What Happened to Supervillains?
mark roth-whitworth, 2018
I’ve just written a short story, and one of the premises is that real superheros would not, as Tom Smith sings, “be out bashin’ baddies in their BVDs”. What just struck me is that some of the supervillians have become far more believable. The best example is, of course, Lex Luthor. Look at the Lex of the comics in the seventies and eighties, and the first Superman movie: he keeps looking for ways to make money fast, and gain his own superpowers, including an Iron-man style power suit.
Then came the DC Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the aftermath, Lex was none of that. Instead, he was a billionaire, who hired people to do things, or made them do things. The way he used his all-female direct support staff showed just how evil he was.
So, why did the superheros never make that jump?
I can only assume that, even though several times over the decades, the comics realized that most of their audience were no longer early teens, and went to serious stories.. then back to bashing. Makes a fun, brainless movie, but any real thought makes so much of it absurd. The most obvious example of this would be Green Lantern. He’s still going around creating giant green fists with his power ring. At least to me, the most obvious thing in the world for him to do would be something along the lines of “Oh, here come some baddies,” and the next thing baddies know, they’re completely surrounded by a force field… and can’t breath, pass out, and our hero can use the ring to disarm and bind them, and hand them to the authorities.
Another example would be the Batman. He’s supposed to be brilliant, and a billionaire, and yet doesn’t seem to have any way to track his villians movements of money, or hiring, the way Holmes did with the Baker Street Irregulars. Instead, he has to do everything himself, and then go bash the baddies.
The superheroes just don’t do much in the way of actual teamwork. Maybe there should be one who does hire those newly come into superpowers, or who want to be costumed heroes, and train them… then let *them* go out and bash the baddies.
Perhaps it’s time for low and mid-level heroes who work for the “superheros” to have their chance in the sun.