Or, similarly, Six of Clubs, one of the Joker’s other henchmen in Joker: Year of the Villain, providing a stark contrast between mental illness and criminal insanity. Such is the case in Azzarello and Bermejo’s Joker, through the perspective of henchman Jonny Frost. Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, sometimes a second party is required to observe the mysterious title character in order to truly comprehend them. The best way to get around that? You don’t actually make them the perspective character. It’s always those villains who don’t want to be understood, the vilest to their core, who put up the greatest resistance to being centered in their own story. On the flip side, there’s always the danger that if you get too far into a villain’s head, you risk spoiling the character’s mystique. And in a villain’s own story, that opposing viewpoint gets the much-needed space away from the hero to flesh itself out. A clash of fists is incomplete without a clash of ideals to match. After all, a great fight needs challenging dialogue to go with it. It’s Ra’s al Ghul’s faith that he is ultimately saving the world that makes him Batman’s most persistent foe, and the camaraderie between the Flash’s Rogues in an impossible mission which makes them such lovable losers. The comic books Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Sinestro and more or less every appearance of Black Adam in the 21st century have all been about complicated men making what they believe to be hard choices to save what truly matters. Some of DC’s most delightful villains are the ones who revel in their villainy, but what makes many more compelling is how they believe themselves to be on the right side of history. But some of the most compelling villain stories come from when creators try. Getting into the Joker’s head is so daunting a task, not even Batman dares it. Most successful in recent memory, of course, is 2019’s theatrical film Joker, the tale of a broken man in need of support who is failed at every level and simply reacts accordingly. Or Batman: The Telltale Series, which lends us “John,” an initially harmless psychiatric patient whose fixations on the alluring Harley Quinn and his “best friend” Bruce Wayne drive him over the edge. Batman: The Killing Joke gave us the story of a hard luck stand-up comedian of little talent, who falls in with the wrong crowd to provide for his family and ends up losing everything. The most popular villain used for this particular approach is, appropriately, the Joker himself. To humanize a super-villain, the simplest solution is to go back to when they were human and show us how they fell. Or, to borrow a phrase from the Joker, their “one bad day.” Just as every hero has their Secret Origin, every super-villain had that incident which made them into who they were. Let’s look at four different ways of making a super-villain a star.Ĭommon advice is that the ideal place to start any story is at the beginning. But luckily, it’s one which DC has attempted enough times-successfully, no less-to allow us to figure this out together. This gives rise to a particularly tricky challenge: how do you tell a story about a villain without making it all about the hero they were created to challenge? How do you shift a villainous character from antagonist to protagonist? As these villains continue to return to wreak havoc against their heroic counterparts, we find ourselves wanting to know more about them each time. By necessity, every hero’s ongoing story requires a wide variety of obstacles for them to face, and as such, new concepts for villains tend to generate at a much faster clip than new heroes.īut every so often, once in a hundred new foes, a villain arises with such a compelling element to them that we become drawn to their story. Among the tens of thousands of unique characters who inhabit the DC Universe, it’s the super-villains created to oppose our greatest heroes who often shine the brightest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |