Comments on: Heroes as Villains

By: Yankee Jones

Yankee Jones — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:07:25 +0000

I would place Element Lad turning evil in Legion Lost in the good column. It served a good story and was well thought out and logical.

By: Lis Riba

Lis Riba — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:09:50 +0000

I think I’ve read comments by Wolfman/Perez that they don’t really consider Terra a hero turned villain, because she was never truly a hero to begin with. She was always a villain from day one.

By: SanctumSanctorumComix

SanctumSanctorumComix — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:41:03 +0000

I can accept SCARLET WITCH’s descent to madness, because as a looooong-time fan of the character, se’s been manipulated SO. MANY. TIMES. that her brain has GOT to be made of tapioca pudding by now.
Add to that, the fact that her powers have ALWAYS been portrayed as being waay to undefined, unpredictable and powerful.

Looking back at her publication history, it really come as a suprise why she didn’t go completely bat-$#!T insane years ago.

———-

As for HULK, he’s not really the villain since he thinks that the Illuminati set up a bomb to blow up when he was on the new world.

He truly thinks that THEY are responsible for killing his people, wife and unborn child.
(When we ALL know that it was Meik & Brood who tampered with it while they were “gettin’ in ON!” in that scene several issues ago.)

———

Just MY 2-cents. No one has to believe that I’m right.

~P~
P-TOR

By: Matthew E

Matthew E — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:43:21 +0000

In the ‘Five Years Later’ series, the Legion of Super-Heroes got pretty chummy with their old rogues’ gallery. Polar Boy tutored Evillo’s daughters, Matter-Eater Lad married Saturn Queen, Spider Girl joined the Legion, Cosmic Boy had a nice dinner with Mordru, Invisible Kid and the Subs worked together with Universo and Ron-Karr against the Dominators… the boundaries between good guy and bad guy were getting pretty blurry.

But the one thing that happened along those lines that was the most shocking was that Tellus seemed to join the Dark Circle. I don’t think much was ever made of this, but his motivation seemed to be political.

By: Siskoid

Siskoid — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 13:42:06 +0000

Oops, shouldn’t have said “also” in that Monarch/Hawk comment. My eye totally skipped over him in the list.

By: Siskoid

Siskoid — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 13:40:57 +0000

Monarch (Hawk) should also be included in the bad. I originally could see, yes, how Captain could become Monarch in 10 years’ time (2001). When DC decided to change gears (and eye color) due to a leak in Monarch’s identity AND in any case jumpstart Monarch’s beginnings to today (1991), it stopped making sense.

Recently, the Pied Piper’s return to villainy seems ridiculous by contradicting all previous characterization.

Yes on Scarlet Witch, yes on Superboy-Prime, yes on Batgirl II. I think it’s worse when they do this to a high profile character. There’s usually too large a backlog of stories that characterize the hero an unimpeachable. So Green Lantern is the worst of offenses in this category.

I don’t mind Jean Loring so much, she was always a jerk, but whatever. The Hulk started as a villain, and “smart (gray) Hulk” has always been, at the very least, an anti-hero. WWH isn’t a reversal, in my opinion. If Bruce Banner turned bad, yes. The Mr. Hyde personality is already bad.

By: Pizzapotamus

Pizzapotamus — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 05:05:35 +0000

And they only killed Alfred so they could bring in Aunt Harriet with the idea that a female presence would make Bruce and his “ward” living together in that big out of the way mansion less suspicious. Poor Alfred.

By: Marionette

Marionette — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:58:48 +0000

Batgirl heavily into the bad category because it was so poorly set up, unconvincing, and inconsistent, and then given a get out so contrived that “It was a skrull” would have worked better.

Alfred was killed off in the early sixties and brought back again as the mysterious Outsider who had been tediously plaguing Batman for months. I’m not convinced that the two were intended to be the same character, but they needed Alfred back because he was going to be in the TV show. The stories can be found in the two Batman Showcase collections on sale now! [end of commercial]

By: Cloud Commando

Cloud Commando — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:43:48 +0000

Rusty and Skids are a strange case. They were great teenage sidekicks to the original
X-Factor back in the 80s. Rusty, Skids, Rictor, Boom-Boom, Artie, and Leech were the kids
being trained by the older mutants, running around and getting into trouble, going through
lots and lots of teenage angst, and each in their own way struggling with a difficult past,
controlling their powers, and their social status as mutants. They were almost like another
group of New Mutants. Eventually they were absorbed into the New Mutants (once X-Factor stopped
believing that a) The X-Men had sold out to ally with Magneto and b) the X-Men were dead) but for
some reason Rusty and Skids were left out. Then they got kidnapped by the Mutant Liberation
Front. That was a story that never went anywhere and didn’t get resolved for YEARS. I was all like,
“Um, so…the cool kid with the flame powers and his slippery force-field generating girlfriend…
um, is anybody going to rescue them…show at least a little concern for them…hello? Hello?”

They were brainwashed to work for Stryfe and the MLF.
They were freed from their brainwashing by Magneto. But rather than go running back to their
old friends, they join up with Magneto, causing all readers who remembered who the heck they were to
do a collective “WHAT THE…?” It was obvious Marvel had no clue what to do with either one of them.
Meanwhile, we wished that they would hire Louise and Walter Simonson back so SOMETHING would be done
with Rusty and Skids. Then Rusty got killed by Holocaust (his character was so marginalized by then
that the death carried no emotional resonance whatsoever) and Skids is in limbo.

The whole thing makes me wish the characters had either been forgotten or shoved to the sidelines
(much like Polaris and Havok for much of the 1970s-1980s) rather than go through such mishandling.

By: farsider

farsider — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:38:56 +0000

Thanks, Scott. That would have been a little too much.