my favorite monster

I first met Mazikeen as a teenager reading Sandman. She’s a demon in the form of a beautiful dark-haired woman, but with half a face; the daughter of Lilith and lover of Lucifer Morningstar. The left side looks to have rotted away, leaving bone and teeth and an empty eye socket. And she's my favorite monster.

Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? That question, posed by Jack Nicholson's Joker in the 1989 Batman movie, comes across as an esoteric threat in that context; a destabilizing glimpse into the mind of a madman. Yet the exact same question asked by the X-Men character Nightcrawler would seem like an invitation to possibly the most romantic night of your life, and you'd probably be swept off your feet. If Nightcrawler is a devil, he makes it look good --- perhaps just as much as the Joker makes clowns look bad.

When thinking about favorite monsters, I wanted to go to one of the biggest, most uncontrollable and terrifying concepts that have ever hit the comics page. Dinosaurs and demons are all well and good, but they offer a threat that doesn’t dig deep beneath the skin. What really frightens me is unknown, unseen terror that exists in fugue; horrors like the Ogdru Jahad, creatures we've seen only briefly in Mike Mignola-created books including Hellboy and B.P.R.D..

Who else but Godzilla deserves the title of favorite monster? Sure, there are lots of great contenders, like werewolves, and Dracula, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But the Xenomorph and Predator could team up and even they could not topple Godzilla. She has had one of the longest lives of any monster in the world.

Barbatos is the ancient bat demon summoned by Thomas Jefferson, which later turned out to an Apokoliptian monster that Darkseid sent to hunt Batman through history. It’s a whole thing, but it ultimately ends up being completely crucial to the creation of Batman and the evolution of Gotham as we know it.

John Constantine has fought many a monster. He's faced everyone, from the First of the Fallen to renegade demons causing football riots and beyond. But of all the villains he's fought, probably my favorite is one who only ever appeared in three stories: the King of the Vampires.

It feels almost too clichéd to be worth saying: whether you're naming a favorite superhero or a favorite comics monster, the Thing is no surprise for the top of either list. In fact the archetype of the monster as member of a superhero team started with him, and with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who introduced the character in Fantastic Four #1. He wasn't exactly the first superheroic monster, but he was the first one who wasn't a loner, and the first whose gruff but self-conscious demeanor contrasted with the sunnier dispositions of his non-monstrous teammates.

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of duplicate knock-off Supermen serving as his villains, since once you’re defined as the top dog of the universe, the only way to match you is to literally match you. My favorite isn’t Zod, or Cyborg Superman, or the Eradicator; my favorite will always be Bizarro.