Daredevil Villains #2: Electro
DAREDEVIL #2 (June 1964)
“The Evil Menace of Electro”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited
If you’re going to play Daredevil as a swashbuckling solo superhero who swings through the streets of Marvel’s New York, there’s an elephant in the room: Spider-Man already exists. So what makes this new guy stand out? One solution would be to give Daredevil his very own arch enemy. Instead, here’s Electro.
Now, this is only the second Electro story. He debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #9 four months earlier. He hasn’t been slotted as a C-lister yet. But even allowing for all of that, Daredevil’s not even met a supervillain of his own yet, and already he’s dealing with Spider-Man’s hand-me-downs. How was that supposed to help him?
It’s not like Electro is an especially strong concept. His back story and powers have no particular synergy with Daredevil. Max Dillon is a lineman who gets electric powers when he’s struck by lightning, and decides to become a criminal. That’s it. That’s the character. Electro stands and falls on the strength of his electricity gimmick, and there are certainly worse gimmicks. It’s a strong enough visual to have kept him around to the present day. But he’s still a gimmick villain. Going to him as early as issue #2 is not a good sign.
The story, then. The Fantastic Four show up at the offices of Nelson & Murdock, playing the same “welcome to the Marvel Universe” role that Spider-Man will have in later years. Their lease is up for renewal. They want a lawyer to visit the Baxter Building and check that it matches the lease. Foggy says that leases are Matt’s department, and he’s not in right now. So the FF cheerfully add Matt’s photo to their security system and then head off for a meeting in Washington DC.
For obvious reasons, a lot of early Daredevil stories start with a client hiring Matt. It’s not just an easy way to get him into a story; Stan Lee also understood the entertainment value in having Matt be a normal lawyer for bizarre clients. Sometimes the results make reasonable sense. And sometimes they don’t. Here, for example, the Fantastic Four, who have a hi-tech security system because their technology is so incredibly important, are giving unsupervised access to a blind rookie lawyer they’ve never met and who they seem to have picked at random from the phone book. Why? So that he can check the building against the lease – a task which requires him to visit the building, but not to see anything once he gets there.
Naturally, Matt misses the FF’s visit because he’s busy as Daredevil, dealing with street level crime. He catches a bunch of car thieves, which requires the narrator to get excited as Daredevil “unhesitatingly approaches a dingy garage”. As it happens, these guys work for Electro. But Daredevil and Electro are both bored with this mundane level of crime, and ready for a bigger challenge. In Electro’s case, he decides to break into the Baxter Building while the FF are out of town, steal some secrets, and “sell them to a hostile nation for a fortune”. It’s a plan, I guess, but it’s an uninspired one.
Electro duly gets in to the Baxter Building by using his powers to shut down the security systems. Matt shows up, senses trouble, and changes into his Daredevil costume. Pages 9 to 21: they fight.
I mean, there’s a bit more to it than that. Electro knocks Daredevil out and tries to launch him into space. Daredevil steers the ship safely back to Earth, because his senses let him figure out what the controls do. And then Stan really pushes his luck by telling us that Matt was able to find a safe place to crash land in Central Park by listening out for heartbeats. From inside the plunging rocket. Really. And there’s a cameo at the end by the Rockettes. But really it’s just an extended fight.
These days, for all practical purposes, Daredevil’s radar sense is just sight without colour. For Stan, it’s much vaguer and hazier than that, and it’s the little details he picks up with his other senses that let him understand what’s going on around him. It’s not just the powers; it’s how clever he is at interpreting the information he has. But the creators haven’t figured out how to get this across visually, so it becomes a relentless internal monologue. “The temperature has risen 27 degrees! It can only mean arc lights indicating a stage show! And the scent of perfume and theatrical make-up – showgirls!” And so on.
There’s a lot of this in the early issues. Evidently Stan recognised it as the book’s unique selling point. So maybe his priority in issue #2 was to focus on that, and Electro was just chosen as a recognisable off-the-shelf villain who didn’t need any work to set him up. But that’s being very generous. It’s just a random fight scene with a random Spider-Man villain.
Tonally, this is a massive overcorrection from the car thieves. Future issues dial it back a bit and find a much better balance, but that only makes this issue seem like even more of a misfire.
Ah, yes. The first of many 1960s stories in which Stan Lee and his artist/plotter essentially give up and just take a villain from another comic so Daredevil has someone to fight.
Electro has a little bit of distinct characterization in his debut story in Amazing Spider-Man #9. He’s portrayed as a talented electrical lineman, but also someone who refuses to rescue a fellow worker without a payout.
Getting super-powers makes him a criminal opportunist; he first encounters Spider-Man while robbing an armored car, and is kind of apathetic when Spidey shocks himself into unconsciousness. Rather than gloating about it or trying to kill Spider-Man, Electro just shrugs that he wasn’t trying to electrocute the hero, but whatevs, and then sensibly grabs the loot and walks away.
It’s a bit different than the usual bombastic villainy, making Electro out to be more of a callously self-interested crook than a vicious punk with a chip on his shoulder, like, say, the Silver Age Sandman.
This story — Daredevil (1964 series) #2 — does turn Electro into an off-the-shelf villain-of-the-month, a status that he keeps for decades until writers start trying to give him depth in the 1990s.
Oddly, Electro becomes a kind of shared villain between Spider-Man and Daredevil. It’s Electro who organizes DD’s alliterative villain team, the Emissaries of Evil, for Daredevil Annual #1. Of course, this is just Stan and Gene Colan imitating the Sinister Six form Spider-Man’s first annual.
From there, Electro appears in one more Spider-Man issue late in the Stan Lee run, and one more Daredevil multi-part story in the 1970s under Gerry Conway that teams him with the Purple Man.
After his next appearance in a Marvel Team-Up story featuring both Spider-Man and Daredevil, Electro lands more firmly in the Spider-Man titles. By this time, Daredevil has been Miller-ized, and the guy in the green-and-yellow lightning bolt costume hardly fits.
If all these heroes and villains are running g around in NYC, there probably should be more meeting random bad guys, not just the ones in your rogues gallery. At least in DC, folks are often in their own city, so it makes a smidge more sense.
@Omar- Electro also showed up in a couple of issues of Omega the Unknown. But it’s amazing how rarely he showed up before the late 1970s. A lot of villains we think of as core members of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery showed up very rarely before the late 1970s. Mysterio and Vulture both appeared very rarely- during Conway’s run, he didn’t bother using either one and instead replaced them with successors. (The next writers to use them promptly brought back the originals.) Scorpion also appeared rarely- he was used in a couple of Captain America stories where he showed how dangerous he was by being knocked out by Steve with a tree branch and being unable to escape an ordinary rope he was trapped in. Rhino was shunted off into the Hulk after his original appearance and still appeared in that title relatively rarely. Poor Chameleon had only a dozen appearances up to his appearance in Marl Wolfman’s run, and then disappeared from comics for a DECADE- he didn’t even get a full entry into the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe. And Shocker remained a D-list villain with few appearances well into the ’90s.
Part of it might have been the spirit of the times- Scarecrow appeared relatively infrequently after he was reintroduced into the Bat-books in the 60s until the late 1970s. And Riddler appeared a lot while the Batman TV series was on the air but not a lot otherwise.
Given the discussion here and in the original Daredevil rogues post, it sounds like you could easily fill an issue of OHOTMU/Who’s Who with failed legacy villains: Mad Hatter II, Clayface II, Mysterio II, Vulture II, etc.
They could band together and demand to be recognized in some Morrisonian meta-story.
@Paul- one of the main limitations to Matt’s radar sense in the modern era is that it can’t see flat patterns. For example, when Matt first met Crossbones, Crossbones thought Matt was an idiot for not being able to figure out which villain he was fighting- he wears a skull and Crossbones on his costume. But Matt couldn’t tell that, while any other hero who hadn’t met Crossbones in person could just look at his costume and realize it was Crossbones.
You know you’ve read too many comics when you see “Daredevil and Electro” and wonder why he spelled her name wrong.
You know it’s hopeless when you then think, “like on the cover of her 1st appearance!”
Michael said: A lot of villains we think of as core members of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery showed up very rarely before the late 1970s. Mysterio and Vulture both appeared very rarely- during Conway’s run, he didn’t bother using either one and instead replaced them with successors.
There’s also the Sandman, who was transferred over to Fantastic Four halfway through Ditko’s run on the title, and also didn’t come back to Spidey’s books until the later 1970s…and didn’t come back as a regular until he’d stopped being a villain.
A lot of that was Conway, who wanted to introduce his own villains, like the Tarantula and Hammerhead, and tended to go for existing villains who were more than petty criminals: gangleader and megalomaniac Doctor Octopus, his reinvented “my powers are killing me” version of the Molten Man, and Green Goblin substitutes Harry Osborn and the Jackal.*
When Len Wein succeeded Conway on the title, he seemed to want to do his own sequel versions to Conway stories: another Molten Man story, two more Punisher arcs, another Doc Ock/Hammerhead gang war, another Harry-as-the-Goblin tease, another Jonas Harrow plot, and so forth.
Wein did use the Kingpin and the Lizard, and brought the Shocker back for the first time since Stan Lee, but otherwise Wein stayed away from the pre-Conway villains. B
Most of the classic baddies got some occasional appearances in either Marvel Team-Up or Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. That’s where Kraven the Hunter, the original Vulture, Electro, the Enforcers, the Sandman (in his original Ditko costume), and the Chameleon clashed with Spider-Man during much of the 1970s.
Marv Wolfman made an effort to bring back some more of the Stan Lee-era baddies in the run-up to issue #200, much as he’d done in Fantastic Four for its #200 story. Now Electro was back in ASM, the Chameleon turned up there for the first time in over 100 issues, and the original Mysterio was back from the dead and back at it again.
But yeah, it takes until the early 1990s for the “classic core villains” to really solidify in the Spider-Man books and start turning up with real regularity. And some of that may have just been how many books Spider-Man had by then.
* The Jackal definitely started out as a Goblin ripoff: a green-costumed mystery villain who went from trying to rule the criminal underworld to having a psychotic obsession with Spider-Man, eventually revealed as a supporting cast member with something of a split personality. It’s hard to remember that now that he’s portrayed more like Mister Sinister’s methods with the Joker’s personality.
Notionally, I’m in favor of the notion of a new hero butting heads with an “established villain” connected to an established hero in the new hero’s early appearances, as a way to establish how far they have to go in developing their capabilities. I just don’t care about Daredevil much, so I don’t care about applying this approach to Daredevil.
I’ve always liked Electro, though, and I hated that when John Romita takes over from Ditko, he stars using the Shocker exclusively, who has almost the same power set in a much worse costume.
Alright, my memory is mistaken. Shocker appears twice during Romita’s run, but Electro once. I felt like there was a lot more Shocker.
“You know you’ve read too many comics when you see “Daredevil and Electro” and wonder why he spelled her name wrong.”
I never even made that connection. That would be fun. I thought it was kind of dull that Chip Zdarsky made Elektra another Daredevil. He should’ve made her another Electro.
That connection is joked about on-panel eventually … in Daredevil #202, the backup comedy story that’s included as part of the “wackiness” of Assistant Editors’ Month.
The mention of how many titles Spider-Man had in the 80s crystallized something for me. I was a relatively new fan then, and I was encountering all these classic Ditko villains in *reprint* titles. Even before the days of trade collections, the Ditko run was quite regularly in print. So villains from those early days were getting exposure that later-introduced ones were not.
Alexx Kay said: The mention of how many titles Spider-Man had in the 80s crystallized something for me. I was a relatively new fan then, and I was encountering all these classic Ditko villains in *reprint* titles. Even before the days of trade collections, the Ditko run was quite regularly in print. So villains from those early days were getting exposure that later-introduced ones were not.
That’s an excellent point, I think it was in the 1980s that Marvel Tales stopped reprinting stories from X years ago, in sequence.
Instead, they started over from ASM #1 and started going forward through the Ditko and Romita Sr. eras. As a consequence, a big chunk of Bronze Age stories just never got reprinted.
But that would definitely have put the focus back on the Silver Age Lee-edited stories and characters, especially the villains.
In the 1990s, this switched to reprinting all of Spider-Man’s team-ups with whatever character was selling well — the X-Men and New Mutants, the Punisher, and then Ghost Rider — before trying to do the Hobgoblin saga and eventually most of the DeFalco run.
But by then the 60s Spider-rogues were pretty solid regulars in contemporary stories, and they never really left until they were deliberately “rested” for the first year or two of the Brand New Day era.
Bringing this back to Daredevil, his rogues’ gallery has been further constructed by the emphasis on the Miller stuff in collections, plus the lack of a dedicated reprint series for DD for a long time. It’s only with Marvel Unlimited, the recent Epic Collections, and the restarted Marvel Masterworks volumes that all of the Silver Age and Bronze Age runs have been widely accessible.
As a kid in 70s and 80s, I don’t recall seeing any DD stuff reprinted. Obviously, Spidey, FF and Avengers were the big ones when you had things like Amazing Adventures, Marvel Triple Action and the like, in addition to Marvel Tales and the Pocket Books collections, which were huge as a kid to me.
The Marvel Super Heroes title (which originally featured original stories, including Captain Marvel’s try-out for his own book) switched to reprinting Iron Man and Daredevil comics for a brief period before it settled on reprinting Tales To Astonish/Hulk comics. It looks like Daredevil #2-19 were reprinted in that book. This was circa 1970-1971 though, so everyone too young to have bought that book never would have come across old DD comics.
I never even considered reading pre-Frank Miller DD comics until Marvel began their Essential line.
I used to love Marvel Tales, when I discovered it was reprinting the Lee/Ditko Amazing Spider-Man comics in the 1980s.
I started collecting the back-issues to find cheap copies of the stories which followed the Lee/Ditko, Lee/Romita era.
Marvel Tales reprinted Amazing Spider-Man until the end of the Len Wein run (I think). I’m sure Marvel decided that the issues which followed were too recent to bother reprinting at that point, plus there was a new generation of comic fans who had no access to the classic earliest Spider-Man stories. So, they switched to starting over from Amazing Fantasy #15 again after the Wein run.
I didn’t read any of the mid-1970s/late-1970s Spider-Man comics until Marvel got to that point with the Essential books.
Your mention of Marvel Triple Action rang a bell.
The very earliest DD stories were reprinted in Marvel Super Heroes when it was a big reprint collection. they made it to issue #19 before the DD reprints bounced through Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action and then into Marvel Adventures
A grand total of 8 more issues of the Lee-Colan Daredevil was reprinted in the Marvel Adventures series in the late 1970s, eventually getting to issue #27.
As 1970s reprints, these cut select panels, enough to drop a couple of pages from the original stories to make room for the extra ads of the 1970s format.
ChrisV — beat me to it!
Regarding Marvel Tales: going by the Grand Comics Database, it looks like they made it to ASM #159 — about a year out from the end of the Len Wein run — before going back to Amazing Fantasy #15.
I sure treasure my five Essential DD volumes.
(For some value of “treasure” ; v1 is just about falling apart from being reread so much. Giving it another go for these posts isn’t helping.)
For Spider-Man villains, remember that he was always much bigger than his comics. I personally knew about the Lizard in the 70s because of a story/play on LP record. Even when the TV show was having him mostly fight robbers and stuff, those early rogues were front and centre in a lot of merchandise.
@JD: “I sure treasure my five Essential DD volumes.”
I love my Essential color tions, and I’m annoyed Marvel stopped making them. I’m glad I got my Conan & Godzilla volumes in the limited times they were released. Having all of Tomb of Dracula in black and white is the best.
Essential COLLECTIONS, that is, although I think it’s funny that autocorrect changed it to “color” something.
The live-action Spider-Man films have used almost exclusively Ditko villains haven’t they? That’s kind of amazing considering how many Spider-man films they’ve made compared to Ditko’s relatively short run on the book … I think most of the supporting cast is drawn from the Lee/Ditko run, too.
Venom is the obvious exception, but other than that even the minor villains that I can recall are Ditko creations. And Mary Jane and the characterization of Gwen are from Romita, but other than that, everyone seems to basically be riffing on what Ditko laid down between ’63 and ’66.
@Aro- Rhino appeared in Amazing Spider-Man 2 and he’s a Romita character.
But part of the reason is that 10 villains of Spider-Man’s core rogues gallery- the Sinister Six, Green Goblin, Chameleon, Lizard and Scorpion- were created in the first half of Ditto’s run. That’s unusual.
The core members created outside Ditko’s run were Shocker. Rhino. Kingpin (Romita), Hammerhead and Tombstone (Conway), Boomerang (imported from the Hulk) and Venom and Carnage. And arguably Hydro-Man. But the majority of Peter’s core rogues were created in the first half of Ditto’s run.
The Shocker was in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but as a minor villain.
It’s interesting to see that some Spider- villains didn’t end up becoming core rogues, despite periods of heavy use across multiple creators’ runs: the Molten Man, the Beetle(s), and Silvermane all turn up across multiple decades and creators, but they haven’t become as iconic or frequent as the core villains.
The Beetle suffered under the curse that the original started out as a Human Torch villain.
OK. Granted, the Wizard started out in Strange Tales, but he’s the exception. Outside of that one character, the Human Torch strip gave Marvel the Plant Man, Paste-Pot Pete, Eel, Rabble Rouser, and the Asbestos Man.
I’m a little surprised the Spidey movies didn’t use comedy characters like Frog Man or White Rabbit as throw away villains.
Although the TV shows have fallen off. At least it gives us more chances to see the more obscure characters.
@Omar- Abe Jenkins probably would have become one of Spider-Man’s core villains if he hadn’t reformed and jolned the Thunderbolts. Janice Lincoln might still become one of Spider-Man’s core villains, especially if she and Randy actually manage to get married- it’s too early to tell.
Molten Man had a handful of appearances before he reformed. That seems to be the issue- creators like him better in a reformed/ semi- reformed role as Liz’s brother and Normie’s uncle than as an antagonist.
Silvermane is an interesting case. In 1984, he was arguably Spider-Man’s second crimelord, after the Kingpin. But after he got his mind back, he was shunted aside in favor of the Rose. Gang War set the precedent for what to come. The Arranger tries to kill both Hammerhead and Silvermane with explosives. Hammerhead survives and tries to kill the Arranger the next issue. Silverrmane is presumed killed and doesn’t return for five years until a two-part filler in Web.
Gerry Conway’s second run (in Web and Spectacular) helped establish Tombstone and Hammerhead as the two biggest players in Spider-Man’s underworld, after the Kingpin. In Conway’s second run, Tombstone is introduced and serves as an enforcer for Kingpin and then Hammerhead, before getting powers and trying to usup Hammerhead at the end. Meanwhile, Hammerhead forms an alliance with Chameleon and challenges the Kingpin. Ever since then, whenever writers need a mob boss and Kingpin is unavailable, they use Tombstone and Hammerhead. Look at the Fortunato storyline in the ’90’s- Tombstone and Hammerhead fight against Fortunato and HYDRA while Silvermane is around but does nothing. Or look at Wells’ current run- there’s many crime lords, but aside from the Rose, the only ones which have many lines are Tombstone and Hammerhead.
In fact, after the Power of Terror miniseries in 1995, Silvermane didn’t do much, finally was revealed to have been killed of off panel in Slott’s run and when he was finally brought back in Superior Foes, it was as a HEAD. He didn’t get his body back until 2021.
@Chris V- I always thought Trapster worked as a villain after his name change- the problem with Paste-Pot-Pete was largely the name and costume.
Of course, it took a lot of tinkering to make the Wizard a useful villain. He didn’t get his anti-gravity technology until his last appearance in Strange Tales. Then when he moved over to Fantastic Four, he became the leader of the Frightful Four and got his classic costume. And then a few years later, he got his Wonder Gloves, completing his transformation into the villain readers know today.
@Michael – I forgot that Rhino, Kingpin and Shocker were from early in Romita’s run on ASM. They’re all kind of Ditko-esque, with strong designs. Romita was very good.
Liz Allan is a very funny case of a minor early character who gets elaborated on decades later. She’s just a student that Peter has a crush on in the Ditko series, and is dating the bully Flash Thompson. Once they graduate high-school she stops appearing in the book.
More than a hundred issues later, Roy Thomas (of course) reveals that Molten Man was her step-brother. Then in the 1990s, she gets married to Harry Osbourne, and they have a child before Harry has a breakdown and becomes the Green Goblin.
In the 2010s, her ex-boyfriend Flash becomes the superhero version of Venom, and then she becomes the CEO of the Spider-Man 2099 mega-corporation Alchemax (???).
In the most recent film series, her father is revealed to be the Vulture, which doesn’t look like it’s part of the comic-book continuity, but which would be a hilarious ret-con.
Just recently her son Normie has become The Red Goblin, so now she has a brother, ex-husband, ex-father-in-law, and son who are all super villains. Cool. And it looks like she’s recently bonded with a Venom/Carnage symbiote to become a supervillain called Misery herself. With a four-issue mini-series.
At this point it’s like pretty much every single person Peter Parker knew during high school and university has developed some kind of super powers, so sure, why not?
It was actually Conway who revealed that Molten Man was Liz’ step-brother.
Conway said he was reading the Lee/Ditko run over again while working on Amazing, looking for story ideas, when he came across the first appearance of Molten Man, which also happened to be the final appearance of Liz Allan for years (it was the issue where they graduated high school). Conway decided he could bring both of them back in one issue by making a connection between the two characters.
The Sinister Syndicate members were more core Spider-Man villains outside the comics.
Thank Semper for that.
To be fair: *both* versions of the Shocker were in Spider-Man: Homecoming. 🙂
Oddly enough, I think they’re the only villains in the movie who get referred to by their made-up names.
“At this point it’s like pretty much every single person Peter Parker knew during high school and university has developed some kind of super powers, so sure, why not?”
@Aro: I just happened to read the 1986 OGN Amazing Spider-Man Hooky, whose starting point is that Spider-Man’s childhood newspaper delivery girl Marandi Sjörokker is actually a sorceress who’s hundreds of years old. So yeah, pretty much everybody.
Did we ever see who lives on the other side of Aunt May;s house in Queens?
“I’m a little surprised the Spidey movies didn’t use comedy characters like Frog Man or White Rabbit as throw away villains.”
That’s a good point. I don’t know what the benefit is of structuring an entire cookie cutter movie around a single villain, like the Vulture or Mysterio. Presumably there’s some profit in it somewhere.
I prefer the Lego Batman Movie strategy: have literally every goddamn Batman villain – major, minor, forgotten, whatever. (Okay, not LITERALLY every, but it was a wonderful assortment.)
“At this point it’s like pretty much every single person Peter Parker knew during high school and university has developed some kind of super powers, so sure, why not?”
I didn’t read Zdarsky’s Spectacular run, so I don’t know why JJJ knows Peter’s identity, or why the creators have kept that without retcon (I think?) for five years now. Can anyone elaborate?
And while we’re on Spider-runs, am I the only one who thought Gerry Conway’s run on Amazing was very dull, but was surprised at how good his Spectacular run was? It was like two completely different writers.
I think around that time we basically had Stern, Conway, David, Michelinie, and Dematties on the Spider-books. For a few years in there, that was the best Spider-man comics had ever been.
@Josie: ” I don’t know what the benefit is of structuring an entire cookie cutter movie around a single villain, like the Vulture or Mysterio. Presumably there’s some profit in it somewhere.”
It depends on the movie for me, but I don’t disagree. The first 2 Raimi Spider-Man movies did it well, as did Batman ’89. The better Marvel movies, however, committed to the world-building, including a wide range of characters. They didn’t always have compelling villains because they put the hero(es) and set-up front and center, and wasted some great comic book characters.
I have a bigger problem with tv shows that are so concerned with the season-long big bad that it gets boring. The CW and Netflix Marvel shows ran into that problem. I stopped watching some of them because the episodes got really same-y.
The “single villain/Big Bad” syndrome has a lot more to do with the realities of contracting actors for the role than with storytelling, per se.
Actors pursue other opportunities, and are not going to be available reliably enough to bring them back as recurring villains. putting multiple villains in a movie also increases its budget and reduces each one’s screen time, which makes it harder to attract actors and make good use of them.
Locking one actor-as-villain in for a single season — or a single movie — is easier. So is making them a series regular.
@Josie Janeson’s dad married Aunt May. Jameson was off on one of his tirades on his Myspace page or whatever. Parker got so sick of it he sat Jameson down and told him he was Spider-Man, so it was picking on family. They gained a lot of respect for each other that night, and blah blah blah. I think that was the last Spider-Man comic I read.
“I have a bigger problem with tv shows that are so concerned with the season-long big bad that it gets boring. The CW and Netflix Marvel shows ran into that problem”
I love Flash season 1, and to a lesser extent, Legends season 2, but in general that formula wore its welcome out fast.
“multiple villains in a movie also increases its budget and reduces each one’s screen time, which makes it harder to attract actors and make good use of them.”
We only have to look at the Avengers films, or even the recent DC films, to see that this logic doesn’t work at all. They have no problem packing these films with characters, just not villains.
Josie said: We only have to look at the Avengers films, or even the recent DC films, to see that this logic doesn’t work at all. They have no problem packing these films with characters, just not villains.
True. They don’t have problems packing the show with protagonists, whose interplay and goals are the main focus of the movie. The same goes for television shows with their regular cast members.
It’s possible to do a film series with a solo hero fighting multiple villains in a given installment — and that does happen from time to time — but it seems hard to do a comics-style rogues’ gallery that appears on and off across multiple installments.
Inevitably, recurring baddies either become series regulars, or they stop showing up after a handful of episodes across a couple of seasons or a couple of consecutive films.
The CW Flash show seems like a good example. They tried creating a recurring rogues’ gallery with a slow-build plot, but ended up making Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller into regulars on Legends of Tomorrow to keep them around. Miller ended up leaving anyway because he got tired of playing Captain Cold, so the plan to slowly assemble the Rogues fell apart.
The 1960s Batman TV show managed to have a recurring gallery of rogues, but it didn’t do team-ups of villains until the movie.
A rogues’ gallery seems easier to do in animation, likely because working actors don’t need to commit as much time to voice acting.
But it does seem like it’s hard to get actual actors to commit to repeated, multi-season or multi-film villain roles unless they are *the* villain of the season or film, guaranteed several appearances, or they get to be the main villain in several successive films.
As to villain teams in movies, that probably is a scriptwriters’ and directors’ philosophy, TV shows and movies are written to be a protagonist’s journey most of the time. The idea of a character with occasional appearances who gets an arc or a dynamic — or a bunch of occasional antagonists with a whole, recurring group dynamic — seems to just not be something filmed narrative does.
And fitting in two opposed groups with equally complex dynamics doesn’t really happen very often either. It generally doesn’t happen in adventure films, just as it generally doesn’t happen in sports films. Groups of baddies are there to be a problem for the protagonists, who are the ones who get to have inner and intragroup conflicts.
Again, screen time and the narrative weight towards protagonists — which feed into each other as phenomena — have a lot to do with it.
Omar: I think that’s a solved problem though. There’s no reason why the Big Bad has to appear in every single episode. I mean, Deep Space Nine pulled it off 25 years ago simply by not having Dukat or Weyoun appear in every single episode, even when the show moved towards serialization.
In my memory, it seems like Buffy did a good job of balancing big bad vs MOTW episodes. Now, the quality of said Big Bad is up for debate, same as it is for Nu Who.
“They don’t have problems packing the show with protagonists, whose interplay and goals are the main focus of the movie.”
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say here, and it seems you have things completely backwards. The plot focuses on the protagonists because there are so many of them. If there were a lot more antagonists, then THEY COULD WRITE A DIFFERENT PLOT.
“the plan to slowly assemble the Rogues fell apart.”
We don’t know that any such plan actually existed, given how tightly they clung to their formula in every CW superhero series.
“A rogues’ gallery seems easier to do in animation, likely because working actors don’t need to commit as much time to voice acting.”
Where are you even getting this from? This is utterly bizarre and not how anything works.