WHY I LOVE ONE-DIMENSIONAL VILLAINS

by guest-blogger Rodney K Brown

What I’m looking for in general with comics these days can be summed up in two words - something different. Not meaning a reinventing of the wheel (if you can, that would be sweet), but something I haven’t seen much of in a while. Whatever happened to pure evil -and I don’t mean demonic possession- as an answer to the question what’s my motivation? I mean one-dimensional villains who do the evil things they do because they are evil, not writers going into an excruciatingly decompressed look at some mass murder/serial rapist/alien Antichrist multifaceted personality. Fictional villains aren’t wedding cakes, adding more and more layers won’t necessary make them bigger and better.

How does everything old become new again? When what was once common becomes a rare trend. Whenever a new innovation (in this case characterization) is embraced to the point of excess, in an effort to separate from the herd, people go vintage in their ideas. Some people’s idea of embracing their individuality is to dress up like all their friends. Writer’s do the same when they try to give every character a back-story just like all their friends do. Where it all goes wrong is trying to invoke sympathy for every bad guy, or gal.

‘Sympathetic’ comes out of the writer’s tool-box

Writing a character to be sympathetic or unsympathetic is writer’s code for trying to lead a reader around. When a character is written as sympathetic – no matter their deeds – the writer wants you to at least feel sorry for them, if not cheer them. When a character is written as unsympathetic, the writer wants you to dislike them, or feel less than nil for them, which is even more damning. Denny O’Neil hates Miller’s darker Batman so he pissed all over the archetype back when Azrael was wearing the bat suit in the 90’s by having that character be unsympathetic.

Peter David, in his atrocious book (I got for a penny and shipping out of curiosity) Writing for Comics, talked about a story he wrote in Incredible Hulk #380. David is against the death penalty (full disclosure I’m for it) so he wanted to write a story where a super-villain (Crazy-Eight is her name) gets the chair. He pulls the “those in favor of capitol punishment were outraged that crazy-eight the executed criminal, was remotely sympathetic” card. [Page 24]

He also makes one big mistake by trying to go for the gray area and repeats what everyone else has done with bad guy’s since the 90’s. He writes about how he wanted to show both sides of the issue, and readers on both sides felt he favored one side, or the other. Just like the trick Bill O’Riley pulls at the end of his show with e-mails, David tries to imply this reaction from both side’s advocates shows his fairness. Wrong. What it shows is people don’t trust someone who doesn’t chose up sides and pick a point of view. If someone disagrees with you, at least you know where they stand – no one wants to turn their back on a fence straddler swaying in the wind. “In order to be convincing that the courts felt she deserved to die, I had to make her crimes brutal and herself totally unrepentant. But I also needed to make her as fully rounded as possible, otherwise the reader would have felt no connection to her. No one is upset when a monster dies in a movie. To make Crazy Eight be something other than a monster – and for her death to have meaning so the opposing view was presented – I had to hammer home her fundamental humanity.” [Page 25]

I can’t remember the last time a monster in the humanoid evil sense was really killed off in the comics. It is also a shame the MSNBC series Lock-Up wasn’t around back then to add more realism, less idealism to David’s story. One convict facing the death penalty said “anyone who tells you they feel sorry for committing pre-mediated first degree murder is a liar.” That monster, masquerading as a man, killed his mother to end up behind bars, then killed a fellow inmate, and a prison councilor in jail to get the death penalty. His reasons: he didn’t like his mother, and the other two insulted him.  “If you put enough holes in’em they can’t plug’em all. Chances are they gonna die” is his stated philosophy. In another episode, a warden talks about a prisons victim’s restitution fund. One inmate didn’t think it was fair a share of the money he made behind bars went into this fund because “all my victims are dead.” What fundamental humanity to be hammered home? Why can’t we get that kind of real life characterization where every bad guy isn’t sympathetic in comics?

What if the Red Skull had a heart?

Anybody out there remember Comics Scene? In one of those magazines from the early 90’s it featured an interview with Stephen Tolkin screenwriter of the first Captain America movie. Firstly, he had little to no respect for the comic that it was based on. Secondly, Tolkin didn’t want Captain America in his costume much, because viewers wouldn’t take the movie seriously.  Thirdly, he talked about the fact that due to budget constraints he could not do the opening and closing of the movie with the Red Skull he wanted to. Originally, the movie was going to start with the Red Skull as a child playing some classical piano piece that he didn’t finished because his family were killed. It affected his little mind turning him evil, and he would always get to the point in the piece when his family died and be unable to finish it.

The movie ends with Red Skull dying, but finally able to finish that classical piece of music he was playing, Tolkin thought it was ‘beautiful‘. Producers of that film thought a lack of action scenes was the problem, and tucked some more into it. Idiots. For a work of fiction, a writer would have to be a fool, a damn fool, a G.D. fool to try to get sympathy for Red Skull the Nazi. It is all about comparing and contrasting on the morality scale. The less evil a villain is the less good a hero can ultimately be. It has been almost twenty years since one of the worst movies ever made, and mass murders are people too, sympathetic characterization for everyone has gone on long enough. I’m hoping Golden Age retro simplicity is the next big thing, cause it’s past damn time.

-Rodney K Brown (RKB)