I know almost zilch about comics, so I turn to the source of all wisdom.
For a couple lines of dialog in a story about something else entirely, I need the names of at least two comic book characters with the stereotypical ‘enlarged head signifying super intelligence’ appearance. These characters wouldn’t have to be top rank famous, but hopefully they wouldn’t be totally obscure, one-issue wonders.
For my purposes, I need at least one who was aligned with ‘evil’ and one with ‘good’, and having a good/evil pair coming from the same, uh, universe? would be perfection.
Hammond’s not especially intelligent, though, is he? (Not stupid, but not exceptional, either.) He falls into what is, in my experience, a more common ‘big head’ - psychic powers. He, Psycho Lad, and Psimon, as examples that spring to mind immediately.
I suspect good big-head characters are going to be rarer in comic books, because as we all know intellectualism is always suspect, while being able to punch someone’s lights out is as American as apple pie.
I totally disagree, considering so many heroic characters are known for their intellect: Batman, Oracle, Iron Man, Mister Fantastic, Professor X, Beast, the Atom (II and IV), Steel, Mister Terrific, Blue Beetle II, and many others.
I think it has more to do with the fact that physical beauty has always gone hand in hand with heroism and virtue in comics and popular fiction in general. Conversely, villains are much more likely than heroes to be physically twisted, disfigured, or deformed in some way, to mirror their twisted and evil mental states: the Joker, Two-Face, Dr. Doom, Red Skull, Baron Zemo, and so many more. The movie Unbreakable also touched on this in an interesting way. I’ve done some formal research on different models of disability theory as applied to popular culture, and the moral model of disability theory seems to be the dominant model throughout fiction and literature: people with disabilities (and more unrealistic deformities as presented in comic books) are too often presented as bitter, angry, and jealous of the able-bodied majority.
Redmond, the CEO of the “MacroShaft” corporation in the comic book Astounding Space Thrills, has an elongated transparent skull with three brains inside. He’s sort of neither evil nor good (as I recall; the comic hasn’t come out in years) and not a genius, but that’s one.
The Green Lantern villain Hector Hammond has the stereotyped image you seek.
On preview I see someone beat me to Hector Hammond. Okay, but I’m still first with Redmond.
And Psimon, it depends whose drawing him, but in his earliest appearances, the clear portion of his head, and the brain contained within, are noticeably outsized. See here, for an example. Even the way he’s usually drawn now, his head is typically shown somewhat bigger than an average person’s.
Hmmm, on the lack of Good Guy Big Heads. See, in my story a couple of nerdy high school boys have just seen a neighbor’s new baby, and they feel the kid has a freakishly large head, and are speculating on what he’ll turn out to be like. I was going for Good vs. Evil, but I think Evil vs. Psychic powers will work okay.
Thanks for coming thru, guys! ::heads off to check out links::
