I’ll take a shot at this one.
Imagine, if you will, a… OK, let’s say a supervillain. We’ll call him Doctor Interception . Now, by supervillain standards, he’s really quite good. Coupla really ingenious bank jobs early on, fair bit of murder and mayhem, and actually slaughtered a superhero once. Of course, it was Hawkeye from the West Coast Avengers that he slaughtered, not Spider Man. And other supervillains have managed to slaughter, oh, three or four. And at times he makes some really horrible mistakes, the kind of mistakes that even your average purse snatcher can avoid. He routinely orders his enemies left alive “so they can witness [Doctor Interception’s] triumph,” for instance. But OK, our supervillain is really pretty skilled at his job, and his Legions of Doom love him to pieces (at least, as much as Legions of Doom can love a man).
Now imagine that the newspapers take an interest in Doctor Interception’s career. And for a while, their discussion of his work is about appropriate for his accomplishments. He’s described as a “menace” and a “thorn in the side of [the city’s] heroes,” and that seems about right. But then, after a few years and a few evil schemes, some successful and some less so, you start to notice a change. Suddenly, they’re writing about him as if he has a hundred dead superheroes to his credit. They’re referring to him as a “Master of Evil” and a “Diabolic Genius.” Worse still, eventually the stories stop concentrating even on his actual performance as a villain. Writers start tripping over their own elaborate prose describing his rugged stubble, and even when he forgets to properly load his death ray and gets caught by a junior superhero sidekick, all anyone can talk about is “how much Doctor Interception was enjoying himself burning down that orphanage.”
But it gets worse. One particular columnist, one who, mostly, writes well and provides intelligent commentary on the art of murder and mayhem, falls completely in love with Doctor Interception, and devotes endless column inches to the kind of thing you’d be embarassed to find in Penthouse. This columnist is quite popular, and deservedly so, but he abandons all reason in his frantic effort to become Doctor Interception’s boot-licking sex slave, and in the process makes his work exponentially less valuable each week.
And then, one year, after yet another humiliating defeat at the hands of, like, Alpha Flight, Doctor Interception decides he’s quitting for good. But then he changes his mind. He repeats this process yearly for an estimated 1.21 billion years, and each year, his Chief Henchman - who is waiting to take over the Evil Empire - suffers crushing disappointment. Finally, one year, the shareholders at the Evil Empire - who by the way have been in business way longer than Doctor Interception, and took out a metric assload of superheroes before Doctor Interception was even stealing Payday candy from the Quik-E-Mart, thanks so much, decide that maybe it’s time for Chief Henchman to have his chance. So when Doctor Interception says, “I quit,” again, the Evil Empire finally says, “OK,” and moves on without him.
When, a few months later, Doctor Interception decides he wants to kill some more and the Evil Empire suggests that maybe this wouldn’t be the optimal outcome for them but they’re open to it, but don’t offer him free blowjobs from everyone in the Empire up to and including Chief Henchman, the whole world goes nuts. We get to hear some more about how rugged and populist and just all-around fucking awesome Doctor I is and has always been, and how he MADE the Evil Empire (which was killing its first superhero some years before Dr. I was even born), and how DARE they, and, by the way, Doctor Interception, I think I think I love you.
But there’s more. The Evil Empire finally says, “hey, Dr. I, come on back and work with us. Again, we’re not thrilled, but here’s a check for $14 million.” But Dr. I, who is so tough and rugged and wonderful, decides that the only place he wants to be is a member of the X-men, who have been the sworn enemies of the Evil Empire for decades. The Evil Empire manages to ship him off to Avengers West Coast, instead, and he goes, but he whines like a Pomeranian the whole way.
Then he gets there, and in his first mission, the team barely survives their encounter with the likes of Mysterio, for God’s sake, and Dr. Interception very nearly dooms them all by his lonesome. In the second mission, they’re wiped out completely, thansk in part to Dr. Interception fucking up the safety on the Death Ray again. And then, on Monday morning, here come the articles, again, ignoring what actually happened to focus on Doctor Interception’s motherfuckcunting facial stubble.
Don’t you kind of want to hit Doctor Interception in the head with a rock right now?
That’s Brett Favre.
