Off-Color
Heroes
Robert M. Price
Recently, looking for good reference pictures for various
action figures I wanted to make, I perused a stack of beloved old Marvel Comics from the
mid-sixties. I was on a villains kick and wound up making my own versions (as
opposed to the heretical modifications of TV and ToyBiz) of the Unicorn, the
Plant Man, the Eel, the Titanium Man, the Crimson Dynamo, the Beetle, the
Mandarin, the Gladiator, the Stilt Man, Mr. Fear, Electro, Ape-Man, the Masked
Marauder, Mesmero, Baron Mordo, the Cobra, the Tumbler, and the Porcupine (by
the way, can you remember which heroes fought these bad guys?). In the process
of all this fun-having, I began reflecting on suspicions and inklings I’d long
had concerning super-villains, Marvel super-villains in particular.
Evil Superheroes
First, there is the evolution of super-villains. As
everyone knows, the earliest foes of Superman, Batman, Captain America, even of
Spiderman (the Enforcers) and Daredevil (the Kingpin), were just crooks, thugs.
Nothing super about them. At this primitive stage, the gimmick of the superhero
was simply that he or she was a moral omnipotence fantasy, a way of seeing to
it that the bad guys got what was coming to them. Superheroes were a superior
and infallible remedy to crime, better than the plain old police and military,
with their many limitations. No cop-killers to worry about when catching those
crooks is a job for Superman. Bullet-proof vest? Forget it! Built in! But this
approach got repetitive fast. The victories were too easy, and Superman’s
costume (or the Flash’s, etc.) got old since it was the only costume you were
seeing. For both these reasons, the supervillain was born, and immediately he
threatened to steal the show.
There
were and remain various kinds of supervillains. The category least removed from
the mere crooks of the first comics was what I call super-crooks. They
are just lucky or inventive thugs with powerful gimmicks. Their costumes may be
simply distinctive clothing, suits and dresses, or a characteristic look. These
include the original Psycho-Pirate, the Silver Age Flash’s enemy the Turtle
Man, the Sportsmaster, the Fiddler, the Gambler, the Toyman, the Prankster, and
most famously, the Penguin, the Joker, and Two-Face (though with these last
two, their faces are their costumes). The Joker shows that a “mere” super-crook
can still be a classic villain.
Super-crooks
also included malevolent cranks of one type or another, like Lex Luthor, a guy
who bore a grudge for lack of Rogaine, and Mr. Mxyzptlk, a prankster more like
the Norse Loki (“I started a joke that started the whole world crying.”) than
Marvel’s Loki ever was. These folks might not have costumes, either. Luthor
(Silver Age) just wore prison togs, while Mxyzptlk was anticipating hideous
Seventies leisure suits. They might be counterparts of real-life fiends like
Hitler (Per Degaton) or of movie monsters and villains (Solomon Grundy =
Frankenstein), the Yellow Claw and the Mandarin (= Fu Manchu).
The
super-crooks just gave the superhero more of a run for his money. They were
Kryptonite personified. By contrast, the true supervillain is more of an
exact counterpart to the superhero. This is most obvious in direct match-ups
like Iron Man versus the Titanium Man or the Crimson Dynamo. Thor versus Loki.
Dr. Strange versus Baron Mordo. Dr. Fate versus Wotan. Spiderman versus the
Tarantula or the Scorpion. Dynamo versus Dynavac. But even the ones that do not
exactly mirror the heroes (the Human Torch versus the Beetle, the Eel, the
Plant Man) still parallel superheroes and their typical origins so closely that
I think we ought to consider them “evil superheroes.” The supervillain
is usually a scientist or hapless person who stumbles onto some chemical,
electrical, radioactive or magical force that transforms him, the Destroyer and
the Juggernaut just as much as Thor. He may be a rank-and-file soldier or
operative. We have Steve Rogers on the one hand, Eric Josten and Boris Bullski
on the other. Radiation shows no favorites, imparting powers to hero
(Spiderman, the FF, Daredevil, the Hulk) and villain (Abomination, Leader,
Radioactive Man) alike, as does the natural selection of mutation.
Once
accidentally or experimentally endowed, the super-character designs a persona
with a stage name and costume to match, and he starts doing exploits. He may
strive to outdo his predecessors or to join them. And he will soon test his
mettle against a superhero. This is equally true of superheroes and
supervillains: conflicts with more established heroes is a vital rite of
initiation, so the reader may gauge his power relative to established
characters. Daredevil fights Spiderman, who himself fought the Fantastic Four
in his first issue. So why does the Beetle challenge the Human Torch? The
Tumbler Captain America? The Gladiator Daredevil? Perhaps not primarily because
the former in each pair is a villain, but rather just because he is super.
True Colors
Perhaps this equivalence of superheroes with supervillains
accounts for the dress code, the color-code, prevalent in Marvel Comics, where
heroes are usually clad in primary colors, while super-villains come dressed in
secondary colors. Isn’t it so? Primary color characters: Captain America,
Spiderman (at first purple, then blue), Dr. Strange, the FF, Iron Man, X-Men,
Thor, Daredevil (any costume). Secondary color characters: Green Goblin,
Vulture, Sandman, Mysterio, the Wrecker, Mr. Hyde, the Unicorn, Titanium Man,
Mr. Fear, Masked Marauder, Mesmero, Frightful Four, Purple Man, Modok, Mad
Thinker, Molecule Man, Loki, Dr. Doom, Electro, Dr. Octopus, Kraven, the
Lizard, the Scorpion, the Abomination, Merlin, Baron Mordo, Dormammu,
Scarecrow, the Super-Adaptoid, Batroc the Leaper, the Impossible Man, the
Growing Man, the Mole Man, the Porcupine, the Plant Man, the Radioactive Man,
Diablo, the Enchantress, the Living Laser, the Swordsman, the Mandarin, Hydra
agents.
By the
way, yellow can go either way, perhaps because though a primary color, it is
also commonly associated with cowardice, so take your pick. You see both sides
sporting it. I suspect this ambiguity accounts for the early change-over in
Daredevil’s costume: the man without fear was dressed in yellow?
Even
apparent anomalies often resolve themselves. The Hulk begins and remains
morally ambivalent. In the first issue, his skin is neutrally gray, his pants
heroic blue, but his shirt was villainous orange. When he loses the malevolent
orange threads, he gains evil purple pants and sinister green skin, still a
kind of hero-villain. Magneto is a combination of noble red and ignoble purple because
he is a Nietzschean superman. He is not altogether bad, as witnessed by his
eventual leadership of the X-Men (without it being an imaginary story). On the
cover, Mr. Fear has a goodly dose of primary blue, but on the inside of the
comic, he is all maroon and purple. The Eel begins in Strange Tales and
continues in X-Men with a mix of good blue and bad purple, but by the
time he joins Mr. Fear’s Fellowship of Fear in Daredevil, he is two
shades of outlaw green. The Vision has supervillainous green mismatched with
heroic primary red, but this is because he starts "life" as a weapon
of Ultron 5, hence a villain, and at once becomes a hero). Hercules is dressed
in secondary colors, but this fits if we do not lose sight of his origin as
Thor’s opponent, thus functionally a villain, at least at first. Quicksilver
started out with green when he served among the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants,
but changed to an appropriate blue after he joined the Avengers.
Galactus
and Thanos (from the Greek thanatos, death) combine good blue with evil
purple or orange, because both entities are really beyond good and evil,
symbolized by bearing both colors. Thanos is death, while (as Jack Kirby
explained) Galactus is simply God. The Crimson Dynamo and the Tumbler have the
“wrong” color scheme. But remember the Crimson Dynamo reformed and became Iron
Man’s ally, didn’t he? (Besides, as a Commie, what other color could he be?
Like the Marxist villain the Red Ghost, for Pyotr's sake.) And one might even
rationalize the Tumbler’s crimsonness since he is, for most of the story in
which he appears, fighting the Adaptoid, whom he thinks is Captain America; in
other words, though a villain himself, he sort of counts as a hero insofar as
he is fighting another villain. The Melter fist appears mismatching heroic blue
with villainous green, but his costume is later "corrected" to green
and orange.
The
second Black Knight (enemy of Giant Man and the Avengers) wore both purple and
blue because he was a Silver Age villain based on a Golden Age hero. Once Dane
Whitman took over for his late uncle, but as a hero, he eliminated the purple,
embracing all three primary colors. Captain Mar-Vell starts out green because
he represents the evil Kree (as does the green Ronin the Accuser), though not
for long, whereupon he dons red. The Kree Sentry is blue as well as evil
purple, because he is a police agent {albeit for the Kree), thus symbolically
at least partly good. The same goes for the Executioner: he is blue as well as
purple/pink because he is a disbarred justice official in Asgard, hence the
vestige of his former service to the good side. The Gladiator sports blue armor
(as well as gold and silver), but then he has that green sash around his waist
as if to remind us he is a villain after all.
Count
Nefaria originally hid his villainy behind neutral gray morning clothes: casual
observers would not know he was a villain. But when he gained superpowers he
donned a bold costume lacking any secondary colors. Why? The stark black/white
contrast is the first thing to hit the eye, while the use of a superheroic red
cape seems to be intended as mockery at the expense of the superheroes, all
helpless against him. He outdoes the superheroes, hence he wears a piece of
their design as icing on the cake, like a token of the vanquished.
I realize
the pattern doesn’t hold with complete consistency; it’s the large trends that
matter. Note that other companies’ heroes and villains do not so closely
approximate this code. DC has Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Sandman, Aquaman,
Martian Manhunter, Hawkman, Matter-Eater Lad, Colossal Boy, Shrinking Violet,
Robotman, all heroes wearing secondary hues. On the other hand, Darkseid, the
Penguin, Captain Cold, Boomerang, etc., would have no business wearing blue if
they lived in the Marvel Universe.
Demo(n)graphics
And just think of the number of villains! I
mentioned how adding super-villains varied the monotony of seeing one costume,
the hero’s, all the time. Once the dam broke, the number of meta-humans was in
no time heavily weighted to the side of the villains. After all, as lax as the
penal systems must have been in Metropolis or Gotham City, you could see the
Joker and the Penguin come back only so often! There had to be a great many
villains for each hero, just to keep him occupied! Just how darn many bad guys
there are becomes apparent only occasionally, as in the villain-besieged
wedding of Reed and Sue Richards or the Villain War during the Crisis on
Infinite Earths. And then you realize just how well populated Villain Valhalla
must be!
Symbolically,
whether intentional or not, this inflation of supervillain ranks changes the
underlying assumptions of the comics’ narrative universe. In the earliest days,
comics expressed a naive optimism. Sure, there were plenty of crooks, but with
a super-police force like Batman and Superman, good had to prevail. And with
the Justice Battalion and Captain America on the job, Hitler and his Ratzis
didn’t stand a chance. But once the number of super-villains equals and
surpasses the superhero population, we pass into a more Manichean vision of
things: Good and Evil are both powerful, neither all-powerful, and we have a
real struggle on our hands.
Other
developments have implicitly pushed the world picture of comics even further
than this into a kind of Lovecraftian pessimism. On the one hand, the endless
proliferation of alien races, all interested in adding the earth to their
trophy rooms (the Kree, the Skrulls, the Shiar, the Badoon, and their equally
numerous DC counterparts) imply an earth that is a favored piece of galactic
real estate, fought over by flying saucer competitors, a la Charles Fort, but
little more. We would be American Samoa for the Kree if not for the deus-ex-machina
rescues of the superheroes, and we get the definite impression, the closer a
call it becomes, that one day we will not be so easily bailed out. How can
people sleep at night knowing that earth will no doubt soon again be the object
of alien invaders--to say nothing of hostile Cosmic Powers like Darkseid, Galactus,
Thanos, and the Anti-Monitor?
I can
only venture a guess to explain this evolution of comic book villainy and moral
vision. Well, two guesses. First, simple inflation. How can we top last month’s
senses-shattering epic? After Dr. Doom, the Mad Thinker seems pretty lame, so
how about the Beyonder? Up and up it goes, till Galactus himself, like the
Gnostic Demiurge (theologically demoted from Godhood) is made to seem puny in
comparison to the Celestials (or is it the Eternals?).
Second,
as we grow up, and of course comic book readership does grow up with the Baby
Boomers, we find we can no longer take seriously even fantasies in which the
final victory of Good over Evil is assured. We need a cosmos truly at risk,
where Superman can be killed by Doomsday, where Galactus might destroy the
earth.
But the
most serious mutation of the comics’ moral universe is something I have already
anticipated, the near-equivalence of supervillains and superheroes, the
villains being in a sense evil superheroes. This similarity has long made
possible a swinging door between the two camps, with individual villains
becoming heroes: Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Magneto, Hawkeye, Wonder Man,
the Black Widow, the Swordsman, the Thunderbolts. That sort of change is positive,
redemptive. The fact that it happens fits my theory that super-villains are
really just another kind of superhero. We receive them this way and think they
are just as cool as their good guy counterparts. But we feel a little guilty
since, after all, they are villains! But if they were to switch sides, all
would be well! With enough letters to the editor, it works!
It gets
scary, however, when the door swings the other way. And more scary still when
there is so much traffic both ways that we lose direction and the door falls
off its hinges. This is when might has made right in the meta-human community,
and one can no longer find a relevant difference between the supervillains and
the superheroes. This, as you know, was the premise of Kingdom Come. It
parodied in general the dark anti-heroics of the Punisher, Rorshach, the Dark
Knight, and Miracleman. It parodied in particular the protagonists of
Image/Extreme/Maximum Comics in much the same way Alan Moore’s Image
mini-series Judgment Day did. “Heroes” had become judge-and-jury killing
machines like Supreme, Shadowhawk, etc., or cynical mercenaries (Brigade, Heavy
Mettle) and sinister government operatives (Youngblood, Bloodstryke). Moore
wanted comics to pull back to at least a Manichean vision where the sides could
be differentiated from each other!
Supervillains
have always provided a gauge with which to measure our favorite superheroes.
Just as, on the story level, the hero’s power will be tested in battle, so will
the very concept of hero be tested and defined by the sort of villain we pit
him against. Will it be a push-over thug? Or a mirror-image counterpart who puts
up a decent albeit futile fight? Or must the hero go up against hostile gods
and titans? Menaces that threaten the world, not just First National Bank of
Coast City? Or will the hero have to ask himself his justification (as Superman
does in Kingdom Come) for judging the actions of one so much like
himself? It is not a bad measuring stick to use on ourselves, to determine the
limits of our own strength of character: what does it take to stop us? To
define us?.