When I was around eleven or so, I began to lose interest in comic books because I found the super-villains’ motivations weak. After all, even the most selfish, greedy villains in the world would need to be motivated by more than a sick desire to harm people and to devote their whole lives to that end. I began to wonder if even Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor or the Joker wouldn’t be touched by more complex emotions than just “DO EVIL! WHAT FUN! YES, I WILL MAKE PEOPLE SUFFER!!’ I found them too flat to be fully believable, which began my interest in actual literature, where motivations are more finely shaded.
But Trump and Putin changed all that. (I suppose Hitler and Pol Pot could have but I was too young in their heyday.) Now I wonder if I was just overthinking Doom and Luthor, whose ruling philosophy of “The World Sucks, and my role in it to make it suck more for other people and less for me” seems shared by real-life villains. Has anyone in the comic book/graphic novel world exploited this concept of simple-minded, pure evil characters based directly on actual world leaders? I haven’t read comics for decades, not since about SPIDERMAN # 60 or so, so maybe they’ve addressed this issue. It would be kinda cool to have a plotline that had, I dunno, Ted Cruz as a villain out to wreck people’s lives and all the wicked crap he pulls, only to reveal that he is a puppet being manipulated Trump, and then later on reveal that the super-villain really pulling the strings on both of them is BWAH-HA-HA Vlad the Mad.