JohnLees
Thursday, October 07, 2010, 12:26 AM
Hey Clubbers! Or perhaps that should be, “Prepare to die, Clubbers! Bwahahahaha!” After all, the subject of today’s meeting is the comic book supervillain. Supervillains are every bit as important an innovation of the comic book world as their superhero counterparts, and have similar origins. While superheroes were influenced by the pulp fiction of the early 20th century, some of the first supervillains showed up earlier than that, in 19th century novels. Characters like Fu Manchu and Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes series introduced the idea of villains who operated on a grander scale than the regular antagonists of fiction up until that point. Fu Manchu was one of the first characters to establish what are now well-worn supervillain tropes, such as armies of colorful henchmen and plans for world domination, while Moriarty referred to himself as “the Napoleon of crime.” Considering the rise of the comic book superhero in the late 30s, it’s also worth considering a real-life inspiration for their arch foes. With schemes for world domination, nefarious deeds and an evil army at his disposal, Adolf Hitler could be called a prototype for the comic book supervillains that emerged soon after his rise to power. And since these beginnings, though it’s the superheroes that largely get the glory and the iconic status, it’s the supervillains who for the most part drive the plots and keep things moving forward. After all, a hero is only as good as his villain.
But as important as a supervillain’s role is in serving as the antagonist to the superhero, what happens when the supervillain shifts from antagonist to protagonist? Do these characters have the depth to move beyond a supporting role, and become the anchor for their own story? And if so, do they risk losing their identities as villains in the process?
Perhaps the most important, highly-acclaimed “villain comic” of all is The Killing Joke, by writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland. This was by no means the first comic book story to focus on a supervillain – The Joker himself had a short-lived ongoing series of his own during the 1970s – but I believe it set a new standard for just how deep you could explore these supervillains psychologically, and how writers could find new things to say about even the most tenured and familiar of comic book bad guys.
For long-term readers of this column, you’ll remember that I’ve brought up The Killing Joke before, in the first Open Forum. There, I singled it out as the one graphic novel I’d be most likely to give to a non-fanboy friend to introduce them to the world of comics, and also established that it’s my all-time favorite comic. When discussing the characterization of The Joker in the book, I said “The Killing Joke manages to simultaneously showcase The Joker at both his most tragically human and his most detestably monstrous.” Make no mistake about it, the actions committed by The Joker are vile and callous, with the motives behind them cruel and malicious. But juxtaposed against the backdrop of an origin story showing how The Joker came to be, everything he does becomes driven by intense feelings of hurt, lashing out against what he calls “life, and all its random injustice.” In his tormenting of Gordon, we see him project his own inner turmoil onto Gordon’s suffering:
How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is “not very well.” Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this… any other response would be crazy!
The ironic thing is, as much as he talks about life being pointless and meaningless, his entire scheme is, whether he realizes it or not, a search for meaning. He is seeking to prove that he turned out the way he is because that’s the way the world is, that no one else in the world is any better than he is, given the right circumstances. “Who can blame them?” But it’s a point The Joker ultimately fails to prove, as Gordon retains his sanity and stands by his principles, even after all the physical and psychological torture he has been put through. “So maybe ordinary people don’t always crack,” Batman tells The Joker, “Maybe it was just you, all this time.”
But whatever fascinating insights into the psyche of The Joker and his relationship with Batman The Killing Joke may offer, I must admit it may be a little bit of a cheat including it in this meeting, as The Joker isn’t really the protagonist. This is still a story about The Joker escaping Arkham Asylum, and Batman setting out to stop his latest nefarious deeds, and so the narrative is still framed by The Joker as Batman sees him. Yes, The Joker gets an abundance of panel-time, and yes, we get flashbacks of his past life, but throughout he still remains an enigma. We are kept at arms’ length from his thoughts and feelings, with no narration by The Joker to let us get any closer. I’ve noticed how rare it is for The Joker to ever get narration in any story. Even the recent Joker hardcover graphic novel opted to give us a surrogate protagonist to follow The Joker through. I like to think that it’s because his mind is too chaotic to ever hope to understand, that he works best when we can only guess what he’s thinking.
This unknowable quality even casts the origin story featured in The Killing Joke into doubt. In his afterword, Brian Bolland remarks that he “would never have chosen to reveal a Joker origin. I think of this as just one of a number of possible origin stories manifesting itself in the Joker’s fevered brain.” This is an idea Moore backs up in this famous, often-referenced line spoken by The Joker as he speculates on Batman’s past:
I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that… Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! HA HA HA!
Here, The Joker touches on the idea that his exact origin doesn’t really matter, and now he just is. If you make The Joker a fully rounded protagonist, if you get into his head, then you cheapen the character, he loses some of his power. One of my favorite quotes about The Dark Knight came from screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, who said that he liked to imagine The Joker just appeared out of thin air on that street corner seconds before the camera comes up behind him for the first time. He exists on an almost primal level as a counterpoint to Batman, the antithesis to all he stands for. He is inherently unknowable, always the other. It is said that everyone is the hero in their own story, but this is not the case for The Joker. The point that The Killing Joke concludes with is that even The Joker himself knows that Batman is the hero of his story, that he is eternally the villain.
Someone who most certainly does view themselves as the hero of their story is Lex Luthor. One story where this is clearly demonstrated is Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo. Here is a comic that does have the villain as the narrator, as most certainly its protagonist and central figure. We see that, in his own mind, he is justified in all he does, and it is Superman who is the true villain:
All men are created equal. All men. You are not a man… but they’ve made you their hero… and they worship you. So tell me… what redemption do you offer them? Those red eyes, I’m sure they look right through me, like I am nothing more than a nuisance. But when I see you? I see something no man can ever be. I see the end. The end of our potential. The end of our achievements. The end of our dreams. You are my nightmare. But even staring at you – the abyss – I am not afraid. Trust me – I’m not. Because whatever you have? I have more… I have hope.
During this confrontation with Superman, from the end of the graphic novel’s first chapter, Superman is dehumanized, portrayed with glowing red eyes and with his face cast into shadow. He looks frightening, monstrous, the way Luthor views him. Lex Luthor, meanwhile, portrays himself as the true champion of humanity. He constantly reiterates the idea that the human race is capable of great things, that throughout history they have always advanced and bettered themselves. But with the emergence of Superman, argues Luthor, humanity has been confronted by something it can never hope to live up to, that they will now just accept this alien as their superior rather than striving to reach for the sky themselves. But on top of this, Luthor argues that the danger of Superman is more than just symbolic or existential, but potentially more immediate. In conversation with Bruce Wayne, he tells him to “think about a hurricane with a will. Then multiple that intensity a thousand-fold.” When Bruce replies with “Good thing he’s on our side”, Luthor has this response:
What if he changes his mind? What if… tonight – he looks down at us and decides we’re not capable to manifest our own destiny? What if tomorrow he wakes up believing he knows what’s best for us? That it’s not enough to protect the world… when we can rule it? The only safeguard we have against that happening… is his word.
When expressed like this, Luthor’s viewpoint is understandable. A comic like Irredeemable demonstrates how easy it would be for someone as powerful as Superman to turn against the people he protects, and how devastating that would be for the world if that happened. But what’s effective about this book is that Lex’s narration, seeing the world through his eyes, it lures us in, lulls us into thinking of him as the hero of this story, the way he thinks of himself. We see some small acts of kindness towards his employees and start to question whether he’s really all that bad. But right from the very beginning of the story, the pieces are being set in place for him to betray or kill most of those supporting characters we’ve seen him apparently establish human connections with, culminating in a pointless act of violence and bloodshed so petty it makes Lex Luthor’s long-established villainy shocking to us all over again.
The face-to-face confrontation with Superman through his office window that closes the final chapter serves as a bookend to the similar scene that closed the first chapter. Only here, with Luthor’s true colors once more exposed, his rhetoric becomes empty, the words of a small, mean-spirited man. His words here (“There are six and a half billion of me… and only one of you.”) come across like those of a racist. Earlier in the book, Lex Luthor’s secretary, Mona, says, “You’re a bastard.” He responds with “No, Mona… I’m an idealist.” And this to me sums up the message behind Lex Luthor: Man of Steel - Lex Luthor is a bastard who thinks he’s an idealist.
This idea of a self-justifying Luthor has been prevalent in quite a few stories of recent years. One of the things Smallville has been praised for getting right was its portrayal of a sympathetic Luthor futilely railing against his practically predestined descent into wickedness. In alternate origin story Superman: Birthright, we see Lex Luthor as a deluded would-be savior of humanity. In current comics continuity, Geoff Johns and Paul Cornell have both explored the notion of Lex Luthor’s jealousy, his deeply-hidden desire to be Superman.
What does this say about the character and his current place in pop culture? Commenting on the ever-evolving nature of the character in the TV show Inked! Alter Egos Exposed, Douglas Wolk remarked, “In the 40s and 50s, Lex Luthor was a mad scientist because Americans were terrified of science. In the 80s, Americans are very happy with science, there’s a tech-boom going on. What are they scared of? They’re scared of rich people. In the last few years, what are Americans scared of? We are terrified of our Government. So Lex Luthor becomes President of the United States.” And now? Lex isn’t President anymore, and America has a new Government. What are we afraid of now? What if it’s ourselves? I think Grant Morrison has had some of the best observations about the character. In Part 5 of the “All Star Memories” interview series on Newsarama, Morrison came to this conclusion:
I see him as a very human character – Superman is us at our best, Luthor is us when we’re being mean, vindictive, petty, deluded and angry… However he’s played, Luthor is the male power fantasy gone wrong and turned sour. You’ve got everything you want but it’s not enough because someone has more, someone is better, someone is cleverer or more handsome.
So, in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Lex Luthor is the protagonist, but he is no hero. Though we see the narrative from his perspective, and get a deeper understanding of his motivations, the story stops short of allowing us to sympathize with him. In the end, he remains unquestionably a villain. Interestingly, Paul Cornell’s current storyline in Action Comics is toying with the idea of a more heroic Lex, with Superman out of the picture and Luthor battling other supervillains in his quest for knowledge. The character is still egotistical and ruthless, but thus far the victims of this ruthlessness have largely been other bad people, and as he does battle against supervillains that ostensibly far outmatch him, we can’t help but root for him. And we realize that, however powerful these other villains might be, Lex Luthor is the guy who regularly goes toe-to-toe with Superman. To do that takes guts, however evil you might be. I’m intrigued to see where this story goes, and what conclusion Cornell draws on Lex Luthor once it has wrapped up.
[/IMG]
Loki, by writer Robert Rodi and artist Esad Ribic, takes the idea of the “supervillain comic” to another level of complexity by not only having its eponymous villain as the protagonist whose eyes we see events through, and not only having him think of himself as the hero, but by crafting a story where we find ourselves questioning if he really is the villain, and even if he, whether or not he’s to blame for his standing.
The story begins with Loki’s latest diabolical plan to conquer Asgard having actually proved successful, with Loki finally succeeding in his goals and finding himself as ruler of Asgard at last. In these opening pages he is all arrogance and cackling malevolent glee over finally achieving victory. But soon, Loki is faced with getting on with the mundane responsibility of actually being a competent, dutiful ruler of his new kingdom. As he visits his various fallen prisoners – the heroes of your typical Thor comic, such as Odin, Balder, Sif and Thor himself – we are given glimpses of their uglier sides, various ways they were cruel or dismissive of Loki in the past, what they did to earn his hatred. This culminates with him confronting Odin in the third chapter, where he accuses his adopted father of grooming him from infancy for the role he would become known for:
Simply this, then: how best to make a hero? Give him a means by which he might define himself so. Set up a field of black against which his white will be yet more blinding… Yes, I speak of Thor, my stepbrother, filled with energy and ambition. How to mold him according to your will? Why, mold a villain alongside him. Take into your bosom a small and helpless babe. Prod him with temptation. Reward him with ridicule. Expect the very worst from him and refuse to see any good, lest it flourish thereby.
Indeed, this is one of the central questions of Loki: was Loki born bad, or was he made that way by others assuming this was the role he was born to play? Sif offers perhaps the most concise answer to this question, when she tells Loki on the fourth page of the second chapter, “I saw from the first what you were, and said so… you but did the favor of showing me to be right.” But as the narrative unfolds, this question becomes something bigger than a “nature VS nurture” argument, getting into ideas of predestination, as Loki learns of an infinite number of Lokis and Thors across infinite realities, with all ending up the same way, and so discovers his role and fate are laid out inescapably before him. Loki is told that he’s not simply a villain because he chooses to be, or even because he was raised to be, but because he was destined to be.
But with this knowledge, accompanied by a realization that he still loves Thor (perhaps more than as a brother) and doesn’t want him to die, Loki seeks out to break the cycle and show he does not need to follow destiny’s plan for him to be a villain. With Thor imprisoned and awaiting execution, Loki plans to release him and reconcile with him, wondering what his new role could be:
One who would again be his brother. We did love each other once, before the noxious insinuations of his vixen and fellows-at-arms… and before the machinations of the All-Father compelled us in opposing directions. Thor believes much evil of me because he has been bred and led to do so. I cannot fault him… for I so believed it of myself. But now… how can he doubt me? To have his life in my hands… and give it back. Damn the fates, how can he possibly doubt me?
But before he can enact his plan, Thor escapes captivity. Loki tries to explain to him what he has learn, pleads with him to help him break the cycle rather than falling back into his usual role and in turn forcing Loki back into his. But Thor responds as he always responds, how he was destined to always respond: he hits his enemy with his big hammer. Only this time round, it feels tragic and damning rather than triumphant.
Respectively, The Killing Joke, Lex Luthor: Man of Steel and Loki show that a villain can be a deep character, a compelling protagonist, or even a sympathetic figure. But what all of these stories show in their own way is that these supervillains are defined by the superheroes they are set against, that one gives the other meaning and purpose. They might get the occasional chance at playing the main character, but so long as Batman, Superman and Thor are around, The Joker, Lex Luthor and Loki will remain supervillains.
Meeting #36
You asked for it, and next time you’ll get it. We’re going to have an overview of the entire Scott Pilgrim series, examining the key themes and ideas that drive the story, and speculating on what lies behind its appeal.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Scott Pilgrim VS the World
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim VS the Universe
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Meeting #37
Making Comics
Zot!
But as important as a supervillain’s role is in serving as the antagonist to the superhero, what happens when the supervillain shifts from antagonist to protagonist? Do these characters have the depth to move beyond a supporting role, and become the anchor for their own story? And if so, do they risk losing their identities as villains in the process?
Perhaps the most important, highly-acclaimed “villain comic” of all is The Killing Joke, by writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland. This was by no means the first comic book story to focus on a supervillain – The Joker himself had a short-lived ongoing series of his own during the 1970s – but I believe it set a new standard for just how deep you could explore these supervillains psychologically, and how writers could find new things to say about even the most tenured and familiar of comic book bad guys.
For long-term readers of this column, you’ll remember that I’ve brought up The Killing Joke before, in the first Open Forum. There, I singled it out as the one graphic novel I’d be most likely to give to a non-fanboy friend to introduce them to the world of comics, and also established that it’s my all-time favorite comic. When discussing the characterization of The Joker in the book, I said “The Killing Joke manages to simultaneously showcase The Joker at both his most tragically human and his most detestably monstrous.” Make no mistake about it, the actions committed by The Joker are vile and callous, with the motives behind them cruel and malicious. But juxtaposed against the backdrop of an origin story showing how The Joker came to be, everything he does becomes driven by intense feelings of hurt, lashing out against what he calls “life, and all its random injustice.” In his tormenting of Gordon, we see him project his own inner turmoil onto Gordon’s suffering:
How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is “not very well.” Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this… any other response would be crazy!
The ironic thing is, as much as he talks about life being pointless and meaningless, his entire scheme is, whether he realizes it or not, a search for meaning. He is seeking to prove that he turned out the way he is because that’s the way the world is, that no one else in the world is any better than he is, given the right circumstances. “Who can blame them?” But it’s a point The Joker ultimately fails to prove, as Gordon retains his sanity and stands by his principles, even after all the physical and psychological torture he has been put through. “So maybe ordinary people don’t always crack,” Batman tells The Joker, “Maybe it was just you, all this time.”
But whatever fascinating insights into the psyche of The Joker and his relationship with Batman The Killing Joke may offer, I must admit it may be a little bit of a cheat including it in this meeting, as The Joker isn’t really the protagonist. This is still a story about The Joker escaping Arkham Asylum, and Batman setting out to stop his latest nefarious deeds, and so the narrative is still framed by The Joker as Batman sees him. Yes, The Joker gets an abundance of panel-time, and yes, we get flashbacks of his past life, but throughout he still remains an enigma. We are kept at arms’ length from his thoughts and feelings, with no narration by The Joker to let us get any closer. I’ve noticed how rare it is for The Joker to ever get narration in any story. Even the recent Joker hardcover graphic novel opted to give us a surrogate protagonist to follow The Joker through. I like to think that it’s because his mind is too chaotic to ever hope to understand, that he works best when we can only guess what he’s thinking.
This unknowable quality even casts the origin story featured in The Killing Joke into doubt. In his afterword, Brian Bolland remarks that he “would never have chosen to reveal a Joker origin. I think of this as just one of a number of possible origin stories manifesting itself in the Joker’s fevered brain.” This is an idea Moore backs up in this famous, often-referenced line spoken by The Joker as he speculates on Batman’s past:
I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that… Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! HA HA HA!
Here, The Joker touches on the idea that his exact origin doesn’t really matter, and now he just is. If you make The Joker a fully rounded protagonist, if you get into his head, then you cheapen the character, he loses some of his power. One of my favorite quotes about The Dark Knight came from screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, who said that he liked to imagine The Joker just appeared out of thin air on that street corner seconds before the camera comes up behind him for the first time. He exists on an almost primal level as a counterpoint to Batman, the antithesis to all he stands for. He is inherently unknowable, always the other. It is said that everyone is the hero in their own story, but this is not the case for The Joker. The point that The Killing Joke concludes with is that even The Joker himself knows that Batman is the hero of his story, that he is eternally the villain.
Someone who most certainly does view themselves as the hero of their story is Lex Luthor. One story where this is clearly demonstrated is Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo. Here is a comic that does have the villain as the narrator, as most certainly its protagonist and central figure. We see that, in his own mind, he is justified in all he does, and it is Superman who is the true villain:
All men are created equal. All men. You are not a man… but they’ve made you their hero… and they worship you. So tell me… what redemption do you offer them? Those red eyes, I’m sure they look right through me, like I am nothing more than a nuisance. But when I see you? I see something no man can ever be. I see the end. The end of our potential. The end of our achievements. The end of our dreams. You are my nightmare. But even staring at you – the abyss – I am not afraid. Trust me – I’m not. Because whatever you have? I have more… I have hope.
During this confrontation with Superman, from the end of the graphic novel’s first chapter, Superman is dehumanized, portrayed with glowing red eyes and with his face cast into shadow. He looks frightening, monstrous, the way Luthor views him. Lex Luthor, meanwhile, portrays himself as the true champion of humanity. He constantly reiterates the idea that the human race is capable of great things, that throughout history they have always advanced and bettered themselves. But with the emergence of Superman, argues Luthor, humanity has been confronted by something it can never hope to live up to, that they will now just accept this alien as their superior rather than striving to reach for the sky themselves. But on top of this, Luthor argues that the danger of Superman is more than just symbolic or existential, but potentially more immediate. In conversation with Bruce Wayne, he tells him to “think about a hurricane with a will. Then multiple that intensity a thousand-fold.” When Bruce replies with “Good thing he’s on our side”, Luthor has this response:
What if he changes his mind? What if… tonight – he looks down at us and decides we’re not capable to manifest our own destiny? What if tomorrow he wakes up believing he knows what’s best for us? That it’s not enough to protect the world… when we can rule it? The only safeguard we have against that happening… is his word.
When expressed like this, Luthor’s viewpoint is understandable. A comic like Irredeemable demonstrates how easy it would be for someone as powerful as Superman to turn against the people he protects, and how devastating that would be for the world if that happened. But what’s effective about this book is that Lex’s narration, seeing the world through his eyes, it lures us in, lulls us into thinking of him as the hero of this story, the way he thinks of himself. We see some small acts of kindness towards his employees and start to question whether he’s really all that bad. But right from the very beginning of the story, the pieces are being set in place for him to betray or kill most of those supporting characters we’ve seen him apparently establish human connections with, culminating in a pointless act of violence and bloodshed so petty it makes Lex Luthor’s long-established villainy shocking to us all over again.
The face-to-face confrontation with Superman through his office window that closes the final chapter serves as a bookend to the similar scene that closed the first chapter. Only here, with Luthor’s true colors once more exposed, his rhetoric becomes empty, the words of a small, mean-spirited man. His words here (“There are six and a half billion of me… and only one of you.”) come across like those of a racist. Earlier in the book, Lex Luthor’s secretary, Mona, says, “You’re a bastard.” He responds with “No, Mona… I’m an idealist.” And this to me sums up the message behind Lex Luthor: Man of Steel - Lex Luthor is a bastard who thinks he’s an idealist.
This idea of a self-justifying Luthor has been prevalent in quite a few stories of recent years. One of the things Smallville has been praised for getting right was its portrayal of a sympathetic Luthor futilely railing against his practically predestined descent into wickedness. In alternate origin story Superman: Birthright, we see Lex Luthor as a deluded would-be savior of humanity. In current comics continuity, Geoff Johns and Paul Cornell have both explored the notion of Lex Luthor’s jealousy, his deeply-hidden desire to be Superman.
What does this say about the character and his current place in pop culture? Commenting on the ever-evolving nature of the character in the TV show Inked! Alter Egos Exposed, Douglas Wolk remarked, “In the 40s and 50s, Lex Luthor was a mad scientist because Americans were terrified of science. In the 80s, Americans are very happy with science, there’s a tech-boom going on. What are they scared of? They’re scared of rich people. In the last few years, what are Americans scared of? We are terrified of our Government. So Lex Luthor becomes President of the United States.” And now? Lex isn’t President anymore, and America has a new Government. What are we afraid of now? What if it’s ourselves? I think Grant Morrison has had some of the best observations about the character. In Part 5 of the “All Star Memories” interview series on Newsarama, Morrison came to this conclusion:
I see him as a very human character – Superman is us at our best, Luthor is us when we’re being mean, vindictive, petty, deluded and angry… However he’s played, Luthor is the male power fantasy gone wrong and turned sour. You’ve got everything you want but it’s not enough because someone has more, someone is better, someone is cleverer or more handsome.
So, in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Lex Luthor is the protagonist, but he is no hero. Though we see the narrative from his perspective, and get a deeper understanding of his motivations, the story stops short of allowing us to sympathize with him. In the end, he remains unquestionably a villain. Interestingly, Paul Cornell’s current storyline in Action Comics is toying with the idea of a more heroic Lex, with Superman out of the picture and Luthor battling other supervillains in his quest for knowledge. The character is still egotistical and ruthless, but thus far the victims of this ruthlessness have largely been other bad people, and as he does battle against supervillains that ostensibly far outmatch him, we can’t help but root for him. And we realize that, however powerful these other villains might be, Lex Luthor is the guy who regularly goes toe-to-toe with Superman. To do that takes guts, however evil you might be. I’m intrigued to see where this story goes, and what conclusion Cornell draws on Lex Luthor once it has wrapped up.
[/IMG]
Loki, by writer Robert Rodi and artist Esad Ribic, takes the idea of the “supervillain comic” to another level of complexity by not only having its eponymous villain as the protagonist whose eyes we see events through, and not only having him think of himself as the hero, but by crafting a story where we find ourselves questioning if he really is the villain, and even if he, whether or not he’s to blame for his standing.
The story begins with Loki’s latest diabolical plan to conquer Asgard having actually proved successful, with Loki finally succeeding in his goals and finding himself as ruler of Asgard at last. In these opening pages he is all arrogance and cackling malevolent glee over finally achieving victory. But soon, Loki is faced with getting on with the mundane responsibility of actually being a competent, dutiful ruler of his new kingdom. As he visits his various fallen prisoners – the heroes of your typical Thor comic, such as Odin, Balder, Sif and Thor himself – we are given glimpses of their uglier sides, various ways they were cruel or dismissive of Loki in the past, what they did to earn his hatred. This culminates with him confronting Odin in the third chapter, where he accuses his adopted father of grooming him from infancy for the role he would become known for:
Simply this, then: how best to make a hero? Give him a means by which he might define himself so. Set up a field of black against which his white will be yet more blinding… Yes, I speak of Thor, my stepbrother, filled with energy and ambition. How to mold him according to your will? Why, mold a villain alongside him. Take into your bosom a small and helpless babe. Prod him with temptation. Reward him with ridicule. Expect the very worst from him and refuse to see any good, lest it flourish thereby.
Indeed, this is one of the central questions of Loki: was Loki born bad, or was he made that way by others assuming this was the role he was born to play? Sif offers perhaps the most concise answer to this question, when she tells Loki on the fourth page of the second chapter, “I saw from the first what you were, and said so… you but did the favor of showing me to be right.” But as the narrative unfolds, this question becomes something bigger than a “nature VS nurture” argument, getting into ideas of predestination, as Loki learns of an infinite number of Lokis and Thors across infinite realities, with all ending up the same way, and so discovers his role and fate are laid out inescapably before him. Loki is told that he’s not simply a villain because he chooses to be, or even because he was raised to be, but because he was destined to be.
But with this knowledge, accompanied by a realization that he still loves Thor (perhaps more than as a brother) and doesn’t want him to die, Loki seeks out to break the cycle and show he does not need to follow destiny’s plan for him to be a villain. With Thor imprisoned and awaiting execution, Loki plans to release him and reconcile with him, wondering what his new role could be:
One who would again be his brother. We did love each other once, before the noxious insinuations of his vixen and fellows-at-arms… and before the machinations of the All-Father compelled us in opposing directions. Thor believes much evil of me because he has been bred and led to do so. I cannot fault him… for I so believed it of myself. But now… how can he doubt me? To have his life in my hands… and give it back. Damn the fates, how can he possibly doubt me?
But before he can enact his plan, Thor escapes captivity. Loki tries to explain to him what he has learn, pleads with him to help him break the cycle rather than falling back into his usual role and in turn forcing Loki back into his. But Thor responds as he always responds, how he was destined to always respond: he hits his enemy with his big hammer. Only this time round, it feels tragic and damning rather than triumphant.
Respectively, The Killing Joke, Lex Luthor: Man of Steel and Loki show that a villain can be a deep character, a compelling protagonist, or even a sympathetic figure. But what all of these stories show in their own way is that these supervillains are defined by the superheroes they are set against, that one gives the other meaning and purpose. They might get the occasional chance at playing the main character, but so long as Batman, Superman and Thor are around, The Joker, Lex Luthor and Loki will remain supervillains.
Meeting #36
You asked for it, and next time you’ll get it. We’re going to have an overview of the entire Scott Pilgrim series, examining the key themes and ideas that drive the story, and speculating on what lies behind its appeal.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Scott Pilgrim VS the World
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim VS the Universe
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
Bryan Lee O’Malley
Meeting #37
Making Comics
Zot!