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Well done, sir!

It’s hard to see most comic writers putting that much thought into creating a villain when so little thought seems to go into creating the heroes these days.
“Hey, can we do a female version of that guy?”
“What’s a name nobody has used yet? There aren’t any? Damn you, Claremont!”
“Say, what if he had a son from an alternate future?”

Though I didn’t care for the execution, I thought that addressing subjects like rape and mind-wiping was a good idea. It’s hard to believe that in the thousands of stories wherein a really evil guy has a fabulous babe heroine at his mercy it hasn’t happened before. And secret identities were such a huge part of comics for so long, and villains finding out identities such a big problem, mind-wiping is almost required. As for the choice of Doctor Light, well why not him? He was a cipher. I couldn’t have told you a thing about him, though I’ve probably read 100 stories with him in them.

And I have never understood the reverence people seem to have for the Flash’s rogues gallery. Stupid villians with stupid powers and minimal motivation.

And I have to say that if I were suddenly to aquire superpowers the last two things on my to do list would be robbing banks and ruling the world.

The real reason Doctor Light will never be scary is that he’s just one set of butterfly wings away from being an exact duplicate of The Monarch. Try solving THAT with your postmodern superhero writing, Postmodern Superhero Writer Man!!

I think part of the problem is the desire to up the stakes so greatly. Practically everything has been done, or at least it may seem that way, and the heroes have always come out on top, so in order to make a villain a “threat” they have to be completely unpredictable and monstrously evil. This gives writers the illusion of having something at stake. The problem is, these apocalyptic, angstly slugfests are all essentially the same thing. The heroes are not doing anything new, and since we still know they will win in the end, upping the stakes does nothing but make things uglier. I fully support the idea of villains forcing their heroes to flex different “muscules” if you will, using their powers in creative ways and actually using their brains as well as learning new skills and so on. That would make for interesting storytelling.

Another thing is, I kind of miss heroes fighting ordinary criminals sometimes. You really don’t see that anymore. For one thing, it gives the powers of the heroes something to contrast with, and reminds us that they are indeed super. Plus, sometimes a clever ordinary person can be a serious headache for a hero who is used to winning through might alone. I’m not saying that’s all that should go on, but it would be cool to see once in awhile.

So your idea would basically be to have Doctor Light behave, essentially, in the manner of a totally stereotypical mad scientist, using a nefarious plot that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if it appeared in an issue of Richie Rich? That’s a great idea. Maybe it could have also turned out that Sue Dibney’s killer was the Elongated Man’s long lost evil twin brother just to complete the bookend of hackneyed tripe.

So your idea would basically be to have Doctor Light behave, essentially, in the manner of a totally stereotypical mad scientist, using a nefarious plot that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if it appeared in an issue of Richie Rich? That’s a great idea. Maybe it could have also turned out that Sue Dibney’s killer was the Elongated Man’s long lost evil twin brother just to complete the bookend of hackneyed tripe.

I’d prefer Dr. Light to act like Dr. Light. He IS a mad scientist. If you’re not telling a mad-scientist story, you shouldn’t use him. That’s the point I was making.

As for the rest of it, well, mileage varies… if you liked Identity Crisis, more power to you. But I don’t see how your sneering definition of ‘hackneyed tripe’ is any more plausible than what we actually got.

Jamming things that don’t make sense into a superhero story simply because they’re shocking or novel isn’t a good enough reason. That’s just playing to jaded fans, and it’s a little creepy that so many people seem willing to defend the book simply on the basis of that novelty.

I like it when some of Spider-man’s lesser villains, like say the Shocker, mention that they don’t want to kill people, they just want money.

There are many heroes out there that need MORE villains. How many real villains does Ironman have? Think that has anything to do with his less than stellar stories in recent memory. I think each hero needs to have at least five villains, five real threats, that they can call all their own.

Great post here, Greg. I agree that most villains in comics are now worthless, and need to be fixed/revamped/retooled/whatever. I love your Dr. Light idea.

Hell, if I wrote Batman, one of my main goals would be to make the baddies worthwhile again. If I could make King Tut a viable threat, then I could do the same for anybody. I love the schmoes like Clock King and Egghead and Crazy Quilt– they need love, too.

It’s always better to fix a villain than it is to kill them off or turn them into somebody else. Making Scorpion the new Venom? They’ve totally ruined both Scorpy and Venom by getting rid of why they matter.

Ian - Iron Man has the Mandarin, Spymaster, Blacklash, MODOK, Fin Fang Foom, Blizzard, The Ghost, Titanium Man, Ultimo, Living Laser, the Melter, the Controller, Crimson Dynamo, and a couple others. Yeah, a lot of his rogues gallery sucks, but he at least has one. They could all use Hatcherian revamps, of course. But still. Iron Man’s far better off than Captain America, Daredevil, or the whole of the X-Men. Or even Superman.

The problem with Identity Crisis isn’t so much the motivation of Dr. Light. Instead it is that the Dr. Light rape and mind wipe had NOTHING to do with the actual story. Instead it was just some enormous red herring that the writer thought it would be really cool to have a rape and heroes erase the mind of someone. If it was actually in the story from some reason besides to be shocking, then I wouldn’t hate it so much.

It is also the case that we need to look at the heroes as well. So Dr. Light has committed rape and he knows the secret identities of all the heroes. But wait a minute, on this team we have Green Lantern who can easily put him in a bubble take him out to a planet hundreds of light years away and put him there. We have the Barry Allen Flash who has the cosmic treadmill and can take him a thousand years into the future where they can rehabilitate him.

Within the world they have created there are a million other things that they could have done besides mindwipe him. But then we would have the whole storyline about the superheroes crossing a line and covering up a secret…

“The problem with Identity Crisis isn’t so much the motivation of Dr. Light. Instead it is that the Dr. Light rape and mind wipe had NOTHING to do with the actual story.”

The lengths the heroes would go to protect their loved ones and consequences of failure had everything to do with IC.

The solutions you presented were murder and a fancier way of mindwiping.

It be interesting if they had a villain who racked up body count, but never intended to. I’m a villain because I, oh, wanted to do something to Batman, and rob a bank at the same time, but oops, I killed people. I didn’t mean to do that…

I think a lot of it has to do with the gradual shift of the superhero genre away from hero vs. villain to hero vs. self and hero vs. the system, that is, to exactly that element of “deconstruction” that still dominates. When the hero’s greatest foe is his or her own moral failings, psychological difficulties, etc., the villain is at best an afterthought and at worst a distraction.

The other major element in the weakening characterization of comics villains seems to have much to do with the increasing tendency to “professionalize” the heroes, a tendency of which Civil War is merely a late example. But the sense is that the heroes need to be treated like “realistic” cops, intelligence agents, paramilitiaries, or the like; and if you’ve read many police procedural or military/spy novels, the enemy doesn’t often get much characterization. In a realistic police procedural, the average felon, enemy agent, or enemy soldier is basically not a character. At best, you’ll get a political zealot, a simple mercenary, or a not-so-bright or bright sociopath; and serial killers in fact have almost no real motivation.

Prior to Hannibal and the recent Hannibal Rising, did we know why Dr. Lecter killed? How many of Tom Clancy’s villains have any motivation beyond the standard “evil Euroterrorist megalomania’ sort of motivation? As superhero comics absorb these genres, we lose that character type once called the supervillain, and instead get simple human malice or purposeless sadism and insanity as the extent of motive and background for the hero’s external opponents.

“It be interesting if they had a villain who racked up body count, but never intended to.”

Great idea. A similar idea is explored in the novel and film A Simple Plan. A “victimless” crime turns very, very ugly.

One of my favorite moments in film history is in Brazil, when our hero crashes the police line to save the girl and he is all excited about his coolness until he looks in the mirror and sees the cops burning to death. The look on his face is crippling.

Alot of villains, as well as heroes, seem to have more or less become victims in the bizarre competition that seems to exist between people writing super-comics and people who want to be writing super-comics (or writers on other titles for that matter). Writer A creates a bad-guy who takes out (insert superteam here) and writer B comes along and says “how dare you have your character take out (said superteam), I’ll show you how lame your character really is!” and proceeds to make a joke of the character in whatever manner they can think of. Prometheus is a pretty good example of this, and the reason Morrison killed off his other two JLA-era creations (Aztek and Zauriel) was out of fear of what others would do to/with them after he left.

Nowadays it goes beyond that as now you have writer C coming along who proclaims themselves to be Writer A’s biggest fan ever and has a personal mission to “restore (fill in character)’s dignity by whatever means possible” whether it’s in keeping with the genre’s conventions or not. Identity Crisis oozes with that sort of attitude; “Dr. Light wasn’t pathetic because of his own doing, it was mindwipe, take that Marv Wolfman!”

I often wonder how many people are genuinely interested in superhero stories and how many are just interested in seeing other stories “undone” so they can get their favorite characters back to where they think they should be (even when they don’t seem to have any ideas for them after that point).

Identity Crisis oozes with that sort of attitude; “Dr. Light wasn’t pathetic because of his own doing, it was mindwipe, take that Marv Wolfman!”

I often wonder how many people are genuinely interested in superhero stories and how many are just interested in seeing other stories “undone” so they can get their favorite characters back to where they think they should be (even when they don’t seem to have any ideas for them after that point).

I wonder about this a lot too. There’s this big thing in the last couple of years about luring novelists and screenwriters to come and work on superhero comics and what is so weird about it is that it’s invariably presented as a giant coup for comics, a huge step forward, a way to inject new talent and fresh literary values into the work — but almost always the stuff turns out to be more continuity-driven and fannish than the work you see from some guy running a fanfic website. I really, really wonder what the response to, say, Kevin Smith’s Green Arrow or Joss Whedon’s X-Men would have been if it was their first published work ever, if it didn’t have that celebrity-worship “Hey! Famous person loves superheroes TOO!” cachet surrounding it.

Greg, your suggestion that DC should have transformed Dr. Light from incompetent to dangerous by improving his mastery over light is a good one. However, what you and practically every other blogger fail to mention is that RON MARZ AND GRANT MORRISON ALREADY DID THIS 10 YEARS AGO. Marz had Light return in GREEN LANTERN during “Final Night” and mastered his control of light to such a degree that he could turn Kyle’s contructs against him. He owned Kyle in that issue, and only let Kyle live so he could escape from Earth dying. Then, in “Rock Of Ages” Morrison had Light join Luthor’s gang and pull such badass stunts as creating evil hard-light JLA duplicates, imprisoning Superman and Martian Manhunter in a Joker-controlled hard-light replica of the Injustice Gang satellite, and transforming Electric Blue Supes into radio waves and beaming him into deep space. He was a coward, but no moreso than Leo in Ed Brubaker’s CRIMINAL, and both remained competent and dangerous. Next thing I know, it’s 8 years later and he’s back to incompetent again so he could be shoehorned into Identity Crisis. SO WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE MENTIONING THIS?

Because Kyle Rayner and Electric Blue Supes are things we’d all like to forget?

I can sort of see how a writer might conclude that there was some resonance to Dr. Light being a rapist, especially one whose heart was still trapped in the Bronze Age and to whom the Morrison/Marz revamp was little more than a footnote. One riff of the early Gardner Fox science villains was an ordinary man trying to extrapolate one extraordinary talent or gimmick into a base for extraordinary personal power. Why does someone do this, instead of using his knowledge to make money or acquire social prestige? The only answer that easily presents itself is “ordinary power is not enough; this person desperately wants to dominate as many other people as completely as possible”, and rape is one of the classic compulsive crimes of power. A common generalization about rapists is that they suffer from severe feelings of inadequacy and impotency, and that’s pretty germane to Dr. Light’s apparent need to dominate others, too. I’m not saying it was well-written; but I’ve never liked anything Brad Meltzer has written, comics or otherwise. I can say that Dr. Light was not a completely random choice, and the “rapist” aspect of his personality could be handled well by a writer who is not, say, Judd Winnick. Because Dr. Light had been turned into a joke for so long in the Titans, the “inadequacy” connection was plain as day and waiting to be made.

Now, I have to say that Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny in particular felt pretty random; she’s not anyone special, and Elongated Man is not the most super of heroes. You’d think he’d want to hit up one of the super-heroines or Lois Lane or some sort of supermodel if it was really a power complex on his part… and there’s the rub. The victim was Sue because, as a perpetual D-lister, she was basically disposable. I dunno what interviews about IC anyone’s given, but I’d strongly suspect that in the original proposal for IC, it wasn’t Sue that Dr. Light raped. At least, the story would’ve been vastly more logical from a villain-writing POV if it had been a female character other than Sue. Someone who could’ve survived the assault and later demanded the mindwipes with a victim’s righteous fury would’ve lent a lot more weight and impact to that element of the story as a framing device for the rest of Identity Crisis, but that also would’ve been much harder to write, required more editorial cajones, and required someone in the process to have actually think carefully about handling the rape as a story element rather than as a shocker. Now the poor bastards are stuck with all this mess until someone comes along in five-ten years to revamp it out of continuity. I hope it’s a highly-paid novelist getting to express his love of superheroes at long last!

It’s amazing to me how many people have absolutely no awareness of basic writing principles, and refuse to acknowledge that it might have some effect on their ideas about writing.

Greg, your suggestion that DC should have transformed Dr. Light from incompetent to dangerous by improving his mastery over light is a good one. However, what you and practically every other blogger fail to mention is that RON MARZ AND GRANT MORRISON ALREADY DID THIS 10 YEARS AGO. …SO WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE MENTIONING THIS?

Um… because I forgot about “Rock of Ages” and I didn’t know about the Marz effort. You’re right, of course. All I can say in my feeble defense is that I tend to think of Luthor as the villain in “Rock of Ages” — the others came off as his henchmen. It’s no excuse for not taking a minute or two to look things up, because every time I skip that step I regret it.

It’s a pity it didn’t take. That’s an especially cool idea about Dr. Light being able to control GL’s ring constructs.