Heroes as Villains
Filed under: Comics
Having heroes turn into villains has only rarely been handled well. The payoffs — when it’ s done right — are memorable, but the ploy seems to fail (and usually fail spectacularly) far more often than it works. The most common explanations (amnesia, mind control, shape-shifter impersonation, mirror universe, vampire bite, evil clone) have never worked for me, it always seems superficial and not real.
Looking at my list, a few patterns emerge. A good hero/villain doesn’t necessarily need a good motivation (did Terra really have one besides money and disliking do-gooders?), but a bad motivation (trying to win an ex-husband back, for example) will kill any momentum. The revelation should come as a surprise, but there should be hints that all is not right if you go back and read the previous issues. Every hero is somebody’s favorite, so a hero-turned-villain, even handled well, is going to piss somebody off. Finally and most importantly, any hero/villain conversion as part of an event comic or mini-series is pretty much guaranteed to be bad.
(I’m not counting any villains turned heroes turned back to villains because that reversion to type seems inevitable. Magneto’s gone through the villain/hero/villain cycle at least 6 or 7 times alone. I’m also not counting Elseworlds or possible futures.)
Here’s my quick list of hero turned villains that have worked, or not worked for me (plus a few I’m not quite sure about). There may be some spoilers:
GOOD:
1. Terra from The New Teen Titans.
2. Dark Phoenix. I’m not counting the Black Queen aspect, as that falls under the mind control explanation I don’t care for, but Jean’s subsequent metamorphosis into Dark Phoenix was well done.
3. Runaways. (I don’t want to name names, since this is still a recent series.)
BAD:
1. Madeline Pryor
2. Monarch/Extant (Hawk)
3. Monarch (Captain Atom)
4. Alfred Pennyworth
5. Jean Loring
6. Maxwell Lord
7. Iron Man
8. Parallax
9. Triumph
10. Rusty, Skids
UNDECIDED:
1. Ozymandias in Watchmen. This never completely worked for me, mostly because I never had a good sense for who Ozymandias was, so why should the reveal be a surprise?
2. Atom Smasher.
3. Hulk. He’s coming back to take names and kick butt. But then, he’s been played as a villain many times before.
July 5th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Undecided nails it. The GOOD heel turns were all people that we knew long enough to care about, and their path to evil was planned over an equally long time. The BAD were people either created to be meaningless, or had entire continuities turned on a dime just to “shock” the reader. They are all a case of “Well, we don’t know what to do with [character x], so let’s turn them EVIL!!!” And it shows.
(Now what’s up with Rusty and Skids?!?)
July 5th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Eh, how about Hal Jordan? Well, he did turn good again (and died and became the Specter) later, but it counts right?
July 5th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Alfred Pennyworth? When did he turn evil?
July 6th, 2007 at 12:28 am
Hal Jordan was Parallax, whose evil turn in the comics was, as the list suggested, far worse than the movie.
Seriously, when did Alfred turn evil? I remember doctor Tompkins (how that didn’t make your list, I’m not sure - is it because she didn’t turn into a ‘villain’, just did one horrible out of character thing?), but what happened with Al?
I’m for putting Atom Smasher in the ‘Good’ column - mostly because I enjoyed having a character finally come out and ask why we shouldn’t just be killing these villains - after all, it’s not like you can rehabilitate Kobra. Plus, the storyline in JSA did a good job of showing how it was the (kind of unreasonable) attitudes of the other heroes that drove him to it.
As for the Hulk - I’m a hundred percent in favor of World War Hulk simply because we need someone to kick Iron Man’s ass, and it looks like there’s no one left but Hulk to do it. The only thing that bothers me about the series is the inevitable twist ending where it turns out that Miek and the Brood were the ones actually responsible for blowing up Hulk’s Planet, letting ‘the Illuminati’ off the hook.
July 6th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Alfred became the supervillainous (and telekinetic) Outsider in the mid-60s.
July 6th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Oh, and the reverse — villains becoming heroes — can be done just as well/poorly. I loved Busiek’s original run on Thunderbolts, though the title now makes me retch.
July 6th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Not to be pedantic or anything:
Before the whole “Eclipso” thing, I don’t think Jean Loring was at all “evil.” Sure, she went too far, she made a terrible mistake, she tried to cover up the mistake - but I don’t think she ever enjoyed the consequences of her actions. I don’t think she intended to be bad. She thought she was doing something reasonable, good even, and it got out of hand, so she freaked out, and more bad things happened. Happens all the time in True Crime style drama. So she (as I see it) was a tragic figure, not an evil one, in trying to win back her ex-husband.
It got silly later on (in other series, with other writers), but I don’t think the Jean Loring who wanted her ex to care about her was ever a ‘villain.’ A criminal, yes. But her motivation to become “evil” was shoved in later, and had to do with vengeance and Eclipso and all that, not Ray Palmer.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:12 am
BAD: Skeets.
BAD: Superboy Prime.
Both fit your “event” rule, of course.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Monarch (Atom)
That’s news to me. Are you saying that Aray Almerpay is the new
Onarchmay? (Mild spoiler protection, just in case.)
July 6th, 2007 at 8:03 am
I’m not convinced that Ozy’s “bad turn” is supposed to be a surprise. The surprise, I think, is the lengths to which he’s willing to go to save mankind. I say this because Moore puts enough hints and clues as to Ozy’s status in the early issues to make the reveal seem more a confirmation of what we subconsciously already know, than to make us go “Aha!”
July 6th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Official Comment
farsider,
Sorry, that should be “Captain Atom”, not “Atom”
July 6th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Official Comment
I should probably add Scarlet Witch to the BAD list as well (subclass: Event Comic).
July 6th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Heh. I was thinking of Runaways as I was reading this, as I only just finished vol.1 of the hardcover trade last night. Well played, Mr. Vaughn, you cheeky little monkey.
July 6th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Thanks, Scott. That would have been a little too much.
July 6th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
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.
July 6th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
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]
July 7th, 2007 at 12:05 am
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.
July 7th, 2007 at 8:40 am
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.
July 7th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Oops, shouldn’t have said “also” in that Monarch/Hawk comment. My eye totally skipped over him in the list.
July 9th, 2007 at 8:43 am
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.
July 9th, 2007 at 11:41 am
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
July 10th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
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.
July 13th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
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.
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