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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.