Why do we love (some) villains?

(Republished from Talking Philosophy (2012). As with many of these republished posts, I'm not seeking to reopen the discussions we had at the time at Talking Philosophy, despite the way the post ends.)

In my roles as a critic and erstwhile creator of popular culture, I am fascinated by the dynamic of heroism and villainy in fictional narrative. For some time now, I’ve been running a weekly “Sunday Supervillainy” segment on my personal blog as a bit of slightly-lighter relief, and this has proved quite popular (I usually focus on events in the universe of Marvel Comics, which I grew up on as a child and have an affection for, but sometimes I go wider, and I occasionally use it as an excuse to make connections with real-world villainy of one kind or another).

I’m particularly fascinated by many of the modern tropes relating to villainy and types of villainy (these tend to have their own names over at TV Tropes, such as … look this list).

And I’m especially fascinated by the phenomenon of villains becoming popular characters in their own right. Notoriously, the eponymous villain of The Terminator (1984) obtained much audience identification, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was brought back for successive movies in which he played the roles of visually identical characters that were presented as heroes. The moral is simply that villains can be cool. Even such a malevolent character as the psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter has a huge fan following.

Looking to the Marvel Comics universe, major villains such as Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Thanos are more popular characters than most of the heroes – and it’s not just a case of loving to hate them. Rather, there’s a fan identification with them and their exploits. People want to see them perform well and even obtain victories. Much the same applies to fan-favourite villains a bit lower down the pecking order (such as the Juggernaut, and one of my personal favourites, Moonstone). Marvel still has a few important villains that no one identifies with or roots for (I hope!) such as the Red Skull (a grotesque and hateful Nazi) and Ultron (a megalomaniacal killer robot), but there’s really not much that’s “nice” about Doctor Doom or Thanos, and even the more sympathetic Magneto is a self-righteous, ruthless, overbearing killer – even apart from his actual crimes, he’d be insufferable to deal with. Yet, characters like these, and of course, Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies seem to capture imaginations and loyalties.

My question for the day is simply what makes some of these malevolent fictional characters not only believably charismatic within the diegesis but actually charismatic figures in our world – in that they attract fans who cheer for them, buy posters of them, and want to read stories, see movies, etc., that are focused on them? On the face of it, it seems odd that narratives which depict the struggle between good and evil end up generating evil characters who are somehow alluring enough to attract their own large fan bases like this. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with the situation, though some of you might want to argue along those lines, but there is definitely something about it that seems paradoxical. What’s going on here?

I do have some ideas, but I’ll stop. Let’s discuss.

Sunday supervillainy - Magneto and Rachel Grey invade Attilan

I just plain like this panel, with art by Andrea Broccardo, from "Civil War II: X-Men 3" - in the current X-Men tie-in series to the current Civil War II series from Marvel. Here, Magneto and Rachel Grey take it on themselves to invade Attilan, home of the Inhumans.

Magneto is now more an anti-hero than an outright villain, and Rachel is not really villainous even though she has a mean streak. But they'll do for today's purpose.

[If you're not a fan of all the arcane X-Men continuity, you need to know that Rachel Grey is the time-travelling daughter of Jean Grey and Cyclops, from a dystopian future. She has a similar set of powers to her mother, but something of an edgier personality, having endured a future Holocaust-like situation. Magneto is, of course, in the comics, a Holocaust survivor who has been rejuvenated to his physical prime. I like the fact that Cullen Bunn, the writer of the tie-in series, has delved into old continuity to recall that these two always got along. The decades of layered continuity inevitably mean that casual comics readers will find a lot of stuff puzzling ... like why Rachel Grey seems older than the current version of Jean Grey running around. But oh well... Meanwhile, I simply like this well-composed, classic style panel.]

Sunday supervillainy - Currently reading Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club, by Alison Goodman

I've almost finished Alison Goodman's latest novel, Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club (also known as simply The Dark Days Club).

I don't usually offer disclaimers, since it's a small world and you can assume that I know many of the people whose books I discuss. But just this once, partly because I love this book - and I strongly recommend it if it sounds like your sort of thing - I'll get out of the way that Alison and I are personal friends.

With that said, this is a Gothic novel of a kind. It blends Regency romance (and Jane Austen's sharp eye for social observation) with a dark, soul-corrupting war against a demonic horde secretly entrenched in the cities, towns, and villages of the world. So what's not to like? It's beautifully written and adroitly paced, with rounded, vividly realized characters whom I find myself caring about. Lady Helen's dilemmas, large and small, are almost painful to contemplate. And yet we must know what she'll decide at each point - which keeps us devouring paragraphs and turning pages.

The bad guys of the narrative are demonic beings of various grades that infest the earth, preying on humankind by analogy, somewhat, to vampires. (Although this is not a vampire novel, Lady Helen does rather resemble Buffy - if Buffy were a young aristocratic woman living in England during the extravagant Regency period of the early nineteenth century.) These beings are opposed by a small group of especially gifted humans who might as well be considered mutants - the expression lusus naturae, whim, or we'd say "freak", of nature, is used more than once - and possess the terrible responsibility of employing their powers for mankind's greater good.

Much science fiction and fantasy can be seen as expressing anxiety about the uses of power. As we are told by countless book, movies, comics, etc. - whether it's Spider-Man, or the X-Men, or something more respectably middlebrow - certain people might use extraordinary powers altruistically and responsibly, while others would bend theirs to destructive or selfish purposes. In fiction, as with real-life uses of power (political, economic, technological, or otherwise), it is not always so straightforward. Even when used with all responsibility and diligence, great power may tend to corrupt the user, and this is certainly an overarching dilemma that confronts poor Lady Helen. Dare she embrace her abilities, and what kind of nightmare path in life will she be starting if she does? What would the power and the struggle do to her generous heart and purity of spirit?

There are two more books to come, so I'm looking forward to the whole trilogy.

Sunday supervillainy - Currently reading The Transhuman Antihero, by Michael Grantham

I'm currently reading Michael Grantham's book The Transhuman Antihero: Paradoxical Protagonists of Speculative Fiction from Mary Shelley to Richard Morgan (McFarland, 2016). Paradoxically, as it were, I am reading this after seeing a very unfavourable review of it published in the latest issue of Science Fiction Studies. Bad reviews are often better than no reviews at all, at least if you want to be read and cited! It became apparent to me that this was a book I needed to read, since it covers much  the same ground as some of my own research.

I can report that Grantham's book is nowhere near as bad as the SFS review suggested. On the contrary, many of the readings of individual texts are detailed and insightful. If you have an interest in this area, the book is worth broaching. It's also written fairly well, despite some overly convoluted sentences, and it's been edited well enough to be pretty free of typos and the like.

At the same time, the editing could have been better - for example, too many odd word choices slip through, as when Grantham claims that one author "is not alone in his advocation for designer evolution." Why not "advocacy"? Again, a particular novel "confronts the reader with a social reality in which advancements in genetic technologies have led to [certain outcomes]." Why not just "advances"? These are not at all the only such glitches, alas, and although all writers make a few mistakes in our fuzzier moments a reputable publishing house should never let through so many as has happened here.

As the SFS reviewer notes, the choice of texts to discuss seems very arbitrary. There is lengthy discussion of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, which is fine in itself, but I can't see much reason for choosing them beyond the author's personal interest. Many of the choices seem more like "stuff that I like" than any careful attempt to identify and examine a literary tradition. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing (as I said, the actual readings of specific texts are generally good), but it would dangerous to draw any novel conclusions from this sample of readings. It's impossible for a scholar in this field to be comprehensive, of course, at least in a relatively short book. But perhaps Grantham should have been more open about that problem and more tentative in offering conclusions (this is something for me to remember, as well!).

More worryingly, I'm not very impressed by the idea of a paradoxical "transhuman" anti-hero. Grantham's grasp of transhumanism is shaky: for a start, transhumanists don't tend to use the word "transhuman" as an adjective in the way he does, even in his title, although any rigour about this has long been lost in popular discussion. Since Grantham wants to rely on formal transhumanist theory, and is not just using words loosely, this should have been sorted out in a more scholarly way. He also shows loose scholarship in citing material from the ongoing debates in fields such as bioethics about the prospect of genetic enhancement. Arguments are put forward very quickly and uncritically, with, again, a sense that the choice of authors cited is rather arbitrary.

Getting down to the main thesis, what I find weakest is the idea that there is anything paradoxical in the idea of characters who have greater-than-human physical and/or cognitive capacities, combined with moral limitations of some sort. These characters may pursue destructive ends because they have not been morally enhanced or because of the way they are treated by societies that (to use a cliché that Grantham avoids) hate and fear them.

Well, fine. Science fiction novel after science fiction novel (and one SF movie, comic book series, graphic novel, TV show, etc., after another) shows how this might play out. Great power might be connected with great social alienation and/or destructiveness - and not so much with great exercise of responsibility for the welfare of others - but that's hardly an original point to make. Again, I'm pleased to see good readings of individual works that bring this out, and it's a theme that I often return to in various ways in my own writing, including in this series of blog posts. But there's no real paradox here. Why would great power necessarily go along with enhanced attitudes of concern for others?

In all, I'd give this book a B-minus. It's worth reading for its individual chapters, and early on it hits some of the correct high spots (though why not H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and/or Philip Wylie's Gladiator, which are perhaps the key narratives in the early tradition, along with some that Grantham does discuss such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Olaf Stapledon's Odd John?). The later chapters become increasingly arbitrary in what is selected for discussion - perhaps inevitably so, because of the explosion in science fiction since the 1970s, but that problem had to be addressed in some way, and in any event the actual choices made don't seem especially astute.

The book will increase your understanding of how science fiction, as a genre, has handled the idea of more-than-human characters, and how, as a genre, it has mused (or sometimes failed to) upon the morally acceptable uses of technoscientific power. But it does this through useful discussions of some selected texts, and not through much in the way of insight into a developing tradition.

Sunday supervillainy (a bit belated) - Thunderbolts 3, or what? (Spoilers)

A few weeks ago, I gave a shout-out to the new Thunderbolts comics series written by Jim Zub, which had reached a point of suspense at the end of its second issue.

Like earlier series featuring the Thunderbolts, this one shows the adventures of a bunch of villains who are only equivocally reformed (some, let's say, more equivocally than others). The Thunderbolts began as a sub-set of the Avengers' sworn enemies, the Masters of Evil, but their modus operandi was to play the role of superheroes as part of a long game. Some of them enjoyed the role, with its associated adulation, but they remained morally flawed individuals.

In this iteration of Thunderbolts, we have a classic line-up of the team: Moonstone; Atlas (the original Power Man, though he is much more formidable these days than originally, since he possesses high-level superhuman strength even at his normal human size, plus the ability to grow larger, even to truly enormous sizes); Mach-10 (the original Beetle, though his high-tech battlesuit has evolved over the years to rival that of Iron Man); and the Fixer.

They're now led by James "Bucky" Barnes - a.k.a. the Winter Soldier - and they have in tow Kobik, a reality-bending Cosmic Cube who manifests as a little girl. All in all, this is a nicely balanced combination of characters. Some of them have enough history with each other - dating back to the Masters of Evil days - to be more or less friends; however, you'd be wise not to trust the friendly feelings of Moonstone in particular. If there's any sense that these supercrooks are a family, it's an unusually dysfunctional one.

Moonstone is actually my favourite among them. Over the years, she's been the mainstay of the team in most of its incarnations. She's a versatile and effective supervillain, gifted with a wide array of powers as well as with intellectual flair. But she is also the closest thing the Thunderbolts have to a genuinely evil character, with her constant scheming and a near-psychopathic level of focus on her own ambitions and objectives. You'd hate to know someone like Moonstone in real life, but as a character in superhero comics she's a continual source of fun and trouble (and she pretty often gets her way). I hope she'll be brought to the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some stage, in all her glory.

Issue #3 of Thunderbolts starts with the showdown previously set in place between the Thunderbolts and a powerful team of Inhumans - led by one of their heavy hitters, Crystal - who view the Thunderbolts as having just massacred a large number of their people. As the Thunderbolts see things, they have, on the contrary, rather brutally put down an alien invasion of Earth. (As we learn, there's some ambiguity about the nature of the giant pods, and the monstrous beings that emerged from them, that we saw in the previous issue - all of which the Thunderbolts destroyed.)

As their fight with the Inhumans begins, the Thunderbolts are disadvantaged by the fact that Moonstone is already badly injured (having been almost killed by Kobik a couple of issues before) and is scarcely able to walk. With Moonstone hurt, and Kobik kept out of the fray for fear of what crazy thing she might do next, the Inhumans seem to have the Thunderbolts outnumbered and outgunned... But the Thunderbolts are a tough bunch, equipped with plenty of technology, fighting skills, and raw strength. Thanks partly to the efforts of the overtowering Atlas, but mainly to the Fixer's sneakiness and technology, they surprisingly get the better of their opponents, then make a fairly clean getaway.

By the end of the issue, Atlas and Mach-10 are enjoying a beer together, offering one to Bucky, and generally celebrating what they see as a good outcome. "So, does that mission go in the 'win' column or what?" Atlas says a bit smugly. But the downside is that they are now squarely on the radar of crimefighting authorities such as S.H.I.E.L.D. and have a growing set of problems. "Let's ... let's call it an 'or what,' okay?" says Bucky, who understands the bigger picture (by contrast, Atlas regards things very simply: from what we've seen so far, he just likes to come out on top in, as he puts it, a good scrap).

Later, Bucky reads Kobik a bed-time story, ending with a moral about the power of the imagination, though for him imagination is, perhaps, a curse rather than a blessing. Meanwhile, the two genius-level baddies, Moonstone and the Fixer, conspire over what to do about the unpredictable Kobik. The Fixer wants to kill her, while the still-recovering Moonstone wants to manipulate her psychologically to get control of her power. (By this point, Moonstone is drifting a little in the direction of full-on "I will rule the world!" megalomania.)

I said that Moonstone is my favourite, but I'm fond of all the Thunderbolts. Atlas is endearing in his way, being one of the most physically powerful characters on the Marvel Universe's version of Earth... but without the intellect or imagination to put his great strength to any ambitious purpose of his own devising. He's always seemed a bit of an unfortunate schmuck, led around by others, rather than a really villainous supervillain.

We all love stories about redemption, and there's plenty of need for it in Thunderbolts. Even the Winter Soldier, the most obviously heroic character on the team, has done terrible things in the past. At the time, he was a mind-controlled assassin, but his knowledge of the "mind-controlled" bit can't take away his pain and remorse. By contrast, Moonstone and the Fixer like playing at being heroes, but they're still villains at heart and quite capable of plotting murder or worse. They're unrepentant of anything they've done. Mach-10, meanwhile, is mechanically very gifted, but like Atlas he shows limited imagination, making the two of them ideal drinking buddies and tag-team partners. So... Mach-10 isn't such a bad guy, and he certainly has great armour - but he's no Tony Stark.

Much of the interest in Thunderbolts lies in the way that genuine redemption often seems to recede, even as Moonstone and the others manage to perform some socially useful deeds and score some impressive wins. While they may get what they want, there's usually something ambiguous or plain undermining in the outcome, and, worse, these anti-heroic characters resort pretty quickly to methods that more conventional heroes wouldn't want to countenance. For at least some of the Thunderbolts, redemption is not out of the question, but nor is it easy to reach for and hold - even for the "nicest" of them.

Sunday supervillainy - how to talk about science fictional aliens

I'm currently reading Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule, by Elana Gomel. I have a number of reasons for enjoying this book, apart from my interest in the topic (including the fact that I'm writing a book that covers some of the same territory). I find many of Gomel's discussions of particular texts involving alien encounters to be accurate and (where they go beyong the facts) plausible. I also like particular aspects of her style and critical approach, not least her rather light and deft use of critical jargon.

Every field of learning or practice relies to an extent on specialised terminology to describe what is theorised and/or the techniques that need to be practised. Professionals in the fields of prose fiction and cinema certainly use specialised terms to communicate with each other, and critics adopt much of this terminology as well as adding some of their own. There's nothing wrong with that, and critics are entitled to write on the assumption that some of this terminology is transparent to their readers. Obviously, however, it makes a difference whether I am writing a movie review in a newspaper (aimed at a popular audience, albeit one with an interest in seeing movies) or whether I'm writing for a peer reviewed journal, where much more can be assumed about my readers' theoretical knowledge and terminological sophistication.

Accordingly, I'm not totally opposed to the use of jargon by literary and cultural critics. Things only go wrong when, for whatever reasons, the use of jargon moves beyond whatever is needed for concise, accurate expression and starts to take on the appearance of writing to impress others, rather than writing to communicate. As it happens, we have inherited much language from over the centuries that is still useful - words and expressions such as "plot", "character", "theme", "narrative suspense", "climax", and so on, and in many cases this kind of language is perfectly adequate for what needs to be said. We also have more sophisticated terminology, such as "narrative viewpoint", with ideas such as "first-person narrator" and "omniscient third-person narration" - this terminology has to be consciously learned (in my experience, it is not necessarily transparent to first-year Arts students), but it is still relatively straightforward. By contrast, a great deal of other language depends on the acceptance of speculative and contestable (not to mention dubious) theories of culture and language, and it is often used more to signal the critic's wider theoretical commitments than to be helpful to readers who don't necessarily share them. Hold that thought for a moment.

Some of the aliens discussed by Gomel could almost be considered supervillains, though I admit to being a bit Procrustean in squeezing this post into my Sunday supervillainy series. (Oh well, sue me!)

A good example of such alien supervillainy is the shapeshifting creature depicted in John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", and in the movies based directly on it. In Campbell's original novella, he makes some key choices as to how he will convey the alienness of the alien while protecting the suspense of the narrative. Readers familiar with Campbell's work will appreciate Gomel's point that he was a versatile writer who knew exactly what he was doing in making choices of technique. Against that background, and in a discussion of the superhuman imitative powers of the alien species portrayed by Campbell, Gomel has this to say:

[I]t is also acted out on the level of the novella's narration. "Who Goes There?" has a third-person extradiegetic and omniscient narrator and is marked by a total lack of focalization. The characters' actions are described, and some information on the setting is given. But there is no access whatsoever to any of the characters' interiority. Whether man or monster, we know only what each of them does, not what he feels or thinks.

This sounds right, though I need to go back and re-read "Who Goes There?" to make sure.

Note that Gomel uses some unusual terms (unusual, that is, in everyday English), such as "extradiegetic" (outside the fictional reality constructed by the story), "focalization", and "interiority". By this stage of her book, the terms should be fairly clear even to people who are not otherwise familiar with them, but it is more important that she uses them lightly - they appear in sentences that are otherwise perfectly comprehensible, and they do allow her to communicate accurately and concisely to other people who spend much of their time thinking about fictional narratives.

Also, she is making a point that is actually useful to people wanting to understand more about how professional writers make choices of technique and achieve their effects. I am unhappy with much of the literary and cultural criticism that I read because it is not useful in that sense (and does not appear to proceed from that kind of understanding of art and literature, but rather from some sort of political or quasi-political, theory, combined with an urge to judge art according to how it serves or fails to serve the critic's politics).

I like Gomel's book - at least so far - because it does what I also aim at. It produces synthesis and understanding when discussing cultural products, and in doing so it draws on intimate familiarity with, and reasonably robust theoretical understandings of, the relevant traditions. There is very little sense here of attempting to stand in judgment of art primarily from the perspective of certain current political imperatives. I don't expect critics to throw away their practical and theoretical political commitments entirely, but I do hope to read their work for greater understanding of how art and literature actually work: in particular, how they achieve their effects. This requires a different kind of knowledge and understanding. Whether or not I succeed in particular cases, this is what I aspire to in my own discussions of art and literature.

Sunday supervillainy - Doctor Doom as the Infamous Iron Man

It seems that Iron Man (Tony Stark) may be in for a rocky time as the current Civil War II series/event unfolds in Marvel Comics. We don't know what is in store, except that there are two ongoing series planned, with one version of Iron Man (the Invincible Iron Man) played by a Black teenage girl (Riri Williams) and another version (the Infamous Iron Man) played by Doctor Doom, who is currently reformed from his usual villainous, megalomaniacal self. Doom has a new set of Iron Man armour that draws on his own classic look.

Poor Tony Stark may be dropping out of the picture somehow! Let's hope they don't kill him off as they've done to some other classic heroes of late.

Having Doom as a good guy of sorts is not all that unusual these days. He's one of those villains who are so interesting, and have become so popular, that you have to keep telling stories about them. And those can't, at the risk of boredom, be story after story in which a charismatic adversary like Doctor Doom simply loses, with various heroes in sequence foiling his various evil plans. He has to do more interesting stuff than that, save the world now and then, and generally get to kick ass in his own right.

This syndrome whereby a well-constructed and charismatic villain becomes a sort of hero or anti-hero - and certainly a character with depth and motivational complexity, and a code of honorable conduct - has a venerable history in popular culture. In the long-running serial form of comics, it's almost inevitable that many fan-favorite villains will take that path. At Marvel alone, there are now innumerable villains who've become much-loved semi-heroic characters despite their moral flaws (as well as several out-and-out heroes who began as villains). Even monstrously powerful hardened criminals, like Juggernaut and Absorbing Man, are shown to have likeable sides.

However, it's a bit more than that with Doom, since the events of the most recent Secret Wars event have left him very much physically and psychologically changed.

The creation of Riri Williams is transparently part of Marvel's ongoing attempt to create a more diverse (in terms of race, sex, cultural background, sexuality, etc.) crop of superheroes for our contemporary world. Most of Marvel's core recurring cast - its most iconic characters - were created in the 1960s (or even earlier in a very small number of cases); as a result most of them are white, male, and straight, and many of the heroes in particular are from conventional American backgrounds (as imagined around the middle of last century).

I'm good with the attempt to alter this mix, but the trick is to create great new characters whom readers relate to and actually care about. Readers won't warm to characters out of a sense of political duty, but must come to love them because they engage interest and concern, and because reading about them is actually fun. So it has to be an organic, carefully thought out process. It seems to have worked well with the new Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), so I'll hope Riri Williams will also turn out to be an engaging character.

Sunday supervillainy - Donald Trump as the supervillain M.O.D.A.A.K.

I don't read a lot into Marvel's decision to do this - it's surely just a bit of slightly satirical fun - but in the spin-off universe of "Spider-Gwen" the prominent supervillain M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) has been reimagined as something of a Donald Trump lookalike, and with the new name M.O.D.A.A.K. (Mental Organism Designed As America's King). This has been getting quite a lot of international coverage, including a story in the India/US crossover newspaper the Indian Panorama. I assume that M.O.D.A.A.K. has similar psi-based powers to the original M.O.D.O.K., but I can't confirm this or report on how the swollen-headed, tiny-handed villain fares in battle.

Sunday supervillainy - Cass Sunstein on Darth Vader

I've been reading Cass R. Sunstein's The World According to Stars Wars, which examines the Star
Wars franchise from many angles, allowing the author to discuss moral and aesthetic points, issues to do with the social reception of ideas and cultural products, analogies between the development of a movie series and the development of a legal tradition, and much more. It's a fascinating, likeable, and accessible book.

Sunstein observes at one point:

Say it loud and say it proud: Vader steals the show. Who's the most memorable character in the series? Vader is the most memorable chacter in the series. No one else comes close.

Sunstein examines why Darth Vader is such a memorable figure - alluring; cool; possessed, even, of a kind of erotic power - despite being coded through most of the original trilogy as a figure of evil. Taken as a whole, the original trilogy and its prequels can be viewed as the story of his moral fall and ultimate redemption. Certainly, Darth Vader seems to dominate those six movies more than Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, or any other character; and that's true of the original trilogy, taken by itself, independently of Vader's manifestation as Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. As Sunstein insists, it appears that Vader was the character who most caught George Lucas's own imagination.

A great villain can do that - can dominate a story and capture imaginations - and the best villains possess a certain allure that causes many of us in the audience to identify with them and admire them, partly embracing their values and attitudes, even as we also absorb the lesson that they are not actually role models for anybody to follow. When they are (partly or wholly) redeemed, we cheer for them even if they've previously caused death, pain, and destruction that seem virtually unforgivable when pondered more objectively.

Sunstein rightly observes that we can look forward to more examples of evil choices and character redemption as the new series of Star Wars films, begun with The Force Awakens, unfolds. This trope looks a bit like the workings of a religious, or even specifically Christian, concept of redemption. But I suspect that it goes even deeper than that.

Sunday supervillainy: Thunderbolts - "Justice, like lightning!"

I'm reinstating my regular "Sunday supervillainy" feature, starting with a shout out to the Thunderbolts from Marvel Comics, which is now into a new series (scripted by Jim Zub) with a familiar cast of characters.

The Thunderbolts, recall, were originally the Masters of Evil in disguise, pretending to be superheroes for their own complicated and nefarious purposes at a time when other heroes such as the Avengers were unavailable. Some of the Thunderbolts discovered that they actually enjoyed being heroes, though they were, and remain to varying extents, morally flawed individuals.

The new line-up includes the main stalwart of the team over the years, and one of my favourite Marvel villains: Moonstone (Dr. Karla Sofen). As always, Karla thinks that she should be leader, since she is arguably the most powerful. She is a brilliant psychologist and a (near?) psychopath, whose bonding with a cosmic gemstone gives her a wide range of super powers; these make her a competent and formidable opponent even for the likes of Captain Marvel or the Hulk.

Karla is backed up by Atlas (who was the original Power Man - though that title was usurped by Luke Cage a long time ago - and was known at one stage as Goliath), Mach-X (who was originally the Beetle), and the Fixer.

That's a classic and versatile set of Thunderbolts, though some fans will surely miss Songbird (originally Screaming Mimi).

In the new series, the Thunderbolts are now under the command of the Winter Soldier (a.k.a. James "Bucky" Barnes), who has the difficult job of keeping this villainous, headstrong crew under some semblance of control while leading them on missions for the greater good. He has also picked up the task of looking after (and likewise controlling, if he can) the insanely powerful and unpredictable Kobik - a set of Cosmic Cube fragments that has taken on the appearance and personality of a little girl.

When the Thunderbolts are well written, they're a lot of fun. They'd be worth reading for Moonstone's antics alone ... as she manipulates everyone else (with mixed success), tries to assert her superiority, sometimes does manage to pull off small coups, and occasionally connects with others on the team just enough not to look like a complete psychopath.

In fact, what makes the Thunderbolts likeable is the way this bunch of ex-crooks relate emotionally to each other. All of them originally chose to use their powers (or in the case of the Fixer and Mach-X, their inventive genius) for criminal gain. But none of them is all that evil. The Fixer and Mach-X are fairly decent guys when given a chance; Atlas is more unimaginative (and not terribly bright) than a truly nasty piece of work; and even Moonstone has at least developed some fondness and loyalty toward her teammates.

At this stage, just a couple of issues into the new series, the Thunderbolts have got themselves into a mess (as usual), with Kobik having just ripped out Moonstone's gem - nearly killing her - before being persuaded to put the gem back inside Karla's chest. Moonstone is now wandering around in a dreadful state trying to recover from the ordeal, but she and the others have managed to trash a nest of Inhumans' pods that hatched a whole bunch of giant humanoid ... monsters. Having killed all the "monsters" in an unnecessarily destructive brawl, the Thunderbolts now find themselves confronted by a powerful and angry team of Inhumans, led by Crystal. Grab the popcorn!

I'd love to see the Thunderbolts brought to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How about it, Disney?

Minions makes a billion

Like any aficionado of supervillainy, I'm a fan of the Despicable Me franchise, the latest instalment of which is the prequel Minions - which I found hilariously funny when I saw it a few weeks ago. I see today that after this past weekend's takings Minions has now climbed to a global box office cume of over one billion US dollars. A lot of people must love those little yellow rascals.

My ten most popular posts of all time

These are not necessarily my favourites - some are, but some rather cursory posts also make the list. Still, it's interesting to see what posts have struck a chord or incited a reaction over the years, and they do tend to have good threads attached.

Here we go, without further ado, as a New Year special, my ten most popular posts of all time:

1. Shallow, smug, arrogant; pot, kettle, black

2. Avengers movie

3. What you can't say about Islam - the backlash against Elizabeth Moon

4. More rubbish about "shrill" atheists - this time in The Daily Mail

5. Why this was never an atheist blog

6. Interpreting Deuteronomy - with sophisticated theology

7. Some Saturday supervillainy: Zeus vs the Hulk

8. Sunday superstuff - Marvel's first gay wedding: Northstar and Kyle

9. Islam and "Islamophobia" - a little manifesto

10. "The next step is to prohibit religious expression" - really?

Sunday supervillainy - Amazing Spider-Man #700

I don't get creeped out easily, but even I am creeped out by this. Amazing Spider-Man #700 ends with a scene where Dr. Octopus is apparently about to rape Mary Jane Watson. Dr. Octopus has taken possession of Spider-Man's/Peter Parker's body and has access to all his memories. As readers, we know that Peter and Mary Jane still love each other, despite having broken up some time back (there was that whole "deal with the devil Mephisto" story, etc., etc.), and despite all the bad shit they've been through together.

Now, despite (on top of those other "despites") how oddly "Peter" has been acting, Mary Jane seems to be up for getting back to together with him. And Dr. Octopus seems like he wants to take advantage of the situation.

Ugh! Just no. I really hope that this is a fake-out and that Mary Jane is going to be revealed as too smart for what has been set up here and/or that Doc Ock, usually a relatively sympathetic villain, is going to be revealed as not that evil. Even if it does prove to be a fake-out, I'm going to be shaking my head at this development.

Sunday supervillainy - Gail Simone to be "new" writer of Batgirl!

I can't make head or tail of this. Gail Simone was apparently sacked as the writer for DC's New 52 book, Batgirl. But now the announcement is that the next writer for Batgirl will be ... Gail Simone.

It seems from here as if the uproar among angry fans caused DC to change its collective, corporate mind, but for all I know the whole damn thing was just a horrible mistake. One way or another, it's weird. At any rate, apparently all is well for the moment with the career of one of the few high-profile female writers in the comics industry. I hope it stays like that.

Sunday Supervillainy - the X-Men stories that we lost

Though there was a large hiatus in my reading (creating a gap that I've since pretty much filled by researching back issues), I've been following the X-Men narrative since I was very young, in fact almost from the beginning. I was a little kid when I read a second-hand copy of  the original X-Men #4, which caught my imagination (and I soon caught up with most of the other issues that had already been published). Admittedly with gaps, I've followed the ongoing narrative ever since.

So I was around reading the last months of Chris Claremont's original X-Men run, and I'd been following Claremont's work through most of his run, which I enjoyed at the time.

Some events in the later part of this period don't make much sense because they were never followed up after Claremont left. Crucial plot threads were left hanging or, much the same thing, cut brutally short.

Thus, we never did see the story arcs that Claremont had in mind, and was foreshadowing, toward the end of his run, particularly a fragmented war of mutant against mutant that would have involved the Shadow King somehow controlling the Hellfire Club. It was revealed that Magneto had already fought some kind of epic battle against the Shadow King and had had to do something he considered shameful to prevail, or least survive the encounter... but we've never learned what happened.

At the end of Uncanny X-Men #275, Magneto executes the "foul creature" Zaladane, abandons Rogue, with whom he's developed the beginnings of a romantic relationship, and resolves that he'll no longer try to be a "kinder, gentler" version of himself - but he'll be taking on the Shadow King and the Hellfire Club, among other major threats to mutantkind, including perhaps the UN itself.

None of this happened in the way foreshadowed. Instead, Magneto was (apparently) killed off at the very end of Claremont's run, only a few months later. When he returned (as major villains always manage to do), he did, indeed, eventually have run-ins with the UN, but he was much more like his old villainous self, rather than the wild card or anti-hero that he'd become by the end of the much-celebrated Savage Land story.

I wish those Claremont stories had happened. The narrative was building to something that could have been exciting, and the creators involved were at the peak of their powers. Well, here is an account of what it was all about that gives us an idea of what was intended... and what X-Men fans twenty years ago missed out on, thanks to the rift between Chris Claremont and Bob Harras/Jim Lee.

Sunday Supervillainy (2) - Emma Frost

For Emma Frost fans, Brian Bendis linked to this pic by Aly Fell on his Twitter feed just now. What the heck?!

Sunday Supervillainy - reboot of Fantastic Four

The word is that there's going to be a reboot of the not-very-successful Fantastic Four movie franchise. I'd love to see the Fantastic Four done a bit better than we've seen to date, perhaps even with the sort of goofy science-fictional dignitas that you can find in the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run of the book, back in the early sixties when it really was "The world's greatest comic magazine!"

At this stage, I have no idea of what is going to be involved in the movie, and I guess we won't know for a long time, as the scheduled release date is 2015. Since it's a reboot, I guess it has to include a version of the origin story, in which the FF members gain their powers when accidentally bombarded in space by mutagenic cosmic rays (yeah, yeah, goofy). Maybe it would be a mistake to try again with Dr. Doom this early in a rebooted movie franchise. I'd love to see Black Bolt, Medusa, and the other Inhumans introduced, but that might get too complicated for an initial movie with an origin story to tell.

Looking forward to some more clarity on this as the time approaches.

Sunday Supervillainy - look what happened to Professor X!

Yes, the Red Skull stole his brain, as revealed in Uncanny Avengers #1 and #2. Horrors!

Nice seeing some interaction between Rogue and the Scarlet Witch, including Rogue's memories of when she first joined the X-Men... with Professor X defending her despite her villainous past.

Sunday Supervillainy - How death works in the world of X-Men

This video provides a bit of fun ... and seems to be about right. I'm glad I chanced across it.

Sunday Supervillainy - Uncanny X-Men returns

As of next February, the flagship Uncanny X-Men series will be restarted at #1 for the second time in the last year or two. This iteration neatly fits our "Sunday Supervillainy" theme because it focuses on the adventures of what is pretty close to a team of supervillains.

In the wake of the Avengers vs. X-Men event, Cyclops is now a full-blown mutant revolutionary, and his team is made up of Emma Frost, Magneto, and Magik - all of them morally dark characters. Their immediate aim is to rescue young mutants from bad situations and induct them into the team. Their ultimate goal, however, seems to be mutant revolution in some form.

It hasn't escaped anybody, I'm sure, that this rebel X-Men faction is pretty much an update of Magneto's old Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. It will be getting into conflicts with more law-abiding X-Men groups, though apparently it will also have a mission of protecting the world that hates and fears it. In that sense, it is a continuation of the Extinction Team that Kieron Gillen introduced to us in the previous series of Uncanny X-Men, although it is now down to its most hardcore members.

Magik has gradually become a favorite character of mine during AvX and especially since. I never used to think much of her one way or the other, but she's becoming a breakout character for Marvel at the moment. She's being portrayed as one of the most badass, ruthless, and competent of any of Marvel's characters with some claim to heroism - she's someone whom you'd hate in real life, but her destructive, demonic glee makes her a helluva fun character to watch in action.

Also of interest is the Chris Bachalo redesign of the main characters' costumes, which is going to take me some getting used to, though I think I might come to like it. At this stage we only have the cover of the first issue - I'm looking forward to seeing how the new visuals for Cyclops, Emma, Magneto, and Magik work within the covers.