The Anti-Monitor for one reason: he wants to die and thinks they can make it happen. He’s sick of this tortured existence devoid of anybody he loves and wants to end it, but sadly, he seems to have made himself indestructible over the years. It’s a tragic and complex reason for doing bad that I think sets Henshaw apart these days.

And that scene at the end where he thinks he succeeds in courting death by trapping himself in an explosion but then his skull is recovered by the Manhunters and he sheds a single tear—classic.

I knew that Cyborg was trouble from the start and was certainly no Superman, but he sure does make a perfect bad guy. It’s crazy that a villain with so much going for him from origin to look to impetus almost ended up a footnote, but I guess we’re all lucky one of the millions of people who read his first misadventures had the power to make sure that didn’t happen.

Cruel Summer: Mister Sinister

My history with Mister Sinister begins, as so many of my comics-related tales do, with “The X-Cutioner’s Song.” He was the tertiary villain at best, showing up near the beginning to kidnap Cyclops and Jean Grey, then again at the conclusion, getting bamboozled into released the Legacy Virus on the world. He looked kind of like an evil Colossus and didn’t impress me much; in a crossover where Stryfe was at the top of his game and Apocalypse was also running wild, Mister Sinister seemed like an afterthought with a goofy name.

Then I saw the cliffhanger finale to season one of “X-Men: The Animated Series”—and the version of Sinister intended to fly on a cartoon aimed at a Saturday morning audience comprised primarily of children scared the crap out of me and left a lasting impression.

Following the big battle against the Sentinels, Scott Summers and Jean Grey are chilling on a beach when the visual framing of the scene shifts and we’re now viewing them through a camera lens. The perspective flips and we see a silhouetted figure seated upon a creepy throne of tentacles or something; he leans forward to reveal a pasty-faced ghoul with sunken eyes and a grinning mouthful of yellow, fanged teeth. And then the kicker: a fiendish laugh that sent chills through my young soul and had me cringing through the summer months awaiting new episodes.
Mister Sinister as the foreboding, undefeatable, supremely confident overarching villain of season two, voiced spot-on with hollow menace by Christopher Britton, became my template for the character, and also intrigued me as far as looking into his comic book history more in-depth.

Truth be told, at first, I didn’t find much.

Chris Claremont’s original concept for Mister Sinister as he tells it is pretty cool: the idea was that he was a powerful mutant who had been around for some time but his physical development had stopped around age 11, so in order to be taken seriously as a super villain, he created the Sinister vessel modeled after what a kid would find scary then sent him out into the world. Certainly some potential there as a sort of evil Captain Marvel—the Fawcett/DC version—analog, but for whatever reason, it seems like the writer never got to play him that way.

Instead, Sinister gets kind of dropped into the X-Men mythos in the late 80’s seemingly just because the Marauders needed a boss and Inferno needed a mastermind, set up as an ambiguous and foreboding figure surrounded by mystery with vague ties to Cyclops. In his early appearances, Mister Sinister does seem when you look back on it with Claremont’s original intent in mind the embodiment of what a kid would think of as a scary bad guy, but since his creator only got to really tell one story with him and then departed the books a few years later, the payoff never took place. Instead, Claremont’s successors were left with a villain who almost seemed a parody—with good reason, since, again, he’s meant to be a kid’s conception—but without explanation.

That’s the comic book version of Mister Sinister I met, and not that surprisingly I wrote him off as a product of late 80’s/early 90’s excess where everybody was a shadowy mastermind with too many secrets and ill-defined powers; he worked as a boogeyman on Saturday mornings—again, Claremont’s intent used in a way he probably never conceived—but seemed unnecessary in comics.

However, writers like Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell saw something in Mister Sinister—and also good X-Men villains are kind of few and far between—so they kept bringing him back and giving him more and more connections to our heroes, without ever revealing much about the man himself. It was frustrating, but also admittedly tantalizing, as I would get annoyed that we never knew Sinister’s deal, yet of course this made me want to know his secrets more than ever and gasp whenever he appeared suddenly in an X-Men comics; the guy had presence, I have to say that.

In 1996, nearly a decade after his creation, Sinister—writers had largely dropped the “Mister”—had his origin told in the Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix limited series, written by Peter Milligan with art by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson.

Interestingly enough, I never got around to reading the book and once again got my Sinister fix from “X-Men: The Animated Series,” the penultimate episode of which was “Descent,” adapting Further Adventures for Saturday morning consumption about a year after it came out in print form.

In both Further Adventures and “Descent,” we learn that Nathaniel Essex was a 19th century scientist obsessed with Darwinism and evolution who performed depraved experiments and eventually made a pact with Apocalypse to grant him power and immortality as Mister Sinister in order to continue his work beyond his natural lifetime. In subsequent years, it would be revealed that Sinister’s obsession with the Summers and Grey bloodlines were born out of twin desires to harvest incredible genetic potential while at the same time creating the ultimate failsafe against his former master—at some point he got on Apocalypse’s bad side—in the form of Nathan Christopher Summers, who would become Cable.

Probably not what Claremont had in mind, but finally this guy had motivation, and one with potential at that.

Sinister was the old Golden Age mad scientist who got lost in his work and exploited by crime bosses done up in a new way for a generation who expected more layers to their villains and for a franchise that thrived on shades of grey. That the unshakeable ego and calm of Sinister could be rattled be Essex’s gnawing and uncontrollable thirst for knowledge was a different paradigm for the X-Men antagonist of the day. You couldn’t bully or intimidate Sinister through physical force or emotional blackmail, but dangle the carrot of information in front of his diamond-adorned forehead and he becomes a junkie jonesing for a fix.

One of the very best Sinister stories I ever read was “Sinister’s List” from 2003’s Weapon X #14 by Frank Tieri and the guy who I suppose may well be the definitive Mister Sinister artist, John Paul Leon. Following up on the revelation that Doctor Windsor, the seemingly kindly scientist helping mutants to escape from Weapon X’s Neverland detention center is in fact Sinister, who is only abducting them from the prison to his lab for dissection, we get a flashback to Essex during World War II, where he worked alongside the Nazis, cloning Namor and observing the Invaders while attempting to glean knowledge for his own ends. It’s the perfect snapshot of Sinister as a man lost in his own pursuit of answers, completely unaware of the world around him save for the raw elements it can provide him. A pretty on-the-nose comparison between Sinister and Josef Mengele is drawn, but Tieri is quick to differentiate as well, with Essex musing on the “wastefulness” of the Nazi agenda and clearly not adhering to any sort of doctrine of racial superiority, instead viewing all people regardless of creed as nothing more than specimens for the “greater good” of scientific inquiry; true to his Darwinist roots, Sinister doesn’t care which race ultimately survives, he just wants to observe it all.

That was one of the very last times Mister Sinister was featured prominently before his demise in 2007’s Messiah Complex crossover. Truthfully, I think it’s impressive the character made it that far—20 years exactly—given the disparity between his creator’s intentions and where he ultimately ended up, but you have to be impressed at how he seemed to succeed in spite of those conflicting directions, thriving in several different roles and drawing impressive work out of multiple creators who at the end of the day really just seemed to want to solve the riddle of who he was and why he did what he did.

In the first issue of X-Men Forever 2, a comic written by none other than Chris Claremont, a mysterious boy appears in an orphanage alongside Cyclops’ son, speaking ominously with a familiar silhouette surrounding him, so two decades later, we may finally get to see where—to end on a fairly awful pun—this Sinister road leads.

Cruel Summer: Deathstroke The Terminator

When I first started taking an active interest in DC comic books in the early to mid-90’s, I thought, despite his name, that Deathstroke the Terminator was a super hero.

On the surface, it certainly seemed that way. For one thing, he had an ongoing series, and as far as I could tell, villains didn’t get those (Eclipso was an anomaly to me and I figured that was why Venom only got minis). I also remember reading bits and pieces of Panic in the Sky and seeing that Deathstroke was in there fighting Brainiac alongside Superman and the Justice League, pretty vigorously at that. Heck, I think he even wore a black arm band when Superman died.

And it was the 90’s, so “Deathstroke” was hardly the worst name I saw affixed to a good guy.

Imagine my surprise several years later reading Marv Wolfman and George Perez’ seminal New Teen Titans and learning that The Terminator—who they never really called Deathstroke even though that name was used at some point briefly in his early appearances—was a bad guy!

To be fair though, Slade Wilson wasn’t really that bad a guy. Well, he was. I’ll try to explain.

The thing that pushed The Terminator from vigilante to villain particularly in his earliest appearances weren’t just that he was pretty hard line about the ends justifying the means; it was that his ends were pretty unimpressive from a moral compass standpoint. The guy was a mercenary; end of the day, he was looking to score a pay day, and thus whatever he did to you along the way was cool. It wasn’t personal, but it was still pretty douchey.

Of course the whole genesis of Slade’s introduction to the DC Universe and grudge with the Titans was that his son got killed trying to collect a bounty he turned down from the H.I.V.E. for the teens’ heads so now he feels obligated to finish the contract. On the one hand, it’s honorable in a sense that he’s doing this for his kid; on the other, he’s still trying to ice a bunch of teenagers. And the really nasty stuff he did—primarily using and bedding a (maybe) barely legal sociopath as part of his master plan—code of honor or not was pretty darn inexcusable.

However, The Terminator’s motivation wasn’t really power or even money-driven when it came to the Titans; it was about preserving his family name, which sets him apart from a lot of the villain set similarly to what I was talking about with Kraven recently.

Ironically or appropriately—probably a little of both—perhaps my very favorite Terminator story is entitled “Shades of Gray” and comes from Tales of the Teen Titans #55 by Wolfman and Ron Randall. It’s after Slade has fulfilled his contract and gotten away with it after being acquitted thanks to friends in high places, so Changeling comes after him for revenge over what happened to Terra. Terminator beats the crap out of Changeling but doesn’t kill him, then calmly invites him to join him for breakfast, where he more or less says it sucks that Terra is dead, but he was just doing his job and now that it’s over he’s not going to bother the Titans anymore because he’s got no issue with them.

It’s a pretty awesome issue and a pretty awesome scene. It was also the perfect cap to The Terminator story because there really was no motivation for him to keep coming after the Titans or any other heroes as his story was over and his goal accomplished. Wolfman provided a great coda to the saga of a wonderfully complex character he’d begun five years earlier.

Unfortunately, Deathstroke couldn’t fade quietly into the night because he was too darn popular. To his credit, Wolfman held off bringing him back for a solid few years, and then when he did, he didn’t just invent a new reason for him to oppose the Titans, he brought him back as their ally, which made sense as his son was a member of their team.

At first, Deathstroke was kind of cool as a bad ass pseudo good guy with a distinct dark side. Reading the full Panic in the Sky story, I dug how he’s the guy Superman doesn’t want to go to for help because of his past, but needs for his military experience. He did ok for a bit on the outskirts of the DCU.

But more and more, Deathstroke the headliner became contrived and forced. The guy was a mercenary, yet he wasn’t taking assassination jobs on a monthly basis because stars of their own books just didn’t do that (even with Deadpool, who’s had a much longer shelf life, you notice he always has the heroic impulses creeping up every few issues as opposed to actually being a straight up “Merc with a Mouth”).

So Deathstroke’s book got cancelled and he became a bit of a toxic character for a bit because he was so far afield from the guy he started out as. I think he had a few cool appearances in the Batman books as a dude just taking money to kick the crap out of Batman, which is really the perfect use for him, but they were few and far between.

Then along comes Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in 2004 and the inspirational rebirth of Deathstroke as a viable ass-kicker. In issue #3, Slade takes on the bulk of the Justice League—no big three—in a matchup fans had dreamed of back in the 80’s yet never saw and he dismantles them with precision and forethought, immediately bumping him back up to A-level baddie. Admittedly some of the ways he took out the heroes could be seen as a bit contrived—I never really bought that he took control of Green Lantern’s ring by just “out-willing” him—but Meltzer wrote the sequence with such obvious enthusiasm and it was so well-laid-out by Rags Morales that the cracks were pretty hard to see beneath the fun.

Suddenly, Deathstroke is back and Deathstroke is cool and everybody wants to use Deathstroke again. Out of all this we get some pretty neat comics, but also some that just seem to miss the point; that point being that Slade Wilson is not a moustache-twirling, cackling, out-and-out villain, he’s shades of gray, baby.

Meltzer had Deathstroke as the “bad guy” in Identity Crisis in the sense that he’s beating up the Justice League, but he’s really more of a set piece than anything else; near as I can tell, Meltzer didn’t really have any sort of goal as far as stripping down Slade Wilson and telling some broad character arc, he just had an idea for a great fight scene and pulled it off nicely.

But in the ensuing half-decade, I feel like we’ve seen too much of Deathstroke as just a plain old super villain who takes things personally and goes after heroes just cos. It’s the flipside of why he didn’t work in the 90’s as a hero.

That first run of Titans stories was awesome because it gave The Terminator a clear mission statement and reason for doing what he did: he was going to finish the contract his son took on to deliver the Teen Titans to H.I.V.E. no matter what he had to do in order to accomplish that, and then he was going to move on. It was nothing personal; they were just a mission.

The Deathstroke of today, in my opinion, takes things way too personal. He’s not a pro anymore. He attacks guys because they pissed him off, not because of any debt of honor or because there’s money to be made; that’s not Slade Wilson to me, that’s just a super villain. You make Deathstroke just another bad guy who holds grudges and has archenemies, you take away what makes him unique and cool.

To be fair, some excellent stories have been written with Deathstroke as a bad guy (I dug his Judd Winick-written appearances in Green Arrow myself) just as some awesome stories were written with Deathstroke as a good guy, but I maintain the best stories have The Terminator awash in shades of gray. It will always be tough to reinvent Slade beyond where those first five years of his existence had him just because Marv Wolfman really did give him a perfect beginning, middle and end, but I also understand there’s too many cool aspects to the guy—his rad costume not being the least among them—to just let him sit in limbo, so I heartily root for those who take on the challenge of taking him into the future.

Ultimately, Slade Wilson is a decent hero and an ok villain, but he’s an excellent character.