The Re-Read: Villain Teams (Secret Society of Super-Villains Edition)
Sunday's Child is Bonny and Blithe
Over the years, both DC and Marvel have periodically published comics that starred villains. In the 1970s, that was still in its way a pretty daring move, considering that the Comics Code had previously declared, “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals”, and that had only been mildly amended in 1971 to allow periodic and cautious “sympathetic portrayals of criminal behavior” (e.g., criminals who had a more rounded character and set of motivations).
In 1975, the Joker received his own title, and it was pretty weird. The character was in the middle of a transition from being portrayed fairly close to the Batman TV series, as a silly, over-antic clown to being more like his early portrayal, a sinister and homicidal figure. So he killed people in his own comic but he was also the protagonist (though not really an anti-hero) because most of the issues concerned his rivalries with other bad guys. To keep up with the Code, he also got arrested each issue. I bought the comic at the time but I wasn’t wild about it—though I do remember being very excited at the next-issue blurb in issue #9, that announced that the Joker would fight the entire Justice League by himself in issue #10. Which was never published, because the series was cancelled. Oh well.
Over at Marvel, there was Super-Villain Team-Up, which quickly centered on an uneasy alliance between Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner. It was a strange book, very uneven, but it was responsible for some of the development of Doom’s canonical backstory and had one of my all-time favorite Doom stories near the end of its relatively short run. After the Doom stories finished, there was a really ugly two-part story featuring the Red Skull and a reborn Adolph Hitler as the Hate-Monger against SHIELD that pretty much showed the limits of a book headlining villains in a conventional super-hero universe—you really did not want to get inside the motivations or aspirations of these two characters or care at all about their plans and plots other than seeing a fist in their face.
But my favorite 1970s villain book was the Secret Society of Super-Villains, and that’s because it was such a palpably weird and improvised title from the beginning.
In more recent times, DC’s had a new version of the titular Secret Society and it’s been chock-full of the thousands of memorable and forgettable bad guys they’ve featured over the years. But back when the SSoSV premiered in 1976, it was fairly plain that some of the heaviest hitters in DC’s lineup weren’t available for use—no Luthor, no Joker, no Brainiac, no Amazo, no Despero. What they ended up with was a head-scratcher if you were a kid like me who read a lot of comic books. Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang and Mirror Master, ok, makes sense. Gorilla Grodd, sure, though he wasn’t quite as strong and dangerous as he’s been portrayed more recently. Star Sapphire, who was normally a kind of evil alternative personality for Green Lantern’s girlfriend, but this was was someone else without any explanation or origin. Sinestro, ok, he was a big gun in relative terms. Copperhead—a character I didn’t know in 1976—but he was out of the book almost instantly. One of the Royal Flush Gang, who up to that point had no real history of being a character on his own. And the Wizard, who was from an alternative Earth, also with no explanation of why he was on Earth-1 now instead.
And then they added Manhunter—a memorable character who’d had a short-running comic of his own but who was supposedly dead in a rather final way. And Captain Comet, an obscure superhero from DC’s early history who was returning to Earth and was tricked into hanging out with the villains.
I missed the first issue when the title premiered but I got hooked after that. Looking over this ragtag group, it was hard to guess at what would keep them from just turning on each other—this wasn’t one of those temporary villain alliances aimed at beating the Justice League. But in fact, the first five issues did something really important, which was to move Jack Kirby’s New Gods into being available for use in the rest of the DC Universe by revealing that the villains had been organized by Darkseid. (The butler in their headquarters is a spy for Darkseid, and he rather hilariously was drawn to look like John Houseman on the Paper Chase.) In fairly short order, the villains decide that they’re not willing to be foot soldiers in some kind of plot against Earth (though Sinestro and the Wizard confer privately and note that it’s no skin of their nose if Earth dies, since they’re not from there).
(Gotta love Captain Boomerang and Mirror Master just throwing away their civilian clothing as they run dynamically forward with the rest.)
The odd thing is that this was a great sustainable premise that could have kept the book going for a long time—plots and counter-plots, a kind of three-sided struggle between villains, Apokolips and the superheroes. Instead, they rang it down by issue #5 with the Manhunter character blowing himself up in an attempt to kill Darkseid (it doesn’t work, but Darkseid gives up on the whole plan and the book moves on).
So then the title became something more like Captain Comet v. the Secret Society, with some of the villains leaving the book right away (Sinestro, Boomerang and Cold, etc) with Comet reasoning that it’s his job to track them down because the villains have discovered “they like to cooperate” and he feels like that’s his fault. In the meantime, Jack Kirby’s character Funky Flashman (a bitter satirical version of Stan Lee) shows up to be a kind of leader for the supervillains, which always seemed like a really odd fit. It never really clicked after that point in story-telling terms—a lot of odd one or two-issue plot arcs, some strange characterization, and an eventual emergence of The Wizard as the mastermind villain Behind It All (at which point he drops his standard magician outfit for an awful-looking ensemble of non-color-coordinated magical artifacts).
And yet I liked it almost because it was such shaggy, incoherent thing. You never knew where it was going next and plainly neither did the writers. The villains weren’t given much of an inner life, nor did you get any new perspective on their motivations—that kind of villain team would have to wait for a later era with books like Thunderbolts and Secret Six. Captain Comet had almost no personality, but it was kind of thrilling to see him willing to try and hunt down powerful enemies by himself if need be. (In the end, other superheroes pitch in as guest stars.) I think it left a mark on everybody who read it then—I would argue that almost all later villain-centered comics are referencing the idea behind the SSoSV, if not the uneven reality of it.
Have you read _Villains by Necessity_ by Eve Forward? It's a D&D-premised novel. People have become so good that the world will disappear in a puff of white light unless a group of bad guys save it.
It's not sophisticated (I'd like to see a challenge of the bad guys treading the line of not becoming too cooperative), but it's fun.