I’ve always wondered why supervillains emerge when there are superheroes.
If Superman was an anomaly who came from Krypton, why has to be someone like MXYPTLZ, or that strange green gnome for the spider boy, for example, whose radioactive spider bite was a coincidence? Is it bad luck for the heroes or for the villains?
I wonder… if I buy the technology and start training myself to become a crime buster like Batman, will insane weirdos like the Joker or the Riddle or the Penguin start to cause havoc?
Tell me if my worries are logical or it’s very late night for my brain.
Remember, you are talking about fiction. If there weren’t colorful bad guys to fight, the colorful good guys wouldn’t have interesting or exciting stories.
If you became a Batmanesque crime fighter, my prediction is that you’ll either get arrested or get your head blasted off by some gang member.
If the government builds Robocop, the mob will, for its own protection, build Robocrook. And they’ll do what they have to to improve on the original design. India can’t build nukes and aim them at Pakistan without Pakistan immediately following suit. It’s a basic truth about opposing forces.
Also, consider the Fantastic Four. When they started operating, most of their eventual enemies (Doom, Galactus, Mole Man, Annihilus, Diablo, Skrulls, Kree) had been in business for a long time even if the general public had never heard of them.
In The Golden Age, James Robinson explained that Starman acidentally created the circumstances that allowed most DC superheroes and villains to come into being. By harnassing cosmic energy, Starman accidentally bathed the Earth with a lot of it, causing lots of unlikely events to happen more easily.
Batman seems to attract a lot of freakish enemies, but actually, he was a product of Gotham’s spiraling crime problem, not a cause of it. Joker, Penguin and Catwoman seemed to be seasoned veterans of the criminal profession by the time Batman first encountered them (regardless of what later writers might have re-established).
If Superman is super-strong, effectively incvulnerable, super-fast, can fly, has X-ray vision, has heat vision, and can leap buildings at a single bound,it’s going to get really dull really fast if all he has going against him are Bad Guys with ill-fitting suits, guns, and fedoras. That’s good for maybe one introductory, wish-fulfilling episosde. Then it gets dull really fast. As Odinoneeye correctly notes, “the essence of drama is conflict”. You need something for your hero to strive against overcome, even if it’s not a person. Hence the procession of natural disasters, giant apes, and, ultimately, super-powered villains.
As one of those “imaginary stories” comics, it would be interesting to show a world with all the Marvel or DC heroes – and no supervillains, only your ordinary criminals. I imagine the good guys would have things squared away in no time, and then the world would either be a peaceful utopia or a sort of benevolent dictatorship by superheroes. Hmm, maybe those supervillains serve a necessary function.
Baldwin, they have made a few attempts at the “peaceful utopia… or… benevolent dictatorship by superheroes” story you suggest. I’m not sure if you’re a comic book reader or aware of this or not, but the classic stories Squadron Supreme, Watchmen, Miracleman, and The Authority all deal with this, to one extent or another.
Both Watchmen and Kingdom Come boiled down to superheroes fighting each other (Even the really scummy ones like Swastika and Von Bach were, by the conventions of the story, heroes). The villains in it were incidental and had no real impact on the end of the story.
I think if superpowers really were possible, we’d have nothing but supervillains and others using their powers for their own gain. Really, if you had x-ray vision, you’d use it to peek in the girls’ change room, wouldn’t you? And you’d be using your invulnerability and super-strength to push around the people you never really liked.
And a real-life dork like Peter Parker would probably go Columbine with superpowers, instead of that, “With great power comes great responsibility” thing.
Actually, the most likely outcome if there were a few superpowered humans would be their respective governments drafting them for covert use. If they could avoid that, the other most likely outcome would be the entertainment industry,
I don’t quote again Baldwin’s post but that’s what I meant.
I understand that essence of drama is conflict, but if I suddenly find that I possess superpowers, I’d say, “wow, that’s cool, I’ll have fun for the rest of my life!” and after all supervillains start to show “dammit! there’s always a fly in the soup!”.
Hope you all found the light irony in my OP, still your comments are highly interesting.
I wouldn’t agree for Kingdom Come; the machinations of the villians were a factor in the story, though not by the climax.
And in a related vein, the Squadron Supreme 12-issue limited series (RIP Mark Gruenwald) involved super-heroes trying to use their powers to make their world a better place.
And the meta reason that super heroes can’t use their powers to make the world a utopia is that such a story would be pretty boring. Superman crushes all nuclear weapons, transports all crooks to the phantom zone, and establishes a new era of peace and prosperity. But now his comic book is over, since where’s the conflict? Even if he were fighting the occasional alien invasion and natural disaster in his utopia, it still wouldn’t be as interesting as Superman fighting natural disasters in a world that looks like our world.
Bill Willingham was doing something like that in his “Elementals” series. If I recall correctly the last I read the good guys and the bad guys had decided that they had more in common with each other than anybody else and were organizing to demand a political voice. A super-powered breakout from a top-secret government facility can be interesting, but so can watching the government cave in and let the superfolk go because they have access to better lawyers, or a guy who can throw a bus at you explaining that when you consider his powers next to those posessed by the mayor of a major city he’s pretty small-time.
I would like to point out, however, that perhaps the best Batman story every written (and, especially, drawn) was Batman, Year One, in which there were no colorful supervillains at all (unless you count the corrupt commissioner of police with his kitsch memorabilia collection, or the nascent Catwoman as a burglar).
The earliest Superman stories also had him do his thing against ordinary street thugs, wife beaters, and evil dictators. They are certainly as thrilling as most modern heavyweight matchups with Mongol or some other big scary supervillain.
That said, I’m all for crazy supervillains, though the fewer powers they have, it seems, the more interesting they become (Two-Face, Joker, Lex Luthor, Kingpin).
I just remembered a What-If? story I read about Spiderman. Apparently Spidey once found a ring that gave him cosmic powers, but for whatever reason decided not to keep it (I’ve never seen the original story that the issue was based on). The What-If? story explored what would happen if Spidey kept the ring. So in the story Spiderman used the ring’s powers to take out drug lords and mafia kingpins; that is, he used the ring to do what he already does, except with more firepower. I remember reading the comic and thinking, “That’s it? That’s what Spiderman would do with cosmic powers? That’s pretty lame!”
But anyway, think about it for a second. Superheroes can keep on taking out drug lords and kingpins, but more would just spring up in their place. They can bring in drug dealers, but with the demand for drugs, others would quickly replace them on the street.
The roots of crime are socio-economic, and places with low crime usually have strong social institutions and/or good economies. Which is to say that crime would be better eliminated by Superman crushing coals into diamonds and using that money to fund anti-poverty initiatives and economic revitalization programs. But that would be rather boring to read about. So instead we have him fighting aliens from outer space and megalomaniacal super-geniuses. Which is why there are supervillains in the comics.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. In fiction the villains are more interesting but in real life it is the reverse. Is not Gandhi a more interesting figure than John Gotti? Two other things I have noticed:
Fictional villains are more interesting than real-life villains.
Real-life heroes are more interesting than fictional heroes.
