Evil for Evil’s Sake
on December 1, 2008 at 8:14 amGood Morning, Folks-Welcome to December 08.
Recently, I requested a critique for “Johnny Saturn” on a certain forum, and several of my webcartooning peers were kind enough to offer their opinions. One such critique set me to thinking, though: It stated that many of our “Johnny Saturn” villains were evil for evil’s sake, and that we didn’t offer good reasons for them to be this way. This criticism centered on Tactical and Dr. Wissenschaft.
As much as I welcomed the critique, I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment. There is that old Stan Lee adage, that “there are no villains, just fallen heroes.” That same line of reasoning goes on the express that everyone is the hero in their own story, and every villain believes he’s on the side of the angels no matter how awful their deeds.
I don’t buy it.
Josef Mengele, the so called Angel of Death, is a loose inspiration for Dr. Wissenschaft. This should be pretty obvious to those of you who know anything about 20th century history. Did Mengele feel he was walking a moral high ground in doing the things he did? I doubt it. My guess is that he was all about the science, and that he was a total sociopath, devoid of any empathy for his victims.
Tactical, in his origin as a Balkan war criminal, is loosely based on any number of similar war criminals, both those that have been brought to trial in the Hague, and those that have yet to be apprehended. Did these men relish the slaughter they ordered and oversaw? Did they feel terrible about the massacres and rape camps? I doubt it. I think they performed their deeds in a misguided sense of nationalism.
Does every villain have some defining moment in their life when they become evil? An “origin,” you might say. Or, are they all sociopaths and psychopaths? This is the standard comic book way, but I don’t think it’s the real way. I think many of these people grow up in hell holes, and they grow up with cruelty. It’s what they know. They become inured to the suffering of others by their environment, and they learned cruelty as a second nature.
To put a point on it, many of the “Johnny Saturn” villains are simply those who put the ends before the means. If they want something, they will do anything to make it happen.
In the real world, we know some people are bad, and we neither know (nor usually care) what made them bad. The same rule applies to the “Johnny Saturn” villains.
Scott.<-->
Like so many things it takes all kind. It isn’t that every bad guy out there needs a complex back story, sociopaths certains exist, but we like to know more about our villians sometimes, sometimes we like to root for the bag guys and sometimes we want to see the knifes edge that seperates a good guy from a bad guy.
I mean take Venom for instance. The guy is pretty solidly a sociopath when he first showed up. Oh sure he didn’t enjoy killing people but he would, later on the watered him down to being a freak about innocence, but at his core Vemon was a evil lunatic who wanted to kill spiderman for fairly twisted and crazy reasons. The difference was we understood those reasons. We could see that Brock had done some pretty sleezy things, go caught and wanted to blame it on someone else. This didn’t make Vemon an angel by any stretch but it was someone we understood. We could see someone we know doing that.
Another good example is DC’s Scarecrow. That guy has between Nil and Zero good characteristics most days but a reader understands why he is crazy evil. He is a psychologist who went nuts and gets a power trip on fear. They can get into the mind of scarecrow.
But part of what makes Scarecrow stand out is also the fact that their are other shades of gray villians like Two-Face whom we empathize with.
The thing is we don’t really know why some of these characters ended up as super villains instead of wife beaters. What opportunity or event made them super villains. Are they true blue evil and just playing in the big leagues trying not to show anyone they can bleed.
Not everyone needs a deep origin story but it is one of the staples and most beloved parts of the super hero genre. Really major villains like Tactical really deserve a little origin story, it makes there actions that much more interesting to the reader when they know where they come from.
A villain doesn’t necessarily need a “reason” as such to be evil, like some defining moment or a bad upbringing. Why couldn’t some just do bad things for the “fun” of it? We’ve all experienced a moment where it felt thrilling to do something forbidden, something we knew was “bad” or wrong, but the thrill of defying rules was too great to ignore.
Usually our consciences will keep us from going too far. But what if someone ignores their conscience? What if the potential thrill, the adrenaline rush overrides that little voice in the back of our heads saying “Don’t do that”? Or the little voice is too weak to start with? For that matter, how many of us are “good” simply because we’ve never been seriously tempted to be otherwise? Take undercover cops for example: how many of them get corrupted and seduced by the criminal activities they take part in during their assignment? How many get drawn in by the money and the power of the criminal organizations they infiltrate? More than we’d like to think about I imagine.
And then there are the insane ones, like the Joker and your own Dr.Synn. I’ve noticed you’ve never done a serious origin story for him, and I don’t see any need to-often the kind of mental illness that he exhibits doesn’t come on all at once, and may emerge and steadily get worse over time. There usually isn’t any defining moment like a drop in a chemical tank or having acid thrown on half your face, just a slow but inexorable deterioration of the faculties.
There’s also the incremental criminal. Take a minor embezzler, who ‘borrows’ work money once but promises never to do it again. Once he does it once, though, it gets easier and easier, until he’s eventually out of control. Then, he has to protect himself with lies, forged paperwork, maybe even murder. I guess you could call this a slippery-slope criminal, the old “in for a penny, in for a pound” kind of bad guy. He did have a defining moment, the first time he took money, though.