What I Want: Villain Books

You know what has always bothered me about superhero comics? That despite the fact that just about every possible idea about superheroes has been capitalized on, from superheroes with physical impediments to loser superheroes, from parallel realities to time travel, from Magneto leading the X-Men to international superhero teams, we still have yet to see a long-running series about a supervillain.

Sure, there have been miniseries or graphic novels. There's some kind of Magneto miniseries running right now at Marvel, there was the Brian Azzarello/Lee Bermejo take on Lex Luthor in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel as well as their recent Joker graphic novel. While humanized Lex Luthor in a way that hadn't been done in recent comics, Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Joker really paled in comparison to the villain's portrayal in the sublimely awesome The Dark Knight. While the hyperviolence and unpredictability of the character was captured, little else was, and as a consequence we got a portrait of the character that wasn't really able to relate his madness to anything, at least not in the way that The Killing Joke was able to relate it to an attempt to communicate psychological pain.

Some could even argue that certain titles being published today are centered around villains. Marvel's THUNDERBOLTS, for instance, centers around a team of supervillains employed by the government as a part of the Superhuman Registration Act in an effort to reform the villains into performing good. But the latter aspect ties into my basic complaint: instead of villains doing good instead of villains doing bad. While some characters like Norman Osborne and Bullseye seem to relish in their own chaos throughout the book, much of the book centers around Songbird, who is practically a fully reformed supervillain in her own right.

What I want is a book that centers around one supervillain. A completely unapologetic look at how a supervillain operates. No copouts like a gradual transition into being legitimate or good. Just a book that dives headfirst into the side of the villains, shifting our perspective as readers from the black and white of the heroes' worlds to the various shades of gray that are involved in a villain's work.

It doesn't have to be a new villain. It could be somebody like Dr. Doom.

Dr. Doom - who, judging from the photo, appears to be sympmathetic to my complaint.

I'm not interested in seeing this just for the novelty of the idea. I'm interested in seeing it because I think it opens up new directions for storytelling in a superhero universe that are currently untapped. We can see how villains cooperate or screw over other villains, how villains balance long term agendas (taking over some nation or section of the world) with short term ones (badly needing money). We can see how villains evade the law, or in some cases, deal with the consequences of being confronted with the law. Most of all, we can see their humanity. We can learn to empathize with their goals, see how they care for their loved ones, and even see them at their most mundane.

What I'm saying isn't entirely speculation. This kind of spotlighting the villains has already been done in other genres to beautiful effect, be it The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' CRIMINAL. So why can't we see this done in the context of a superhero universe? Surely, the addition of one book about a supervillain can't clog up the publication schedule any more than another book about Wolverine or Batman. I think it's safe to say that we've seen plenty of the heroes, thank you very much. Some of us would like to see what's going on the other side of the sandbox.