villain month

I'm always on the lookout for spooky comics to write about whenever the weather starts to get cold and the scent of pumpkin spice is carried aloft by a chill wind, but after years and years of doing this, I sometimes worry that I'll run out. I mean, there is a theoretically finite amount of weird old comics floating around out there, and once you've already talked about that issue of Star Trek where they find a haunted house in space and fight Dracula, it's easy to think that here might not be a whole lot left to talk about. That's why I was so glad when reader Ian McDougall recommended that I dive into the back issue bins and find a copy of 1975's Beowulf #6, which he describes as a comic where "Grendel vies with Dracula for Satan's throne, Beowulf solves a maze by punching it." And folks, if there is a sentence that will make me read a comic faster than that, I have not found it.

Q: What do you think are the ingredients of a successful evil-opposite type villain? -- @Rheiret A: If you've been reading the things I write about comics for a while, then you probably already know that on the list of plot elements that I'm a complete sucker for, Evil Opposites are right near the top. I love 'em almost every time they show up, and one of the big reasons why is that there actually aren't a whole lot of ingredients. They're one of the simplest concepts to introduce, sometimes to the point of just straight up flipping around the colors on the good guy's outfit and then having them declare loudly and often that they really, really hate the hero. It's that simple, and when it's done right, it can also be one of the most effective ways to introduce a long-running arch-nemesis.

Lucifer. Mephistopheles. Beelzebub. Auld Hornie. Satan. Nick. Clootie. Whatever you choose to call him, the devil has a long and storied (pun intended) history, from his humble beginnings as a nameless adversary in the book of Job to a tempter in the desert to the spokesmodel for canned ham. The prince of the power of the air has been at the center of stories for thousands of years, canonical, deuterocanonical, and extracanonical alike. His status as an instantly recognizable symbol and a royalty-free denizen of the public domain have made him an irresistible go-to in stories where an ultimate evil is needed, including in comics.

The thing about Dick Briefer's Golden Age Frankenstein comics is that if you start reading them from the beginning, there's just enough in there from the novel to make you think that he's doing a straight up adaptation of Mary Shelley. There's familiar stuff about Victor deciding to conquer death and stitching up a bunch of corpses, charging them up with lightning, and then the Monster's escape out in to a world that will never understand it, right down to the villagers with the pitchforks. It's three pages that make you think you know exactly what's going on. And then, on page four, the Monster breaks into a zoo, punches out a lion, and rides off on an elephant, and that's when you realize that Frankenstein is on a whole other level of being completely bonkers.

GloomCookie, created by writer Serena Valentino and artist Ted Naifeh, featured a villain who was the evil queen of the goth club scene, so when Disney Press introduced a series of middle grade novels about their animated feature films’ villains, who better than Valentino to tell the tale of Snow White's Wicked Queen in Fairest of All? That book was followed in 2014 by The Beast Within, about the cursed prince from Beauty And The Beast, and 2016 will see the publication of Poor Unfortunate Soul, about the sea witch Ursula from The Little Mermaid. We spoke to Valentino about the ways and wiles of villainous characters.

If you were born any time in the past 90 years or so, there's a pretty good chance you've been frightened, unsettled, menaced or just generally made uncomfortable by one or more of the villains in a Disney animated film. Understandably, it's the protagonists of Disney films --- particularly the princesses --- who get a lot of attention from fan artists, but as it's October, we here at ComicsAlliance are taking the time to shine a spotlight on villains, those characters who make it their mission to throw obstacles in the way of fresh-faced (and occasionally hunchbacked, wooden. or passed-out) heroes.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. This week, to kick off a special month of coverage looking at comics' finest villains, we're taking a look at Superman and the less frequently explored corners of his rogues' gallery. With over seventy-five years and thousands of issues of publication history, Superman has encountered a lot of bad guys. So why do writers keep going back to the well-trod ground of Luthor, Zod, and Brainiac? This video offers some characters who have perhaps not gotten their due time in the spotlight.