Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
The Twelve All-Time Coolest DC Comics SUPER-VILLAINS
(Part One)
In the accompanying text for another one of this site's many and varied entries (i.e., THE MARVEL COMICS HALL OF SHAME: PAGE ONE (The World's Lamest Super-Villains) ), I advanced the following (quasi-)heretical notion:
"Okay... Article of Faith Numero Uno, then:
ONCE YOU HAVE REMOVED DOCTOR DOOM, THE RED SKULL AND THE KINGPIN FROM THE EQUATION... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MARVEL'S SUPER-VILLAINS ARE IRRETRIEVABLY L-A-M-E."
This single statement has occasioned just about as much e-mail, hereabouts
-- long months after its initial posting, mind -- as has just about anything
concomitantly offered up, article-of-faith-wise, before or since. My goodness,
but you Marvel Comics partisans are a "touchy" lot. 
In any event: having been summarily "challenged" by more than one adherent to The Gospel According To Stan and Jack (i.e., "... yeah... well... so... just try naming any waycool DC super-baddies, then, whydon'cha, huh...?"); and given that regular correspondent "Big" Bill Brackeen has made a courteous request for entries concerning "the classic DC villains of the Silver Age"...
... tah-dah. This: a paean of praise for as deliciously detestable an assemblage of amoralists and anti-socials as have ever graced the pages of any comic book, anywhere.
Come See the Paradise.
Of course... one must begin with the first (and still Da Bestest, after
all these years) truly classic DC Comics super- stinker: the Clown
Caliph of Crime, his own bad self -- The Joker.
What makes this particular uberrotter so immortal in storytelling stature, I think, is a combination of two conceptual "strengths":
1.) No other comic book bete noire has ever ever served as so perfectly crafted a "mirror image" of his (or her) own arch- nemesis.
Whereas The Batman is all about Ruthlessly Controlled (Self-)Repression... the Joker is gleeful anarchism made flesh; wanton self-indulgence run riot. The Batman's ultimate goal (i.e., the "civilizing" of a hopelessly corrupted urban milieu) runs forever counter-clockwise to the Joker's own insatiable impulse for chaos, and social entropy.
2.) Alan Moore's masterful THE KILLING JOKE aside: the Joker has no 'known' True Identity. (DC has -- wisely, I think -- declared all "origin story" aspects of Moore's aforementioned work, in this instance, as being "non-canonical.")
Serving, as he does, as a larger-than-life somatotype... the Joker is one of those vanishingly comics rara avis who would end up being diminished in stature, once we (as readers) were able to affix to him a name; a childhood; and/or any long-term "goal" more concrete than that of "Torment the Holy Living @#$% Out Of the Batman."
The Joker is -- in the final analysis -- best explicated as a primal force of nature; as unrelenting and inhuman as a freak lightning storm, or a tsunami. He is a natural disaster, on two legs.
... and: speaking of primal forces of nature
Gorilla Grodd has always fascinated me, right from the git-go. There's something in the sheer, dichotomous admixture of Big, Mean, Ugly Primate and Reigning King of the Evolutionary "Hill" that -- for my money, at any rate -- that elevates this particular meta-stinker above the rest of the Silver Age Flash's gaggle of gimmick-laden foemen, overall.
Grodd has always been treated as being one of the "big
guns," stature- wise, within the villainous "pecking order" of the DC Universe.
His tres formidable psionic abilities -- yoked in efficacious tandem
alongside his prodigious physical prowess -- once enabled him to pretty much
swab the decks with an extremely startled Superman;
he led the dominant faction within the short-lived Secret
Society of Super-Villains; and has repeatedly been shown to be one of
the only two members of the Flash's criminal "Rogues Gallery" (the other being
the completely insane Abra-Kadabra) who can give all the others a bad
case of The Screaming Fits, simply by striding into the midst of an assemblage
of same. One of the undisputed Main Bad Boys, within the annals of DC
continuity.
Poison Ivy, on the other hand, occasions an entirely different sort
of response altogether, whenever she sashays her shapely way through
a crowd.
I can still remember the afternoon I plucked the issue of BATMAN containing the initial Poison Ivy appearance (issue #181; 1966) from the local drugstore's comics "spinner" rack; took it home; and promptly read, re-read, and re-re-read the thing eight or ten times over the ensuing weekend. There was an indefinable... something in the explication of this coquettish Verdant Vixen; a slow, steamy, sweat-drenched sense of sensual menace that worked on an inarticulate, visceral level.
Whatever it was, in this instance -- the palpably ravenous, Garbo-
esque undercurrent of sexual "challenge" with which the character would regularly
whipsaw Our Hapless Hero, or what-have-you -- I'll tell you this much: it made the silly, parlor leather fetishist games of (say) the Catwoman
seem downright innocuous, by way of comparison.
For sheer, amoral cunning, however... it was (and remains) a damned tough job on the part of any costumed contender to beat out the Reflective Rogue known to (and fondly remembered by) all good Silver Age aficionados as "Samuel Scudder"... a.k.a., The Mirror Master.
This guy was -- no ifs, ands or buts about it -- the very last DC super-villain you ever wanted to screw around with, push come to shove. Other baddies (such as, say, the aforementioned Grodd) were infinitely more powerful, to be sure...
... but: no other spandexed recidivist anywhere ever demonstrated -- over the course of so many years; in such a stupefying number of ways -- an equivalent level of calculation and brute intelligence in his criminal cavortings, either.
The man was, quite simply, too bloody dangerous to make for a comfortable jousting opponent. Unlike practically every other working member of DC's costumed criminal caste... Mirror Master was a firm (and practiced) adherent to the principle of Taking the Long View, re: the inevitability of super-hero confrontations (in general), and dust-ups with longtime nemesis The Flash (in particular).
He used mirrors to scry the future; to explore bizarre, alternate "mirror realities'; and to befuddle, rather than bludgeon.
Whenever this guy came up with some particularly nefarious "master plan"... you always came away the sinking, gut-level feeling that -- with just the faintest trace element of luck on his side -- it might actually work, dammit.
I always granted the Flash full "props" for having to deal with this Mirror
Machiavelli, over the years. God alone knows, I'd have steered
well clear of him... nifty super-powers or no.
It wasn't the Mirror Master, however, who engendered the only actual comics-inspired nightmares I ever experienced, as a child.
No, no; that particular distinction falls to the mad, gaunt (and bloody terrifying, so far as this wide-eyed pre-adolescent was concerned) "Jonathan Crane"... a.k.a., The Scarecrow.
In this case, it was a case of Too Much Empathy With a Comics Character. Even as a friggin' kid, I could connect the conceptual "dots" well enough:
College professor Jonathan Crane was gaunt, and bespectacled; I was gaunt and bespectacled.
Crane committed unspeakable crimes in pursuit of books, books and more
books, in order to slake an all-consuming thirst for Reading. I
harbored (and still do, to this day) the same unholy fixation with the written
word... although I always managed to stop just short of, y'know, knocking
over the occasional bank, in so doing. (I was only, like, ten
at the time; I had a curfew.)
Crane enjoyed tarting himself up in rags, stuffed with stray bits of straw and whatnot, and training flock after flock of lethal ravens to do his crazed bidding. I --
... well... okay. The analogy isn't a perfect one, granted.
I did have a puppy, however.
Seriously, though: this guy gave me the whim-whams so darned badly, as a child. Honest to God. You just have no idea.
No one else ever agrees with me on this next guy... but: I always felt that The Black Manta was a serious contender in the Most Complex (and Loathsome) DC Super-Villain Sweepstakes.
Two reasons, chiefly:
1.) The Black Manta was an unregenerate, no foolin' kid killer, having engineered the scheme during which the infant son of Aquaman died a slow, agonizing death by means of asphyxiation.
Even in the over-heated four-color world of the mainstream American adventure comic... actual (and intentional) infanticide is -- I trust we're all agreed -- a pretty heavy "black mark" to carry around upon the ol' "rap sheet" ledger.
2.) The Manta's primary motivation for undersea rapine and pillaging was (so far as I'm aware, at any rate) pretty much unique within the comics canon, overall: to garner enough ill-gotten lucre to establish an underwater separatist "home land" for "his people."
Oh... did I forget to mention it? The Black Manta was... ummm... you know...
... black.
"Minority" status; one of the most blood-curdling crimes imaginable to his "credit"; and a genuine (if bizarre) socio-political dimension to his motivations.
The Manta was one of DC's most complex and fascinating two-legged monsters.
The Manta was so cool.
The second half of our reprobate review... on the following page!
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