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davidmann95 · 7 years

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Hey, talk somewhat on Superman's B-list villains? Livewire, Atomic Skull, Silver Banshee, Terra Man, Prankster, and any other low-level but recurring ones. Any ones have potential or cool powers there?

With minor Superman villains, I’ve already touched on Silver Banshee, Prankster, Riot, the Galactic Golem, and J. Wilbur Wolfingham. Delving into some others who maybe don’t have that much name recognition, both B-listers of some degree of note and not-quites who I have some fondness for:

Livewire has always felt like she should be a bigger deal among the Superman villains, but at the same time I get to a certain extent why she hasn’t been. She’s got a great design, and Lori Petty’s voice did as much to define her as Arleen Sorkin did for Harley Quinn, but the more I think about her, the more she runs into problems. She’s not especially meant to be taken seriously - her ‘criticisms’ of Superman are deliberately framed as petty and shallow, to an extent that changing them would essentially rewrite her already pretty well-defined personality. So what you’ve got is a villain who won’t really hurt Superman (given one of his most iconic covers is taking a lightning bolt to the chest with a reply of “It tickles!”, electricity isn’t much of a plausible threat to him) who can still avoid him while causing a ruckus throughout Metropolis, mocking him all the while…and, well, that’s Mxyzptlk. Plus, while Mxy while might bring a vague air of sleaze with him in a way that can leave Superman a touch out of his depth, he’s still deliberately ridiculous, while Leslie Willis is typically much more straightforward and pointed in how she tries to take him down a peg or two in a way that can too easily slide into showing him as stodgy and boring by comparison.

The solution then I think is to bend her away from being a character who has direct confrontations with him all that often. One of her big shticks is that she can manipulate media broadcasts, usually just to make fun of Superman before they throw down. But what if that got pushed further? Make her instead a ghost in the machine riling up idiots on message boards who find the idea of tearing down Superman simply for the sake of it a riot; she could be a one-woman Anonymous, the Bad Media to the Daily Planet’s Good Media, drawing a line under how much of Metropolis hasn’t been hearing Superman’s message at all, needing both to be stopped, and to themselves be saved from far more than a meteor or robot (which would also do a lot to counter the image of Metropolis as a generically perfect city). Ironic, detached cynicism vs. unapologetic sincerity. In short, 4chan vs. Superman, winner take all.

Atomic Skull is, what, an actor with amnesia who thinks he’s a movie villain or something? Meh. I guess there’s something to play with in the idea of his powers as inherently dangerous, evoking Superman’s own fears of losing control, but that seems kinda shallow. I know Superwoman has shown him as somewhat reforming, which seems like a good hook (some of his villains really should), but that’s a whole other angle that hasn’t really been developed yet. The one time I have really liked him was in a set of stories immediately after Electric Superman where each of the four Superman titles briefly told stories set in different eras, with a version of the Skull in the first Golden Age story. A movie star who parlayed his fame as an American Nazi propagandist, he tried to attach himself to Superman’s own increasing public recognition - given he too wore a caped uniform in the serial Curse of the Atomic Skull - claiming they were both examples of the emergence of ubermenschen to reclaim the world. Mesh that with his traditional powerset and contemporary context, and I have an idea of him as some kind of hyper-reactionary, ‘realpolitk’-espousing nihilistic superman of skinheads, alt-righters, and crazed survivalists, who see him as the firey atomic nu-human of an apocalyptic tomorrow. He could even hook up with the Supremacists from Greg Pak and Aaron Kuder’s time on Action Comics for some easy recruits and henchmen.

Subjekt-17; now here’s a guy who I wish had popped up again. Largely forgotten as a consequence of Kurt Busiek’s time on Superman being criminally overlooked, Subjekt-17 was a worst-case scenario: not able to pass for human in the same way as Kal-El, he was taken in by the Soviets as an infant and experimented on his entire life, only to be confronted by Superman when freed and trying to cut a swathe of blood through humanity as payment for his suffering. There was an interesting, painful dynamic in play there - he saw Superman as something like a brother, but in spite of his telepathy couldn’t understand why he would protect the humans who coldly tormented Subjekt his entire life, ultimately seeing Superman as so desperate to assimilate that he would fight an innocent to protect the guilty. I feel like there’s a lot more stories in him, and when it comes to the perennial question of “Are you sure you’re really doing the right thing, Superman?”, I feel like he as a victim of the establishment would have a much more consistent batting average for good stories than yet another edgy new antihero lecturing Superman about the Real Issues.

Magog doesn’t even feel like he should break C-list in the natural order of things, but he was in probably the most widely-read Superman-centric comic ever other than I suppose Death of Superman, so yeah, he counts as notable. The idea presented later on in The Kingdom with Gog as a worshiper of Superman whose shattered faith drove him to madness feels like it has almost a kernel of something interesting at the heart of it, but it feels much more so like a vehicle for semi-talented creators to write dumb comics with him that think of themselves as much more important than they are. A friend did have a decent take on what to do with him narratively though in a way that works with how he’s existed up until now: he’s not a threat himself, he’s not even a consistent or on his own necessarily important figure, but he’s a multiversal constant in that his arrival is always the prelude to a cosmic upheaval or an end of an age of heroes, and specifically catastrophe for Superman. His appearances even back it up: his time in Chuck Austen’s Action Comics was shortly before Infinite Crisis, he came on the scene in the New 52 shortly before Truth and the resulting death of that version of Superman, and now another seemingly new version of him is in Supergirl in the build-up to Doomsday Clock. There’s a lot you can play with there: he doesn’t even have to be the same character twice, but he always emerges to try and take Superman to task on some profound level as a harbinger to a greater doom for the DCU. Maybe over time he could have the same kind of narrative “him showing up means something” cache as Doomsday, but in the sense that seeing him means Superman’s going to have to ask some big questions about himself and what he does as preparation for a larger reckoning for him and his kind, rather than meaning Superman’s gonna have to punch a bone monster again.

I wanna love Terra-Man. He’s a cowboy who was abducted by aliens and got a winged horse to fly around the universe, who calls himself Terra-Man because he a spaceman from Earth! That’s great! But I can’t say the execution has ever much interested me; he’s so over-the-top without ever especially being played as a gag that I just can’t get into it. Luckily though, the solution has already been reached with him: Tom Strong’s Coleman Grey, the Weird Rider, is straight-up Terra-Man, played with the melancholy, cold competency and swagger of a killer out of time, and some fantastic stone-cold badass moments that sell the hell out of him. Just apply that personality to this guy - fearsome but not unreasonable in the right circumstances, out of time but comfortable with his new life even if it means sometimes running up against the Man of Tomorrow - and we have an instant winner; maybe not one of the greats, but not every Superman opponent needs to bring major thematic concerns to the table so long as they can pull their weight in entertaining storytelling opportunities.

And now for a few rapid-fire takes:

Kryptonite Man was one of those characters who just had to exist sooner or later, but there’s really nothing about him that Metallo doesn’t make redundant.

To my knowledge Blackrock has never particularly worked, but I like the idea of him as a reality show hero who gets in Superman’s way sometimes. It doesn’t even need to be that specifically if those trappings are passe at this point; so long as he’s another vigilante opposed to Superman, you can probably pull something out of Blackrock.

Mindlessones convinced me that Nick O’Teen has a place in the background of Superman’s world.

Paragon is a comically awful human being with the powers to back up his inane egotism and cruelty in a way that actually quite worked for me under Kurt Busiek; I think he hits on the same “oh god dammit, this guy” response from Superman that Mxyzptlk elicits, but of a different enough flavor to make him worth keeping around as a separate figure.

And finally, while Tempus would probably lose a lot of his charm if up against a more straight-laced version of Superman, in the context of how silly Lois and Clark got he was my favorite part of that show, and I think he’d work fantastically in any other tongue-in-cheek Silver Age revival treatment of Superman’s world as a way to poke fun at the foundations, hilariously enough so it doesn’t grate but so over-the-top villainously we know we’re not supposed to agree with him.

#Superman #Livewire #Atomic Skull #Kingdom Come #Terra Man #Magog #Subjekt 17 #Kryptonite Man #Blackrock #Nick O'Teen #Paragon #Tempus #Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman #fanfic #Opinion

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