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“I Am The of This Story!”: The Development of The Sympathetic

by

Leah Rae Smith, B.A.

A Thesis

In

English

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Approved

Dr. Wyatt Phillips Chair of the Committee

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef

Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School

May, 2021

Copyright 2021, Leah Rae Smith Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to share my gratitude to Dr. Wyatt Phillips and Dr. Fareed Ben- Youssef for their tutelage and insight on this project. Without their dedication and patience, this paper would not have come to fruition.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………….ii

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………...iv I: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….1

II. “IT’S PERSONAL” ()………………………………….19

III. “FUELED BY HATE” (THE SILVER AGE)………………………………31

IV. "I KNOW WHAT'S BEST" (THE BRONZE AND DARK AGES) ...... 42

V. "FORGIVENESS IS DIVINE" (THE MODERN AGE) …………………………………………………………………………..62

CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………76 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………82

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021

ABSTRACT The genre of began in the late 1930s, with the superhero growing to become a pop cultural and a multibillion-dollar industry encompassing comics, films, television, and merchandise among other media formats. ,

Spider-, , and their colleagues have become household names with a fanbase spanning multiple . However, while the genre is called “superhero”, these are not the only costume clad characters from this genre that have become a phenomenon. Their adversaries, likewise, have also become infamous in their own right.

Supervillains have made their way into the spotlight over time, in part because of the rise of their superhero’s fame, but also because of their prevalence with their stories for an who no longer believed in purely evil characters. Characters who at their infancy were nothing more than over-characterized, take over the world concepts now strive to prove their goodness toward the world by attempting to be themselves. Several of these have undergone a great transition in their audience’s perspectives. These have changed due to the growing depth of their origin stories, from their stories being nonexistent to having sympathetic tales founded around personal trauma that call for understanding and potentially forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness and redemption toward a supervillain is one that is introduced in greater prominence in the Modern Age of comics, yet could not be present as such without the gradual introduction of the sympathetic . Also, sympathy could not be given to supervillains if not for the changing perspective of its audience toward the world around them. These two caveats are necessary in order for the

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 development of the sympathetic supervillain to occur, transforming the classic comic book into a new creation and addition to the superhero .

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Bad guy. . Evil mastermind. World Dominator. The list of monikers goes on. Whatever you call them, the concept of the villain is not unfamiliar. Whether seen on the big screen or read on a page, the concept of villainy has been an age-old trope in , and has evolved from vengeful gods to witches in the woods enticing children to their cottages to eat them to intergalactic bent on universal domination.

It is a role that presents its complications with the identified in denial of the title or embracing it emphatically, “I am the villain of this story!” (“Onyx”). One of the more recognizable type of villain is that of the supervillain, a character that typically appears in superhero comic books. Initially overdrawn, out of proportion, and ridiculous, these bad guys colored the pages of comics and comic strips since the first in the late 1930s, and became popularized within the comic medium. Their crimes were initially that which directly affected the common man: robbery, government corruption, domestic violence. These were familiar crimes, crimes that were of a great concern to the readers, and spurned the detestation of that character, as observed by Professor Kelly Bergstrand and Professor James . Jasper, “We construct for the powerful emotions they inspire in who fear and hate them” (231). These two-dimensional characters were initially unremarkable, many being forgotten after their defeat by the hands of . The role would eventually grow from petty thieves to planet swallowing cosmic entities as the scope of evil swelled in the minds of the readers due to mounting global awareness and escalating events around them. These elements were further enhanced via 1

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 the growing technological advancements in communication and media, permeating the populace more as years went by. As the definition of evil changed, so did those who were identified by it.

This is evidenced in the changing characteristics of many supervillains displayed in superhero comics. Characters that at one point were the representation of what should be spurned and hated, supervillains in the past forty years have become more sympathetic, their arguments for their actions causing confliction in their sensibility, and at times they are even performing heroic acts, seeking redemption in the hopes that the superheroes will forgive them of their past actions. This growing sympathy then asks, can these supervillains be forgiven? Can they be redeemed of their villainy? My argument in this thesis is that since the inclusion of the supervillain trope in superhero comics, the villain has gone from a character defined only by their seemingly innate wickedness, to being driven to crime due to trauma, to attempting to become a form of themselves.

They have been evolving gradually over the span of eight decades.

This transition is owing to the growing inclusion of sympathetic origin stories used to manipulate audience perspective, to the identification of them as villains, and the justification of their actions. This culminates into the modern tale of the supervillain who many, currently in comics, attempt to perform good acts in terms of redemption, as well as challenge the superheroes’ beliefs in whether or not they are deserving of forgiveness. I argue that this is a response to the changing perspective of the audience, from facing a world , fighting for civil rights, and experiencing domestic terrorism; the audience has changed and so does their concept of what is good and what is

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 evil. The transformations of a supervillain the altering sympathies of an audience who are becoming disillusioned by the changing nature of the threat they : from an external to an internal one.

Although in storytelling the /antagonist or the hero/villain tropes have been a constant, comics did not follow the same path initially. American comics first started to appear on shelves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and they more often than not were a collection of comic strips from newspapers. These comic strips featured stories that starred such characters as the Yellow Kid and Skippy Skinner, and would last to the mid-1900s. They would then be replaced with comics featuring

Western and Sci-Fi stories inspired by pulp magazines. While the original collection of comic strips featured simple tales of the feats of the main character, it is the later comics that present the protagonist/antagonist feature.

The hero/villain trope—in pertaining to superhero comics—initially was created on the basis of an “us vs them” mentality, where the audience was encouraged to side with the do-gooder and to condemn their villainous counterpart. This has been true for many scenarios of good vs evil that preceded comics,

Throughout history and across genres, authors have used narratological techniques to set apart villains, , and opponents from other characters in a text. One way that authors and/or narrators do this is to exert a certain amount of control over villains. Villains, while necessary for an interesting story, must be carefully controlled by creators lest they confuse or mislead other characters and/or readers (Weiner et al, XXIII). This assertion of control over these characters limited the depth that they could .

However, since the initial target audience was children, the scope of their character was best constrained to good and bad. This created the familiar trope of superhero vs

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 supervillain that has come to be associated with comic books. This also created the great chasm for the readers over who are on the side of the superhero and the supervillain, “our cultural tendency to see good guys and bad guys, or bad guys and innocent victims, may make us unable to see the common reality in which both sides are in the wrong”

(Baumeister and Beck, 59). This is a realization that is later had in superhero comics as readership became older and more aware of the world around them, a world that did not have definitive sides of good and evil, but was filled with questionable good guys and relatable bad ones.

While this adjusts later on, the initial belief is in the idea of strictly good and evil without any leeway on either side. It encompasses the notion that good guys are always good and bad guys are always bad, that “people may simply be evil without justification or reason. Interestingly, the comic industry itself engendered this fear” (Bainbridge, 66).

It is a notion that carries on unwaveringly for two decades, yet as modern times came to be, so did the reinvention of the classic hero and villain as societal culture changed,

“Nowhere else (in the comics) do we find such a rich collection of archetypal heroic and villainous characters endlessly renewed and recast for each generation reflecting and manifesting contemporary culture’s highest values and greatest fears” (Alsford, 33).

Values and fears that become less defined in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries compared to when the superhero genre was presented.

The introduction of superhero comics in the 1930s brought about new tropes still popularly used today. Although the concept of the supervillain did not appear at the same time, the idea of the villain is persistent in every story. Early iterations of villains

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 consisted of robbers, wife-beaters, and crooked politicians. For example, in

Comics #26 (1940), Superman uses his abilities to expose two men who are pretending to be doctors, scamming sick patients into buying their medicine which are actually sugar tablets. Another example can be found in All-Star Comics #3 (1941) where a murderer is killing innocent civilians, so the Spectre investigates in order to bring the to justice. True supervillains did not fully appear until the 1940s at the height of World War

II, when they started to become reoccurring characters with ambitions—to take over the world, to topple governments, to incite war—and their names today have become as recognizable as the superheroes’ thanks in part to television and film: ,

Catwoman, and The , are just a few. These are characters that would continue throughout the run of the superhero comic and into today.

Typically, the title of “supervillain” is given to characters who possess super abilities and use them with evil intent. In this, it connects the two factions, “Superhero and supervillain alike are linked by the prefix ‘super,’ which illustrates a shared sense of being to those around them” (Bainbridge, 69). However, for the sake of this thesis I am offering an alternative definition that I will be following: a “supervillain” is a character that may or may not be endowed with superhuman abilities, but remains the adversary of a superhero and who performs acts of villainy, or falls on the side of evil.

This allows for the inclusion of -superpowered characters, similar to how is included in the superhero category but does not have any super-abilities, yet his heroic acts incorporate him in the category. The necessary presence of a superhero is an imperative element for the existence of the supervillain, which will be addressed later.

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What does this do for the classic “villain” trope in comics? Between the 1930s and present day there has been a shift in the way that supervillains are represented in society. With the petty bad guy gone in superhero comics, the sympathetic origin stories as well as the compelling arguments they make in defense of their actions reveal that villains are becoming, in many cases, the voice of reason in a world that is turned upside with circumstances such as viruses, bombings, and protests. Once more, as the level of knowledge accessibility grew, the idea and awareness of what “villainy’ is changed, according to Juliano, “As the world embraces the accessibility of the , we create a ‘virtual space’ where the law becomes muddled by issues of jurisdiction, accountability, and responsibility” (57). Issues that most of these supervillains now claim to be trying to right. In the (2014) comic series, Magneto is shown coming to the aid of who are being abducted, experimented, and slaughtered by hate and terrorist groups. At one point he faces off with agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. whom he chastises, “If S.H.I.E.L.D. would waste less time chasing me. . . and spend more time policing this kind of atrocity. . . no one would ever need speak my name again” (Magneto

#8, 20). Here, as with many supervillain cases, they on the failure of the “good” guys and become vigilantes in the name of the cause for which they are fighting.

Those who were once considered heroes—the president, government officials, police—have become villains in this growing perspective. Supervillains are now playing a bigger role in stories, with many getting their own comic series or single issues dedicated to them, for example , , and to name a few. The growing attention warps the idea of the superhero comic being solely about the

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 good of humanity and the heroes who defend it, “readers and viewers have for some time been invited to revel in the bad guys’ beguiling sociopathy and sympathize with their plight” (Weiner et al, XIV). These comics present the perspective of the supervillains more than they have in years past, albeit now coercing the audience to feel pity for these supervillains, and conflicting their established belief on which side to support in each scenario. This also opens a way for them to appear more sympathetic and can possibly make them appear good—or at least not as evil as the audience thinks—and the superhero bad for persecuting them.

This idea of the growth of sympathetic for supervillains is possible because of superhero comic reboots. Although comic scholars have disagreed and have edited the time frame, the ages of comics can be broken up as: the Stone Age (pre 1938),

Golden Age (1938-1956), Silver Age (1956-1970), Bronze Age (1970-1985), Dark Age

(1985-1998), and the Modern Age (1998-current day) (Beaty and Weiner, 154)1. There is not a consistent time frame for comics to , several occurrences of the practice have happened since the 1940s. From my study, reboots happen for three different reasons.

First, the introduction of a new storyline. If a comic publisher has a new story that will encompass most of their superhero lines, then a reboot is necessary at times to re- establish the world of the superheroes, what the characters are like, and what they

1 As stated, comic scholars can often disagree with the exact time frame of the comic ages. I, for one, disagree somewhat with the cited ages above, specifically that of the Dark Age of comics. While Beaty and Weiner list the Dark Age being at a time when the superhero comic aesthetic and became darker and grittier, calling it the “Dark Age” alludes to the historical Dark Ages of human history. My opinion is that the Dark Age of comics should be attributed to the early-mid fifties, for the serious decline in superhero comic production and quality, of which will be further discussed in the next chapter. 7

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 are facing. However, this precedes the second purpose for a reboot, and that is poor sales.

If a current iteration of comics is not selling well due to audience disapproval or disinterest, comic publishers will often end that line and introduce another one. While not all the characters will be rebooted, this offers the chance to make changes that are needed to any characters’ stories. A most recent example of this is the end of (2011) iteration of DC Comics and the of that version of Superman. He was an unpopular adaptation of the Man of , that is killed in the story in order to have the “original”

Superman return to appease fans. A reason why these comic lines and characters can become unpopular goes into the third reason of why comics are rebooted, and that is to make the characters recognizable to the audience.

Due to the more than eighty years of superhero comic books, the different ages aids in establishing the period being discussed. When the Golden Age of comics ended and the Silver Age of Comics emerged and began to bring back their characters from the

Golden Age, comic creators acknowledged that the audience of the 1960s would not recognize the heroes and villains of World War II since Golden Age supervillains had an

“unambiguously evil profile” (Weiner et al, XXVIII). The solution was to re-create these characters to reflect the more modern world around them, which also included changing their origin stories, “with the advent of the Silver Age, villain characters would begin to invite meaningful identification opportunities for the audience” (Weiner et al, XXVIII).

Thus, new versions of the same or similar characters were created. The same purpose was done for the Bronze/Dark Age and the Modern Age.

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It is these changing iterations that permit character study over time. As the characters adapt to the atmosphere that the current society will recognize, it allows a chance that not many characters have in other media formats. They have the chance to be ever changing reflections of the current culture while still having the history of previous ones, all connected to the same character. It is how they transform over time that encourages the study of the causes and effects of decisions made for that character. It allows for character growth, as well as added depth, especially for the villains who started their time in the superhero comics as nothing more than the to their hero. By showing them as simply being the bad guy, it caused readers to be unable to recognize themselves in them, “. . . showing villains as inferior is another way for creators to ‘other’ them so that readers do not identify with or pity them, which could lead readers to turn on the hero (who is now seen as a bully)” (Weiner et al, XXIII). In these early comics questioning was not allowed. The roles were clearly defined, and deviations were nonexistent.

Comic book supervillains, as most things in life, could not stay stagnant. As time and culture change, the media that it produces must change along with it, and “given the long history of comic books, supervillains have the capacity to embody any number of societal fears directly relevant to their readerships across changing eras” (Bainbridge,

65). The mustache twirling, bank robbing, fist-waving cliché villain of pre-war comic books could not survive for long in the superhero genre as the audience became older and more in tune with the world via advancing technology, so the supervillain was born to supplant these antiquated characters. As regulations over what could and could not be

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 represented in popular culture slowly died away, so did the early versions of evil characters, in most cases adding sympathetic origin stories for those who at one point in time was regulated to the stereotypical bad buy role. , when he was introduced in the sixties, desires to defeat the reigning government of to become its ruler, later attacking Earth after his home planet is destroyed. In the eighties he is retold, turning him into a man who lost his parents when he was a child in a tragic accident. This mirrors Superman’s origin story and compares the differing routes the two characters took in dealing with their trauma; one vowed to help and the other retaliated.

Dr. Doom, initially out to get revenge on Mr. due to a long-held rivalry, is now shown saving the universe in 2015’s Wars story line. , once just a thief who took advantage of her acquired abilities, now after 2016 is the victim of professional espionage and persecution while trying to use plants to discover cures for humanity.

These are a few examples of the shift of villains between their initial appearances in the comics to their modern-day iterations. Most now have a sympathetic back story that calls on the reader to experience different emotions than they previously had toward villains; ones of compassion and sadness.

This new push calls for a sense of villain justification. Where superhero comics were once clearly demarcated—good vs evil, right vs wrong, good guy vs bad guy, hero vs villain—these stories have become more complex since their 1930s inception.

Emotions toward the characters are muddled, with comics now showing superheroes doing wrong, and the argument for villainous actions now sounding more reasonable. A new culture of villain support has emerged. Supervillains are getting their own comics,

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 their own films. Audiences are more interested in what the other side has to say, a curious shift from the good ‘ole days. Instead of constantly falling to the side of the cape-wearing superhero, people now question the motives of the do-gooders, “patterns of violence do change in major ways due to relatively small changes in the social environment”

(Baumeister and Beck, 15) such as who is viewed as the bad guy, what the acceptable reactions to them are, and how former “bad guys” are regarded. Audiences react to these changes, and superhero comics must respond for their audience. No longer do people trust that good guys are simply practicing heroism because it is right, or because with great power comes great responsibility, or for truth, justice, and the American Way.

“Sides” became occasionally indefinable.

Today, different stories are told to even show a complete reversal of the hero/villain arc making it vague on which side the audience should be aligning with. This creates an atmosphere charged with discord, uncertainty, and the revelation that people and circumstances are more complicated than used to be believed. Villains, at times, seem to have been willingly aware of this from the beginning, and now it is the heroes’— as well as the audience’s—turn for the disclosure. Since the audience has typically sided with the heroes, this knowledge reveals that, along with the blurring of sides, there is also a possibility that they have been cheering on the wrong group the entire time, a concept that has been explored in various mediums in the past two decade or so, for example

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), The Book Thief (2005), etc.

While the superheroes do not typically fully experience the burst of the disillusionment bubble burst, they do meet with challenges during certain storylines that

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 cause them to question their own stance on what is right and wrong. When Captain

America is faced with the truth that the President of the United States is a criminal in

Captain America #175-176 (1974)—a not-so-subtle nod to Nixon and Watergate—he is forced to question where he stands now that the beliefs he has held since the forties has crumbled around him. Facing the truth of a misconceived is the reality for many villains’ origin stories. These epiphenomenal moments convince the supervillains that they must respond in order for change and retribution to occur, and they expect others to understand; “many perpetrators see themselves as people who have been unjustly treated and hence deserve sympathy, support, and extra tolerance for any wrongs they have committed” (Baumeister and Beck, 48). Comics attempt to convey this belief to the readers via the inclusion of the sympathetic origin story, especially in the tragic visual reveal of the abuse and trauma the supervillains endure within the comics’ panels. Since they have slowly become more intricate compared to previous incarnations the accumulative sympathy for them has grown as well.

For this paper, I would like to further clarify the parameters I have placed. I will be focusing on three supervillains—, Magneto, and the Shredder— for the purpose of their persistent presence of a , for established qualities of the story that are carried over into later iterations, and the uninterrupted existence of a direct motive. I have also chosen these three villains because of the companies they are published under: Lex Luthor and Magneto are published under DC Comics and Marvel

Comics respectively, and the Shredder who has been published under several independent comics groups, currently of which is IDW. This then is representation from the two

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 largest comic publishers who dominate the market resulting in a controlling factor of comic history, as well as an independent company to include an example of how they are responding to this shift in the supervillain . 2

I will be breaking this research into segments. The first chapter will focus on the

Golden Age of comics and the initial appearance of Luthor, a product of an era dedicated completely to the war effort and the defeat of the enemy. The second chapter will focus on the Silver and part of the Bronze Age as I break down the change to Lex Luthor, as well as the appearance of Magneto and the beginning of the sympathetic villain origin story in a time where domestic unrest became the focus of the United States. The third chapter will focus on the later Bronze Age as well as the Dark Age of comics, the rise of the , the introduction of Shredder and a plausible reason for villainy as well as more fleshed out tragic tales for supervillains at a moment when the definition of what is good and evil were in constant flux. The fourth chapter will focus on the Modern Age, the journey towards forgiveness and redemption for supervillains by them performing heroic acts. Ultimately, this thesis will trace three examples of several supervillains’ transformative arcs from their introduction in the forties to today, from being purely evil to being complicated bad guys, from being hated to being sympathized, and from being antagonistic to seeking forgiveness and redemption.

These villains have had a lasting presence alongside their superheroes, their names almost synonymous with their do-gooder counterparts. Three reasons for their continuous reoccurrence is: their story, their purpose for their villainy, and their place in

2 I will also only be looking at the characters in the main comic title run. Spin-offs, “what-ifs”, and one-shots outside of the main story will not be considered. 13

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 the world around them. They have been a fan favorite, and so their existence continues.

Their popularity leads to a more prevalent place in comics and offers a further visible of study in the case of sympathetic development. Their differing drives represent the variety of reasons that supervillains choose this way of life. Initially their reasoning was for personal gain, overcoming evil with evil, and to achieve higher positions of power. Even the introduction of their sympathetic origins introduces the varying trials that these characters experience: child abuse, persecution, victims of other criminality.

Luthor, Magento, and Shredder represent varying angles of why they are evil, how they became evil, and why they believe that villainy is the proper route to take in order to achieve what they desire most.

The three villains chosen for this research are popular and known in their own way, but the question might arise, why not use arguably the most famous villain in superhero comics (Weiner and Peaslee, XXVII), the ? After all, has been with Batman through all his iterations, from the very beginning of comics run in 1940, through Adam West’s comedic take, to video games, and even now to his own film, the Joker has been an ever-present character to anyone who is even remotely aware of the superhero genre. However, his presence in this paper is impractical for the discussion being had. My argument for this paper concerning sympathetic transfigurations of supervillain stories over time cannot possibly include the

Prince of Crime, because he is one of very few outliers to this claim3. In order to argue

3 Even though the 2019 Joker film presents an origin story, and a sympathetic one at that, it is not one that has ever been concretely established as the singular origin story in the comics. 14

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 this concept, it is necessary to look at the various retellings of villains’ backstories over time, how the characters argue their purpose for performing villainous acts, and how the

“good” characters respond when the villains acknowledge the wrongs they have committed. While he is not the only villain exhibiting psychological disturbance, he is one of a few who is completely defined by it. The Joker is known for his insanity, for his lack of an endgame, a fully realized purpose for his actions. Traditionally his only purpose has been to undermine Batman and cause as much mayhem as possible. This kind of madness cannot be fully analyzed with the intent of finding sense and intention.

Another aspect of Joker, or lack thereof, that negates him from this study is his absence of a consistent backstory.

As discussed prior, superhero comics have a history of being rebooted, introducing old characters in a new way, a modern way. These retellings are what the primary focus of this paper is about, how over time the original concept of the supervillain has diminished and has made these characters more sympathetic in an attempt to make them forgivable and redeemable in the comics. While elements have been added to these characters’ stories, for the most part they have had a consistent foundation. The Joker has not had any of this, “Despite various writers’ attempts to give the Joker a history, nothing sticks completely as canonical or definitive. The Joker’s origin remains contradictory” (Weiner and Peaslee, XVIII-XIX). This complicates matters in terms of studying the transition from evil villain to redeemable victim.

I briefly mentioned the concept of forgiveness toward supervillains, and that it is something coupled with the idea of the growing sympathy for supervillains and their

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 attempts at redemption. Sympathetic villainy transformed, in part, into the defined

“antivillain”, a “villain with sympathetic qualities who invites the audience into some degree of identification based on shared characteristics or desires” (Weiner et al, XXVI).

Even though the audience is convinced to feel bad for them, the audience still does not agree with their practices and still sees them as being evil. Antivillain is a stage of the overall metamorphosis of the sympathetic supervillain, a stage that has only been recently introduced in its entirety in the past two decades, since the supervillains of the Modern

Age of comics are shown exhibiting traits similar to the superhero in regard to their emotional and physical responses to negative circumstances in the world, such as criminal activity, war, and death. It is a moment where the antivillain can possibly become a hero or revert back to villainy within the overall evolution of the sympathetic villain arc. This is similar to the antihero, usually heroic characters “who act morally, but typically for reasons disconnected from an inner sense of virtue” (Holdier, 7) where they appear to be staggering between being heroic or being villainous. It is a step in their journey.

The gradual inclusion of the pitiful origin stories shifts the reading of the supervillain from maniacal maniacs to victims of circumstance. Revealing that someone is reacting negatively due to trauma or abuse allows the audience to feel permitted into showing leniency to the person, in this case a supervillain. But what of forgiveness? It is a complicated practice to perform, even superheroes are shown struggling with the concept of forgiveness toward their enemy. I will be exploring the relation of showing

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 sympathy toward supervillains and practicing forgiveness toward them in more depth later on in the paper.

Before endeavoring on this, clarification is necessary; what is being used as the defining factors for supervillain forgiveness? What about redemption? First, for forgiveness I will be referring to two writings by Michele Moody-Adams and Jacques

Derrida. Moody-Adam defines her concept of forgiveness clearly in her article “The

Enigma of Forgiveness”, “Forgiveness is a non-obligatory, unilateral revision in judgment that may make reconciliation possible, but that is properly and essentially distinct from reconciliation” (162). This I couple with Derrida’s thoughts in “On

Forgiveness”, that “If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal , the worst, the unforgivable crime or ” (32). So, in essence, forgiveness must be a willing decision based on the hope that by giving forgiveness, there can be a chance of making amends concerning a reprehensible action that has occurred by the individual upon whom forgiveness might be given, “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible. . .” (Derrida, 32). Forgiveness is sacred, and it is represented as such in these comic book texts.

It is essential to go into this study with the acknowledgment that superhero comics were and have been written, such as other forms of media, with the audience in mind. For characters that have been present for over eighty years, they too have had to shift with the times. New characters have been created in order to aid with the transition from one era to another, with readers who have had new encounters since the previous

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 versions of the characters, as well as being experienced by a younger audience. These characters must adapt if they are to continue having a presence, “the of the hero, and indeed the villain, represents our desire for a greater sense of confidence, personal identity and power to affect the world in which we find ourselves, through no fault of our own” (Alsford, 3). Heroes and villains inhabit the same world, and may even share similar life experiences to not only each other, but the reader as well. Victimizing villains creates a way for sympathy to emerge and paves the way to potential forgiveness being bestowed on the evil doer. However, it is the supervillain’s response to their experiences that differentiate them from the superhero, and it is the gradual step of revealing their sympathetic stories as well as their movements toward forgiveness and redemption that beg attention in order to discover why the readers feel compassion toward evil characters.

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CHAPTER II

“IT’S PERSONAL”: THE GOLDEN AGE

Let us set the scene. 1938. Cleveland, . Two Jewish teenagers, both first generation citizens of North America (one American one Canadian, although both will be in the U.S. by the time they are ten), are witnessing the rise of a man in Europe who has sworn retribution on the Jewish population—initially just in Germany—for what he claims is the purpose behind the fall of their homeland. These two boys, along with many other immigrated Jews, have already lost contact with their families back in Europe in conjunction with the rise in antisemitic crimes. Their loved ones are going missing, and their new country says they will not help. These young men are on the cusp of adulthood.

Where for years they faced social distress with their peers in high school, they are now plagued with financial woes as they must assist in taking care of their families. At this point they are not even aware of the attack on their country that will occur on a sleepy

Sunday morning, or the approaching war that they will find themselves engulfed in for most of their early twenties, as well as the unfortunate horror of discovering that six million of their people have been massacred. All of this is on the horizon. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Superhero comics were born in war time. While America had officially declared neutrality in the second world war, for many of her people the war had been personal for years. Jewish Americans felt the of the Nazis from the other side of the world, from the images of Germany shrouded in swastikas and anti-Semitic signs to the loss of communication from relatives, they knew that what was amiss in Europe was not

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 something that should be ignored. Following melodramatic practices from the stage from the previous century to the comics, they utilized “morally simplistic” (Gledhill and

Williams, ix) tales and characters in their storytelling. From the moment superhero comics were produced, they were used by their Jewish creators as a way to vocalize their concern, to bring a complicated circumstance down to a simple matter: Us vs Them, freedom vs tyranny, American vs Nazism, good vs evil. A matter made even simpler with the absence of any sympathetic lean toward the supervillain.

It is this scenario where the first superhero is born (Alsford, 34), a character that will redefine comics and create a new genre of science magazines. Why is this mentioned? It is said the villain is the antithesis of the hero, that they represent everything that the hero is not. That a superhero can only exist if there is a supervillain. In fact,

Professor Jason Bainbridge, Executive Dean of Faculty of Arts and Design at the

University of Canberra, argues that the villain is the catalyst for the existence of the hero, stating that the supervillain is “the agent of change, the disrupter, active where the superhero is merely reactive” and that “fighting the villain therefore becomes the superheroes’ way of justifying their own existence” (67). It is fair to assume that the same can be said for supervillains.

Superman was created in a time where kids needed a hero, someone stronger than them, someone like them, someone who represented and stood for all that is good. In a time of a world war, Superman could not have come at a greater point, since he exemplified everything that the American public in that tumultuous period

(Morrison, 15). When America officially became involved in the war in 1941, all

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 attention was diverted to the war effort. This includes the comics. A rise in comic book advertisements was dedicated to encouraging Americans—specifically children— to

“Support the Troops”. The mindset that was encouraged was that everyone had the opportunity to do their part, as professor of war themed comics and American history. Dr.

Cord A. Scott states, “Comics, like other popular media, now attempted to rally the populace to support the troops, conduct recycling and war bond drives, and to hate the enemy generally” (Scott, 57). Men enlisted, women went to work, and kids were taught to be good Americans. Donate paper and rubber, collect metal. Superman was one of those characters that became a true symbol of American .

America entered the war in December of 1941. The January 1942 issue of

Superman depicts him standing in front of an American Flag in the shape of a with an eagle perched on his arm, and in the corners are outlined tanks and field guns showcasing a very American, very pro-war sentiment from the Man of Steel. Three issues later would feature a cover of Superman standing on what can be assumed is the earth, holding a terrified Hitler and Tojo in his right and left hands. The very first bit of dialogue between and further promotes the war effort, with Clark stating, “I’m taking the tire rationing seriously”, and Lois responding, “Everyone should—it’s the patriotic thing to do!” (Superman #17, 3d). And on the cover of the next issue, eighteen, it displays the most blatant war support: Superman riding a missile, followed by American fighter planes with the statement in the bottom corner “War savings bonds and stamps do the job on the Japanazis!” The issue would contain a story

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 of Superman stopping Nazis from invading , as well as comic shorts “Shorty” featuring a U.S. Navy man and “Joe Jeep” about a U.S. soldier.

The comics promoted the war effort within the stories and advertisements encouraging children to participate in the different drives, such as the aforementioned tire ration as well as collecting rubber, metal, and paper.4 This participation was an expected practice, everyone was anticipated to do their part. Lois Lane’s comment in issue seventeen denotes this, and offers a sense of shame and guilt if not followed. Superman was now being called “The World’s Greatest Character” (Superman #20) and his comics had been drafted into the war effort. With every escapade he traversed, a villain was needed to represent all that was wrong in the world, one that could be used to show young readers what they—they as a country, they as in the soldiers overseas, and they as American citizens—were fighting against.

Though Superman was created in 1938 and would face off against several bad guys, the character that became his arch- was not created until 1940. His reveals him to be unlike a majority of the adversaries that Superman has faced. Simply called Luthor, this man with shocking hair is a genius, planning exploits on a grandiose scale comparatively to his evil contemporaries that have faced

Superman. In his earliest schemes, Luthor hatches plots to start a war between two countries, cause an earthquake, and use an atomic bomb5. He is the first human ever, in

4 This would, unfortunately, lead to the very comics that children were reading being recycled, causing there to be few surviving copies today. 5 This caused a stir in the United States government since the comic, Superman #38, was supposed to be released in 1944, one year before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. The government required that the story be pulled and published on a later date. It was eventually published in 1946. 22

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 print or in person, to use such a weapon. Of course, his bomb does not work since

Superman defeats him, but the concept remains.

It is interesting to note that in this case, the supervillain is depicted utilizing a weapon that the American military used. The very faction that was being heralded as heroes, the one that American civilians were supporting from home, implements the same weapon of mass destruction as a bad guy. This conflicting moment, I believe, can be overlooked by the simple fact of who the target was. In the story, Luthor intends to use atomic weaponry to attack the American city of Metropolis, specifically using the bomb on Superman. The U.S. military used the atom bomb to attack a country that had assaulted theirs and who was also continuing the war instead of surrendering. Just as guns were used in comics by the bad guys while in reality policemen and soldiers did so as well, it is the intended targets that permits and forgives weapon usage in these superhero stories. “Heroes struggle bravely, which is why they are admirable—and also why they need our support” meanwhile “Villains are malevolent and strong enough to menace others, lending some urgency to stopping them” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 231), so in this case, for readers during the Golden Age of comics, the use of the atomic bomb by the

U.S. is used for the betterment of America—and thus the world— while the supervillain

Luthor only intended to harm Metropolis and the superhero who defended it.

In retrospect, the supervillains had to appear in tune with the times and for the audience it was targeted. Children were aware of what was occurring in the world, and if they forgot they were reminded every day when they woke up: supply shortages, food rationing, bomb drills, mothers going to work, and fathers away at war. It was a world

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 divided, Allies vs Axis. This was also translated in one other way: good vs bad, and this was impressed upon the younger generation in the form of media including comic books.

Comic books, especially superhero comics, did not include complex stories during that time, since the stories were written to be “universal” and were predominantly aimed at

“boys and young men” (Morrison, 40). This simplicity carried over and was enforced in the forties in terms of the heroes and villains. The sides were clear, the was black and white. There are good guys and there are bad guys, and children were expected to be on the side of the good guys, “In action-oriented comic books, heroes were the superior characters and children . . . had much to learn. Heroes, we note, were role models”

(Savage, 115). To further encourage the young audience, there were messages put into the comics to encourage them. For example, at the end of Superman #14 there is an advertisement titled “ [sic] Tips for Super-Health” where Superman is shown alongside a little boy as they demonstrate the proper way to obtain “Superman energy!”

(60). These articles encouraged children to be in peak health, to contribute to the cause, and to be good Americans.

Due to the young age of the target audience, complicated stories were not encouraged. Things were kept simple, which typically meant only the title received any back story. As a result, other characters, especially the antagonist, appear as simple roles with simple goals, and usually those goals were not ones that were done with the betterment of humanity in mind, “During the war, the enemy was depicted as dishonest, underhanded, immoral, or evil” (Scott, 88). They were also compared to the ultimate representatives of evil. In one instance, when Superman uncovers Luthor’s plot

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 to use gas to force the world into complacent submission, he likens the action and

Luthor’s mindset to Hitler (Finger, 38). In terms of the hero and villain trope, this is what was desired. Good guys and bad guys were just that. There is no questioning the validity of a villain, and the superhero always comes out on , “Villains focus blame, provide a clear target for action, intensify negative emotions, and solidify group identities”

(Bergstrand and Jasper, 229), mainly the identities strengthen the good guy vs bad guy image, and enhances the us vs them mentality. It did not matter who the villains are, where they came from, or why they are the way they are, they just are. Supervillains, like

Luthor, became recurring, displaying the conquest of the good over the evil as the bad guy attempts (recurrently) to cause harm to others, whether in the shape of murder, theft, abuse, or—the pastime that became popular in the 1940s—taking over the world.

This perception and depiction of villainy does not allow for any adjustment of character. There is no explanation for why the supervillain is doing crimes, and it does not permit any shift in the role they were assigned. They are evil because they are, and that is all there is to it in the early era of comics; there is an absence of motivation, only being evil. This is so, because an acquainted, reoccurring evil character was needed to challenge the recognizable hero, “A familiar character provides a recurrent, simplified package of intentions and capacities that we expect to find together; our imaginations fuse cognitive understandings, judgments, emotional responses, and expectations for behavior” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 232); in this case, the superhero represents the

“complete package” for good so a similar scenario was required for evil, thus the introduction of the supervillain.

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What is imperative is that the supervillain must be distinguishable from the superhero. Granted, seeing a character perform a crime is telling, but the character themselves must be visually discernable, easily spotted, which is a challenging product to produce when your adversary wears tights and in many cases a cape. These new characters had to be distinct in another way than the hero. In his beginning, Luthor is created with a head of red hair, a of red very unique in terms of the other characters, a majority of which had black and blonde hair due to the four colors— , cyan, yellow, and black— exclusively used in comics at that time. However, a few years later, due to a mistake in identity by the artist6, he is made bald and is thus henceforth. Either image of Luthor is used so the readers can easily pick him out; his red hair contrasted nicely to Superman’s black, and even the image of his bald head is quickly identifiable. It is therefore made straightforward for young readers to tell immediately who they are dealing with, making it apparent that whatever the bald man is doing is bad and that they need to support the efforts of Superman in stopping him.

Let us fast forward a bit. The war has ended. The bad guys are gone. The villains that had been the source of hate and drove the young people in America to support their country in its time of need, have been vanquished. What is a hero without its villain?

Superhero comics raised to popularity in part because of war propaganda began to lose their readership (Scott, 89). Readers are no longer interested in a man with superstrength who used to battle Nazis but now only stops the likes of thieves. New comics started taking the place in the interest of young readers. in popularity,

6 The artist who was working on the Superman comics at the time confused him for one of Superman’s other adversaries, -Humanite, who is also bald. 26

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 depicting , gore, and scantily clad women on their covers. Going into the fifties, these comics will become a source of contempt for parents who wish to keep their children pure.

It is here, in between the beautiful Golden Age and the revolutionizing Silver, that there was an era of decline for superhero comics, in readership, in quality, and even the number of comic companies and comics sold on newsstands. Protests began to erupt over comics and their corruption, causing these cheaply printed pages to become “fuel for mass book burnings” (Viedero, 1). Comics were even taken to the Court over questionable elements contained inside the panels. Comics were under , and many of them would not survive.

While many of the accusations that fell were directed toward more mature comics such as horror comics, superhero comics also became bombarded. In his now infamous work Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Fredric Wertham claimed the poisoning of children’s minds was the result of violence in media, especially that of comics. He argued for regulations to be set on comics, regulations that many comic publishers could not follow.

The resulting Comic Code Authority became established, causing many comic companies to close their doors, and led to the decrease of supervillain presence in superhero comics.

Presence I mean, in this sense, to represent the role of villain played by these characters. In this time of comic publication, in order to comply with the Comic Code and to not anger parents, superhero comics decided to rein back on their larger, take-over- the-world tales, and instead chose to focus on the hero at home, on the daily life of these costume-clad individuals. Superman comics grew to include stories featuring Jimmy

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Olson, Lois Lane, and even of a young Superman growing up in , , aptly titled . The stories in this comic line focus on the hero and his time as a young man, battling small-town crooks, and also making sure to wash up before Ma serves supper.

Luthor only makes a few appearances in the comics during this time. In fact, there are almost no supervillains present at all. The “evil” instead is focused on making sure one appears proper when going out or taking care of a superpowered baby: domestic stories. Straying too far from the home could mean danger, for both the heroes and the comics that published them. There was little progression in terms of story for any character, and supervillains became a thing of the past.

Superman, in the forties, is what American children were taught to admire, to aspire to be. He is a patriot, he stands for American ideals, he is the representative of what it means to be a hero, to be good. Because there is a present symbol who encompasses all of this, it means there must also be one that represents the opposing ideals. If one exists, that means there must be the other, since once cannot be defined without the other, as is argued by Bainbridge, that the supervillain “justifies both the superhero’s existence and the reactions, which are framed as the pursuit of justice that the superhero must take to stop the villain” (68) and as already indicated, the existence of a superhero is necessary in order to identify the role of the supervillain. Luthor, as well as the other supervillains of this time, represent the antagonist for young readers. They were the face of what children should despise; they were the examples of what not to be. They presented as being bad as—and at times on the same side as—the Nazis and the Japanese,

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 the enemies of America. There was nothing good in them, they could not be saved, the superheroes rarely if ever attempted to save or convert their antagonists. Supervillains were unredeemable.

In the 1940s era, this is the atmosphere that was created thanks to World War II.

There was not any empathy given to “them” to the bad guys of the war. The supervillain had a role to during this time, they “not only represented a societal fear but also became that fear, making it something that could be punched on the face, ‘solved’, or otherwise addressed without looking for underlying causes or wider social responsibility”

(Bainbridge, 66). Mercy was weakness, and America could not afford to be weak.

Children were not to question why the enemies were bad, they were not to show any concern for them. Every effort was directed to the war effort, no matter what age. The ideas taught at that time focused on the absence of virtues in terms of the enemy, and the complete unquestionable goodness of the United States and her troops.

However, the presence of the supervillain, of the thing that “could be

punched in the face” as Bainbridge expresses it, enables the development

for sympathy. Though they represent the evil that America perceived to be

facing during the war and then after, the idea of the evil supervillain would

come to be challenged by the realization that the of pure evil is not

probable, “Wherever we look to try to understand perpetrators, we will

find that clear insight is rendered difficult by the myth of pure evil—that

is, by a certain of cruelty and violence” (Baumeister and Beck,

18).

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The search for purpose behind evil acts is what leads to the revolution of the superhero genre beginning in the 1950s and the Silver Age of comics.

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CHAPTER III

“FULED BY HATE”: THE SILVER AGE

A new age comes. The fifties and the idealistic image of the family and the home is putting a strain on the budding youth of America and their traditionalist parents determined to continue to mold them into the next generation of perfect families, even if it is solely based on appearance. Rock ‘n roll and television became more present in households, and the rise in inequality awareness started to spread like fire. A new generation was coming into their own and they demanded change in what used to be misconceived, including that of what defined a “bad guy”.

A rise in the fear of communism became a primary focus in the United States, resulting in two new wars in Korea and Vietnam. Protests involving civil rights rose in earnest. The baby boomers who were the products of the end of World War II, who went through the fifties under the pressure of following the roles of the “perfect” family, are now in high school and college. They fight in finding their voices and challenging their parents’ generation against oppression and repression of creative freedom, “In the turbulence of the 1960s, young people were not rejecting the new American dream of easy affluence and personal fulfillment, but only jettisoning the fears that had hung over a generation raised with depression and war” and they rejected the life that their families impressed on them to obtain a new American ideal, “The baby-boom generation accepted wholeheartedly the doctrine of self-fulfillment, but rejected the guilt and fear that had linked fulfillment and security” (Bailey, 31). This fulfillment and security called for a cultural change on the social and political level.

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For comic book readers of the sixties, the comics of the fifties no longer satisfied them. The watered-down tales, the kiddish dialogue, and the stories did not interest them anymore and the comic companies publishing them were aware of it, and allowed for the introduction of a new typography of hero and villain. Still having to acknowledge the Comic Code and their regulations7, though, comic book companies had to establish new lines of superhero comics. These comics had to address what their now older audience of college aged readers desired, as well as appearing interesting to the younger audience, all while simultaneously satisfying the wholesomeness that the parents watched for and not relinquishing regulatory control to the government (Savage, 99). In order to attain this, superhero comics underwent a modification, specifically that of the superheroes.

While the Silver Age of comics is also nicknamed the “Marvel Age” due to the vast library of stories and characters added at that time from , it all began in 1956 when DC Comics chose to reboot a hero from the 1940s, The . However,

Marvel Comics, is credited for introducing the new iteration of superheroes as well as a new type of supervillain; for the first time, superheroes do not want to be superheroes, and supervillains are given an explanation for their evil deeds, legitimizing their existence for the audience of that period.

One of the first villains, Luthor, returns and his story is embellished in order to appease this new age. An initial alteration to this character is the appearance of a first name, Alexander, which would later be shortened to Lex. This new story takes place in

7 This is, of course, excluding the movement which was started in order to publish outside the control of the CCA. 32

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021

Smallville, in the pages of #271 (1960), where a young, genius,

Alexander idolizes the Boy of Steel, and desires to prove that he is just as great as he is.

However, when an experiment goes awry and he calls Superboy for help, the hero comes, and he is able to save him and put out the fire. Unfortunately, it results in the loss of experiments that Alexander had spent years working on as well as the permanent loss of his red hair.

There are a few elements in his new backstory (also his first backstory) that deserve to be highlighted. First, his name. Since 1940, this supervillain was known simply by one name, his last. Since people are identified by first and last names, cutting down his name to one seemingly strips him of the identity that others possess. This causes him to be differentiated from others in his society. The name Luthor does not appear to be his —such as Superman or Ultra-Humanite obviously is—and the only other examples of single names in the early Superman and lines that are not aliases are the henchman to the bad guys and even the nonrecurrent criminals themselves, for example, Action Comics #25 features an evil hypnotist named Medini who is never featured again after Superman stops him from using his abilities to rob from civilians. Just as his red hair than baldness marks him as an “Other” the lack of a first and second name does so as well.

Another aspect that needs to be looked at is the initial missing concept of his character in that he is an evil genius. This is an element that Lex possesses in the 1940s

Superman comics, of a genius villain who desires to take over the world and to defeat

Superman. Now in the sixties, Lex is a young man who looks up to his local superhero

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 and wants to be just like him. Here is offered a glimmer of hope for the youth, one that cannot be ignored. Lex wishes to use his gifts to better mankind, to be a superhero.

However, it is imperative to note the sudden shift from this that occurs in the comic. The jump from wanting to do good to wanting to do bad is based on loss. Losing years of work in the name of doing good—as well as his hair—causes him to turn and decide that

Superboy is to blame and that he will get his revenge. Though becoming a supervillain because of hair loss might appear as a silly excuse, there is an excuse, something that has been lacking in Luthor’s story up to this point, and it is one he holds on to, “They are, as therapists say, in love with the story of their wound, unable to get beyond whatever happened in their past and turn their energies toward healing or redemptive therapy”

(Coogan, 49), at least not at this point in time, not when he is consumed with his insistence on crime being the correct path. It was a sign of changing times. This is also the first hint at a sympathetic backstory for him, of a small-town boy who dreamed of helping the world, and who was negatively affected by the actions of a hero. Actions that are not condemned, despite working outside the law, a topic of conversation that will later be had both in the comics and in this paper.

While Luthor, now Alexander Luthor, is an example of the first reboot for supervillains, Marvel was in the midst of restarting their storytelling. Marvel, headed by

Stan Lee, revolutionized and pushed the boundaries of the superhero comics genre. Since the superhero story was getting an upgrade, the supervillains had to as well. Since superheroes and supervillains are driven by similar sources—"of tragedy, of caprice, of an objective” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 232)—it was necessary that they continue to

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 represent everything that the other was not. Having new varieties of superheroes that showed depth while their evil counterparts did not would weaken the story, “This unprecedented psychological growth and approach to character in a mainstream superhero comic of the Silver Age set a new standard for storytelling in American comic books” (Kruse, 342) and would alter the way that old and new antagonists would be perceived in their recreation or creation. One such villain is that of Magneto.

Of the comics Marvel published, one of their most popular comic lines was

Uncanny X-Men. The series tells the story of a group of people born with superhuman abilities—born different—then are persecuted by the public because of it. Yet, these young heroes still want to protect the people who hate them and strive to create a world where all people can live together harmoniously. This premise describes the world that

America was facing in the sixties, one where people of color were treated as lesser than, facing persecution and inequality, wanting to make a change in the world where everyone can be equal. “The original team had been largely defined by their mission, whether that meant fighting the Cold War, promoting integration, or opposing emergent identity politics” (Lund, 6), their fight for inclusion and acceptance being a core part of the X-

Men throughout their comics, both the initial series and the later reboots.

Historically, the X-Men stories mimicked events occurring in the United States that revolved around the call for racial equality: when the church bombing happened in

Birmingham, the mutants were attacked by humans in the comics, when the Selma civil rights activists were attacked by the police the X-Men shortly later battled killing

Sentinels who persecuted them (Howe, 48). Creating a fictitious race of beings who were

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 born different and were ostracized by the majority who had been in power enabled, in a time where the same events were occurring daily in U.S., for significant commentary.

Two figures were used as representatives of the different methods of the fight for civil rights. The first was Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr., a man who preached for a peaceful coexistence between races. The other was Malcom X who believed that violence and usurpation was the way for black and African Americans to gain any power in the United

States. The X-Men comics likewise had figureheads for the two sides of the fight for mutant rights: Professor Charles Xavier () for the diplomatic coexistent and

Max Eisenhardt Magneto for the forceful takeover, “Xavier chose the path of peaceful integration, Magneto the path of violent opposition to the threat humanity posed to mutanity. In a very real sense, they have identical goals. . . (Yet) Xavier is selfless and therefore a hero; Magneto is selfish, and therefore a villain” (Coogan, 55). Though never directly stated as such, the confirmation of the influence and the commentary of the Civil

Rights movement can easily make connections to the Professor X/Dr King and

Magneto/Malcolm X depiction (Howe, 48).

The Master of Magnetism has always appeared as a source of conflict in comics.

Not in just physical conflict against the X-Men, but also moral conflict. Magneto’s presence is constantly connected to that of Professor Charles Xavier. Their aspiration is to make the world a safe place for mutants. However, their ideals do not align as easily.

Professor X believes that humans and mutants can live harmoniously, if worked at and given time. Magneto does not agree that it is possible, at one point saying to his

Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, “they would kill us if they could! We only fight in self

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 defense!” (Uncanny X-Men #4, 22). He possesses no sympathy for humanity that has been oppressing mutants, whom he views as being superior.

Magneto believes that the only way to find peace for mutants is to either eliminate all humans or have mutants reign over them. “The reasons behind the act are called ends, and they matter to our understanding and evaluation of people’s choices” (Poon, 29), so it is this dichotomy that causes the strife and drawing the line between hero and villain.

Magneto’s first appearance is in Uncanny X-Men #1, the cover showing the original team of teenaged X-Men attacking Magneto, a red banner over his head boasts Magneto as

“Earth’s Most Powerful Super Villain!!”. Magneto appears as cartoonish as Lex Luthor did in his first appearance. However, the thing that separates these two are their motives.

Where Luthor operates on completely selfish intentions, Magneto’s focus is on his fellow mutants and their rise to providence over humans. Already there is proof of a change in the supervillain mythos, a differentiating from the Golden Age. With his first appearance,

Magneto immediately establishes his motivation. It is a purpose that, if not for the dominating over humanity angle, would be justifiable, one that a reader can commiserate with easier than the selfish motivations of Lex Luthor.

Yet, despite the presence of an empathetic purpose, Magneto does not stray far from his supervillain roots. In this issue, Uncanny X-Men #1, Magneto appears as a cliché villain of old, his first panel a closeup of him and his iconic purple and red helmet. His face is half-covered in shadow, his blue eyes sticking out in a manic way. His fisted hands are raised to his face as he begins to initiate his diabolical plan, commenting in the following panel, “The human race no longer deserves dominion over the planet earth!

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The day of the mutants is upon us!” (12). As his initial attack on humanity commences, he performs magnificent feats controlling military weapons, rockets, and in one instance using “the particles from the air itself” (14) to compose a threatening message in the sky, even taking the time to sign his name in cursive. Everything about Magneto in this initial series of X-Men comics has him appearing as overdrawn and performing the classic supervillain persona against that of the familiar superhero mutants.

His intentions toward the world are made abundantly apparent with the introduction of his band of cronies, The Mutants, who will join him in the fight against Professor X and his X-Men in Uncanny X-Men #4. The X-Men and the Brotherhood are shown in parallel panels, all sitting around a table. The superheroes share friendly banter, smiling as they eat a cake that their Xavier surprises them with. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood sit around a half-melted candle, eating food on medieval appearing crockery. They stare at each other miserably and speak harshly with one another (5). These scenes encourage the reader to choose the side of the hero by making the supervillains unseemly and undesirable both in company and by where they reside. Two of the members of the Brotherhood are the eventual superhero twins Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, also known as Quicksilver and Witch. Their reasoning for joining the Brotherhood is not due to a sense of mutant empowerment, but one based on debt, a debt for Magneto saving Wanda. Magneto reminds them of how he saved her from their European village where the people tried to kill her, “It was I who saved you, keeping the maddening crowd back” (9-10) in which she swore her life to helping

Magneto overcome humans, whom Magento says is their “natural enemies”— “We were

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 born to rule the earth!” (10). A sentiment that the twins do not necessarily agree with, yet they cannot deny their aversion to humans.

This issue shows Magento playing the role of hero. It depicts a terrified Wanda, back against a burning village, humans brandishing pitch forks at her, and Magneto swooping in and fighting them off, with her pledging her life to him. It does not show him coercing her or forcing her to fight with him. While he does remind her of what she owes him, he himself does not require this fealty. His only goal is in rescuing her from being killed for being a mutant, a heroic act. “Although there are those supervillains who are pure evil (e.g., the Red Skull), villains are most often rather more complicated. They may do immoral, narcissistic things, but they can also act with dignity and show selflessness” (Weiner et al, XXX), and Magneto is a that heralds in this era of complication for the supervillain, albeit still residing blatantly on the side of evil, yet having some respectable intentions behind him.

While still being the bad guy of the story, Magento is not the staunch villain that has been presented in comics in times past. Instead of performing evil acts purely for personal gain, he does so in the name of mutant kind. He believes the humans to be a threat to mutants, so he attacks with the objective of raising the social standing of his kind. He, like many young people in the sixties, is fighting against bigotry, such as the hero Professor X does. The difference is, as mentioned earlier, one believes that a peaceful path will reap results while the other believes that a show of power will.

However, unlike the new iteration of Lex Luthor introduced during this time, Magneto does not yet possess a sympathetic origin story outside of his experienced mistreatment

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 for being a mutant. A situation that is primarily made sympathetic via the superheroes who are facing prejudice from people they are actively protecting compared to Magneto.

In fact, the only sense of sympathy is his somewhat admissible feelings toward the mistreatment of his people. Granted, the compassion is strained when he repetitiously declares that mutants were meant to rule, and humans enslaved. Yet, the introduction of his origin story in the Bronze Age of comics would introduce a sympathetic element to him that would challenge his status of villain.

The beginnings of the sympathetic supervillain simultaneously initiate the inception of the concept of forgiveness toward the supervillain. Certainly, there is not any sense of the word here at the beginning. It is challenging to forgive someone who would become evil due to hair loss and hate toward others. However, now they have a purpose to their villainy besides blind animosity: Luthor for his loss of his life’s work and

Magneto for the maltreatment he receives for being a mutant, it is that a “Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. (They) are angry. (They) are feeling helpless. (They) want retribution. (They) want to wreak retributive justice” (Ahmed).

Also, there is now an inclusion of the supervillain possessing similar aspirations to the superhero. Young Lex wanted to be like Superboy, yet his plan goes awry. Similarly,

Magneto wants to save mutants and fight for their equal presence in the world, just as

Professor Xavier does, but his methods lean toward the radical. The superheroes in both these cases experience similar ostracization that their two supervillains experience;

Superboy being an alien must hide behind a human identity unless he is saving others, in which he is then accepted for his good deeds. Professor X is hated for being a mutant

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 unless he also pretends while out in society. All four characters have the means to feel as an “Other”, yet the supervillains’ choices of response permanently cast them into the realm of the “Other”, and incites greater hatred toward them,

It is this that distinguishes the hero from the villain. In the face of the isolation that difference can generate the hero gives him or herself over to the world, and in so doing re-enters the world. The villain, on the other hand, deepens the gulf between self and other and sees dominance of the other as the only of engagement between themselves and the rest of the world (Alsford, 29). However, the beginning of a motive is leading the way to asking “why” the supervillains believe the way they do. Why, when they experience similar isolation from humanity that the superheroes encounter as well, why they choose the path that they are on. These answers are explored in the Bronze Age as their sympathetic origin stories begin to emerge. Although forgiveness is not being discussed yet, it is on its way to becoming corporal.

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CHAPTER IV

“I KNOW WHAT’S BEST”: THE BRONZE AND DARK AGES

This new era of superhero comics, The Bronze and early Dark Age, is typically viewed in terms of how it changed the hero, of the emergence of stories like Watchman and where characters are not as heroic as they once were. Let us not disregard the transition of the supervillain arc, though. While the superheroes turn to darker methods causing readers to question their actions, they are also presented with a sympathetic story of the characters they have been groomed to be against.

Here, these characters in superhero comics are once more changing with the times. While attributes of them may carry over and evolve, their origin story, aims, and abilities change. Luthor goes through several alterations, the smallest of which is getting the first name Alexander, one of the greatest is becoming wealthy. However, his highest transformation occurs in the eighties in the limited comic series Man of Steel (1986). It is in this series that Lex Luthor turns into a corporate monger, a public figure that is sometime regaled as a hero and other times as a public menace. He is insistent of the harm that aliens can cause humans by making humans dependent on them, so he attempts time and again to prove this, primarily by targeting Superman through using ingenious weapons of his design.

This aligns with the iterations of him in the past. However, the eighties also introduced a new origin story for Lex starting in the The Man of Steel series. After growing up in an abusive home in the slums of Metropolis, Lex becomes estranged from his father and turns into a successful businessman. He is in some part the American ideal,

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 traversing through tragedy and making something of himself, a true success story. His entire existence is consumed with being the best and having the best. As Lois Lane observes to Clark Kent after Luthor’s multiple advances toward her, “He’s a ,

Kent. He wants to own at least one of everything in the world” (The Man of Steel #4, 7).

In this he has decided to focus more on his image, his status, in which he believes will give him more power. He is entirely consumed with being at the top because he believes that he deserves to be there.

Even when he was a child, his former friend was aware of this drive.

In Superman issue 131 (1997), White recalls, “Even then it was clear that he wanted to prove himself better than everyone. Just as it was clear that he had a miserable home life”

(9). The issue consists of recollections of Perry White’s and Lex’s childhood. The images are shown in an almost old television-like panels. The shapes are softer around the edges, the colors faded. On one page, Luthor is shown eating calmly while his parents argue, his father hitting his mother, flatware being thrown, and his mother, cigarette in mouth, shouting down at Lex in front of his friend Perry. When his parents die in a car crash and Lex receives $300,000 from their life insurance, things do not get easier for him. He is put into foster care with a neglectful couple who attempt to steal his fortune through another foster named Lena. Lex has feelings for her, and when she refuses to help the foster parents, they threaten her, accidentally pushing her down the stairs resulting in her death. As Perry White says, “Ever since, Lex Luthor was as cold as cold could be!” (Superman #131, 14). For the first time in Lex Luthor’s history of publication, he is given a detailed origin story. One of the oldest and most recognizable

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 supervillains, instead of just simply being greedy and power hungry, a villain that readers can hate, is given a sad beginning, one that no one is able to disregard.

Depicting the violence that Lex suffers through as a child creates a feeling of sympathy towards him. The poor environment of his childhood alone would cause pity, yet the added knowledge of him never having a loving atmosphere is one where the understanding of the source of his villainy comes into being. Never seeing or receiving love from either his parents or foster parents, and then losing his first love at the hands of his uncaring guardians due to their envy of him, it is quite easy to create excuses for his behavior and the reason why he is so unloving today;

This grandiose self-aggrandizement arises from a sense of victimhood, originating in a wound that the supervillain never recovers from. He develops a superiority complex that most often emerges as a defense mechanism to make up for feelings of inferiority and inadequacy that arose from maltreatment received when he was younger, often in childhood (Coogan, 49). Because of not experiencing care toward him, he does not give any to others. He is now presented as acting villainous because it is a form of self-preservation.

However, Superman coming into play changes the game. Superman represents the ideal with which Lex strives for. In the Big Blue Boy Scout, Lex sees the strongest, the most famous, and the most desired man not only in the world but Metropolis, a place that he repeatedly claims as his own. In Superman #131, he soliloquizes, “Metropolis. For years, without dispute, it was my city. My domain. My playground” (1) and in Man of

Steel #4, he tells Superman, “I run this town, Superman. Metropolis belongs to me. The people are mine, to nurture, or destroy, as I see fit. And they’ve forgotten that. They’ve looked at you, with your costume, and your flashy super-human . . . And they’ve

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 forgotten who their master is” (23). He sees himself as the ruler of Metropolis, a benevolent one, but also a tyrannical one if need be. Here, he still balances on the line of good and evil. He views Superman as the one that is causing the citizens of Metropolis to turn against him, and he cannot stand for that to occur. As a result, his actions performed to combat this are incessantly causing him to constantly fall on the side of evil.

This also reveals the confliction that appears in his new sympathetic origin. While his childhood is filled with strife that any person would agree that no one should experience, this does not erase the fact that this Bronze Age iteration of Lex Luthor has, in the midst of his tragedies, committed crimes himself, “individuals conceptualize justice as ‘personal justice’, the idea that justice for me is justice for all” (Juliano, 44), a belief process that he carries with him throughout his reign over Metropolis. It begins with the death of his parents and the convenient life insurance policy he receives.

In Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography when questioned by an investigative author if he had killed his parents, there is a two-panel response. The first is of Luthor smoking, seated behind his desk, shrouded in darkness, and the second is him in the same position, but this time the cigarillo is pulled away from his mouth, with a simple response, “Had you known them . . . you would have applauded my actions” (Hudnall,

42). This is a moment, a rare moment, where the audience can be inclined to agree with the supervillain. The detailed panels of the young boy witnessing and being the brunt of such abuse for a lengthy period can lead to the understanding and a level of acceptance of why he killed his parents. This is a moment where the audience begins the complicated journey of contemplating forgiveness toward a criminal for a horrid crime. “According to

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 the emotional regulation model for understanding violence, children who are subjected to abuse may learn to insulate themselves or dissociate themselves from painful experiences, which could lead to constricted forms of emotional expression” (Neller et al,

153), expression such as compassion toward others. It is this knowledge of the catastrophic effects that abuse has on children, and the revelation that Lex is one of those affected by it, that connects the motive to the crime, giving his actions a purpose.

The list of his crimes grows over time as he does whatever he can to get whatever he wants. Several of his crimes appear as a form of justice, though in his hands it comes across as revenge: the death of his parents, getting his foster father—the one responsible for killing Lena—out of jail, promising him $300,000 (the same amount he tries to steal from Luthor) to kill the mayor, and then killing the foster father after he succeeds with the assassination. Luthor is meticulous with his planning, making sure no one is able to connect him to any crime, even though Superman, Lois Lane, and their companions at the

Daily Planet know otherwise.

DC Comics’ introduction of a mistreated Lex Luthor is a step toward the sympathetic angle that began to appear in stronger force, yet Marvel Comics also wanted to delve more into the backstory of their supervillains. In this circumstance, the Bronze

Age saw a drastic development in the case of Magneto’s origin story. The original series of Uncanny X-Men comics did not profitably sell and was canceled after issue #66. Later, the X-Men were rebooted in Giant Size X-Men #1 in 1975, introducing a new diverse team of mutants who face even more persecution than their predecessors. This is exponentially shown with Magneto’s more complex backstory starting in 1981 in

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Uncanny X-Men #150. The issue entails a typical Magneto scheme: he threatens the world leaders to disarm their weapons and surrender to his control, or else he will unleash his mutant ability on them. While this sounds like a bid for power, it is the motives behind his threats that differ him from before. As he tells , at this time his powerless prisoner,

The nations of the world spend over a trillion dollars a year on armaments. I intend to deny them that indulgence. The money and energy devoted now to war will be turned instead to the eradication of , disease, poverty. I offer a golden age, the like of which humanity has never imagined! (Uncanny X-Men #150, 4). Then Cyclops finishes the idea, of mutants ruling the Earth with Magento reigning over them, which Magneto sees nothing wrong with. This is the first bit of understanding created for Magneto.

This introduces the anomaly of the “antivillain”, where the villain uses evil in order to make positive changes to the world (Weiner et al, XXVIII). The antivillain can be viewed as the response to the antihero. However, the of this is that both utilize questionable acts with the intention of good following them, a classic “the ends justifies the means” scenario. As discussed in the opening of this paper, on their respected journeys this appearance of the antihero and antivillain are the crossroads where the characters make decisions on which route they will continue: they can remain on their contrary tracks, return to their roots, or occupy this space where their actions are never regarded as truly good despite the motives behind them.

The antivillain ushers in a new era for characters who fall into the antagonist category. They stand for a new opportunity for the supervillain, a chance to be viewed in a more successful, positive light. For decades, the American people had feared attacks

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 from other countries, particularly those under a communist regime. War had plagued them since the sixties, and Americans were tired of the constant fear. Magneto, playing the role of the antivillain, is offering a solution, albeit a power hungry one, to force the countries to lay down their arms, and to instead dedicate their resources for the betterment of their people. While his focus is primarily on the well-being of mutants, his plan consists of eradicating an issue that people from all walks of life can experience.

This act can almost appear as a radical reaction to a serious issue, and it is one that can almost appear forgivable.

However, it is the decision to put himself as ruler which places him into the supervillain category. Comparatively, his counterpart Professor X also wishes to have humanity be in a better place, but his priority is not in taking over with himself as the to all, “The nemeses live in a dream world, confusing depravity with art. Their goal is simple, make the dream world real” (Arnett, 127), and Magento’s dream world is one where he is in control of a mutant run planet. He believes that under his control all the world’s problems will be solved (Uncanny X-Men #150, 5).

Another method of adding sympathy to his position is the revelation that he is a

Holocaust victim. Initially in his story, Magento hints at the loss that he has experienced in life when he tries to sympathize with Cyclops after he discovers that has died, “I know. . . something of grief. Search throughout my homeland, and you will find none who bear my name. Mine was a large family, and it was slaughtered—without mercy, without remorse” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 5). It is not until later on, after he believes that he has killed the young X-Man that he reveals, in his guilt, his

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 true story, “I remember my own childhood—the gas chambers (at) Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 38). He holds Kitty’s seemingly lifeless form, anguish clearly expressed on his face. His guilt and grief are apparent to even who is filled with anger when she too believes that Kitty has been killed. Magneto continues, “I believed so much in my , in my own personal , that I was prepared to pay any price, make any sacrifice to achieve it. But I forgot the innocents who would suffer in the process. . . .In my zeal to remake the world, I have become much like those I have always hated and despised” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 39).

Here he admits his mistakes, he admits that he is wrong in the way he pursues his ideals.

He acknowledges the harm he has caused in the name of trying to make the world a better place for mutants.

This horrific addition to his story prompts two emotional responses from the readers. One, understanding. By discovering his purpose and drive behind his attacks against humans, the audience has a better chance of understanding his mentality, “The traumatic origin is a common trope in the superhero genre, but what distinguishes

Magneto’s own determining event, the one that drives and explains the character, is the fact that it is based on a historical tragedy of massive scale” (Smith, 8). Surely the similarities are there, in just the same way that Jews were down and persecuted so are the mutants in that world.

These details aid in the revelation of Magneto, of his suffering and his goal to never allow this to happen again. From his perspective, he is experiencing the conditions

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 of the Holocaust once more. Once again, he is a part of a people that are born different and are hated as a result. Yet now he has the power to be able to act, to make certain that history does not repeat itself, “I and my fellow mutants have been hunted down and slain like wild animals. Those killings will stop. All killing will stop. . . leaders of those nations seem not to care. . .You are welcome to exterminate yourselves, if you wish, but in the process, you might destroy my people as well. That I will not allow” (Uncanny X-Men

#150, 3). Making Magneto a Holocaust victim added a level of complexity and pity to the character that nearly excuses his actions, heinous they may be. “In the twentieth century, the most compelling and enduring image of evil is the Nazis. The Nazis have replaced the red-skinned, pointy-tailed Satan as the prototype of evil” (Baumeister and Beck, 34), and this image overshadows the familiar picture of the supervillain Magneto has become.

This links to the second benefit this added fact implies, that of forgiveness. His apparent trauma and hatred of persecutors makes him a forgivable character in the sense that he is a damaged character, which according to Baumeister and Beck, “America’s legal system and therapeutic culture often seem to support the view that perpetrators should be forgiven if they were victims” (58). Comic writer who penned the inclusion of the Holocaust into Magneto’s story intended this to be a source of emotional discord for the audience, “Claremont used the reputation of the Holocaust as a way to ‘redeem’ Magneto, to transform him from a villainous genetic supremacist into a political leader in the mutant community” (Smith, 8). His flaws are inherent from a point of abuse that was well beyond his control. This act, considered one of the most horrible events in human history, permits him his beliefs and even at times excuses what he does.

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However, the point of is where readers and X-Men alike cannot turn a blind eye. Storm, when hearing Magneto’s story after he supposedly killed Kitty, even spares him sympathy, “The dream was good, is good. Only the dreamer has become corrupted” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 39). She realizes the truth in Magento’s devastating life. Storm acknowledges the criminality that drove Magneto to become the supervillain that he is, and that he is a victim, “violence and trauma are extremely complex in terms of how they can be defined, their causes or factors, and the effects they have on victims” (Carlson, 120). He is the victim of horrendous villainy. Even in her grief Storm realizes that his hope for a better future for mutants is marred by the crimes done to him, and his lasting trauma.

Magneto’s presence offers another area of conflict in the X-Men comics, for not only is his origin story and reasoning for villainy conflicting for the audience, but also for the heroes. While other superheroes may or not be aware of these elements in the purpose of the supervillain, their reaction and treatment of them stays predominantly the same.

They are treated like the bad guys they have been identified as by the heroes and the general public. However, in the case of the X-Men, they see that Magneto wants the best for mutants, mutants like them, and they grapple with not agreeing with him. He “uses his powers not for traditionally selfish reasons but for the betterment of mutantkind, so that mutants can get the same (and perhaps more) rights as regular humans. Should humans be hurt in the process, it’s not his concern” (Rosenberg, 76) and it is that final stipulation that causes the team of heroes to pause.

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Yet, they cannot deny the negative treatment they have received because they are mutants from the very people they are trying to protect. In the comics, they are conflicted on whether to stay on the side of the “hero” or to join the “villain” who fights more aggressively for the rights of mutants. When she has a chance to kill him, Storm even hesitates, acknowledging this concern yet still siding with the X-Men, with the side that is good, “Why are we enemies? There is much to respect about him—almost to admire.

What a shame. What a tragic waste” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 20). Though the heroes typically stay on the hero’s path, they still question whether they are on the right side.

Since the end of World War II, the idea of a comic villain being purely evil became ludicrous for anyone to believe as the idea of what evil is morphed,

“Understanding evil begins with the realization that we ourselves are capable of doing many of these things. Ordinary, normal people have done a great many evil things, and sometimes the majority of those present have acquiesced” (Baumeister and Beck, 5). The growth of media, the increased awareness, and the desire for change spurred on this development in the United States. This awareness further escalated the distrust in once honored institutions as more facts surfaced about past lies, especially that of the U.S. government, “The government cannot be trusted: it is lying to the people about the MIAs, and it betrays the heroism of American fighting men. . . the government was dishonest concerning the facts of Vietnam” (Scott, 145). Officials could not be trusted, in any level of power. One of the reasons of the dissolving of the Comic Code Authority was for the rule that persons affiliated with law enforcement or any other positions of authority were

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 to not be depicted in a negative light. Yet in a growing time of misgiving, showing these characters blind trust was not relatable or plausible.

The same could be said for those that had been classified as a bad person. Now they were being shown with more complex characters, viewed more sympathetically.

Now the perception is that many of these “bad” guys had the best intention in mind.

Those fighting against the police are not fighting order but fighting the corruption that the police represent or propagate. The X-Men face similar questions. Storm, at this point the leader of the team—in essence, the leader of good— muses similar ideas, “For all his crimes, for all the pain and grief he has caused, Magneto is not, in his heart, an evil man.

Given different circumstances, he could have been like us—or we like him.” Still, even with this addition of a sympathetic lean, this does not completely dispel Magneto from being a villain, “Yet. . . to fulfill his dreams,” she continues, “he would destroy us all without hesitation” (Uncanny X-Men #150, 23). It is the complicated acknowledgment of a positive and sometime mutual aim between the hero and the villain, yet the differential of the hero and villain via their means of accomplishing that goal. For despite the argument that the antihero/antivillain represent, the path to achieving that goal must not be riddled with negative actions or disconcerting arrangements, the ends and the means should align in copasetic terms, “Both hero and villain are often characterized as those as those who have a very clear agenda and system of values” (Alsford, 4) and it is the mode that they accomplish those agendas that define the difference between them. Where the goal used to be solely self-serving for the supervillain, now they have a more altruistic

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 take on their goals, claiming to have the betterment of others in mind yet still doing whatever it takes to accomplish them, including harming innocents.

Not being left behind in these changing times, Lex Luthor and Magneto adapted to the world of the eighties in the Bronze and early Dark Age of comics. It was a world that constituted the rise of the antihero, where the line between hero and villain began to be skewed. The , a concept introduced in the seventies, became more prevalent not only with the introduction of characters such as the but also with the reinvention of already existing heroes, most popular being the work of writer Frank

Miller on Daredevil in the early eighties and Batman in the late eighties. New ideas of what defined hero and villainy became running themes in comics, and the vigilante offered a way for the hero to traverse the line between the two, “the vigilante exists to bridge the gap between law and justice, but there should be no gap between law and justice” (Juliano, 64). The idea of the defining measures between a superhero and supervillain, and the fact of calling a hero a vigilante, led to the reconsideration on the stance of villains. With these new characters emerging to reflect this it also included the idea of a sympathetic origin story for the supervillain and encouraged new characters to emerge that encompassed this new perspective. The Shredder, from The Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles, is one such character.

In 1984, a new group of superheroes graced the shelves of comic stores, a story about four brothers who are raised in and trained in the art of ninjitsu in order to uphold their honor. The fact that they are mutant turtles merely helped them in standing out from the other ninja stories that were saturating the eighties -fu pop

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 culture market. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue #1 (1984) told the tale of a surprising group of characters whose sole purpose is to avenge their master/adopted father’s mentor and former owner Homato Yoshi. Their father, Master Splinter, a rat who mimicked the fighting skills of Yoshi thus learning ninjitsu, raises his four sons—

Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo—to face the man who murdered his master and kill him in vengeance: The Shredder.

This appears straight forward: heroes bring a criminal to justice. The same superhero motif is told in every story. The fact that the Turtles seek to kill Oroku Saki

(The Shredder) is a sign of the shifting times. That the first moment these characters are introduced, they say their life’s mission is to find and kill The Shredder is very telling of the changing idea of justice for that era. For some, to kill a murderer seems proper justice. Especially when this same man is now leading a ninja crime syndicate in New

York City. This gives the right to the vigilantes—who now represent the hero—to take whatever means necessary in order to stop him:

Once again, then, we return to this notion that it is the supervillain who legitimates the superhero. Both superhero and supervillain operate outside the law, but the superhero is alegal, operating in an area where no specific laws exist to make their acts expressly illegal whereas the supervillain is illegal, acting in contravention of existing laws, but whose abilities place them outside of societal norms and thus beyond the reach of conventional law (Bainbridge, 72). Although the Turtles would cross the line and commit a crime, their motive is not only revenge but also for the sake of the city, to protect them from the villainous actions of the

Shredder.

However, the picture changes slightly when Master Splinter tells the Turtles the

Shredder’s story. When they lived in Japan, Homato Yoshi kill young Oroku Saki’s

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 beloved older brother because when the same woman that they both loved chose Yoshi,

Saki’s older brother attacks her in anger. To avenge his brother, Oroku Saki trains for years, hunts down Homato Yoshi in New York City, then kills him and his wife in revenge, similar to what Master Splinter wants his sons to do. No one is right in the murders that are committed, yet there is some leniency given to those who claim themselves to be heroes, if they believe there is no choice in stopping evil, “The content of human morality is often determined by consideration of consequences such as the greater good or self-satisfaction, or the betterment of the species” (Alsford, 26), and stopping a criminal who has harmful intent toward the public is permitted. In regard to

Oroku Saki, he loses his brother when he is just a child. The horror of losing a beloved person is tragic and explains the rage that fuels Oroku Saki into becoming The Shredder, yet does not forgive him his crimes toward those outside his hatred of Homato Yoshi.

As Baumeister and Beck says in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, is that the myth of evil is that people are just evil to be evil. The Foot Clan, which Shredder is the leader of, represents this, that while he does reside in the realm of evil in a clan built on violence, they themselves are not purely evil in their intent. Though the gang of ninjas represent evil, the Shredder did not intend to perform evil acts, though he does put in a bid for power. His main concern, in this original comic series, is vengeance for his brother, just as the superheroes’—the vigilantes—is to avenge their father’s master.

While not all supervillains were a part of a gang, relatively, when previous supervillains have been introduced before this point, they have been introduced as being pure evil, with no true motive and no reason to be a bad guy because it easily separated

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 the good and bad “The world often breaks down into us against them, and it almost invariably turns out that evil lies on the side of ‘them’” (Baumeister and Beck, 62). For

Lex Luthor, he wanted to defeat Superman because the Man of Steel kept defeating him.

Magneto wanted to destroy humans because he believed mutants to be superior to the humans who hated them. While both have goals, neither are initially derived from a solid story that gives their drives understandable and acceptable purpose, “The heroes and villains continually thrown up by human imagination can be seen as powerful prototypes representing the extremes of human response to boundary situations” (Alsford,10) and the early iterations of these characters represent these boundaries. However, their rebooted stories later, especially in the Bronze Age of comics, give them compelling tales that explain why they perform evil deeds.

Shredder, though he is defeated in the first issue of the Ninja Turtles comics, is given a straightforward reason that explains why he is the bad guy of the story. Even his premature demise must be forgiven in context of the comics. The creators of Teenage

Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, did not intend for the comics to have become the successful franchise that it did. The comic was initially created in homage to another character and his story, a character that received the eighties antihero retheming that several characters were experiencing: Daredevil. Being fans of Frank

Miller, Eastman and Laird created the Turtles as a tribute to Miller and Daredevil. Since the story was not meant to continue, the duo had a challenge of creating not only heroes, but a villain who could plausibly be introduced, believed in, and defeated in a single issue. To accomplish this, they created a set of compelling heroes (the Turtles) with a

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 simple mission (revenge), versus a viscous villain (The Shredder) with a plausible yet simple cause as to why he is the villain (retribution for the murder of his brother). In this, the story of the Turtles against The Shredder was able to come to a conclusion within one issue. This character would not get a true resurgence until 1987, not in comics but in the children’s television adaptation. It is here, as well as the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtles film that Shredder once again becomes a prominent figure in the Ninja Turtles mythos.

The further elaboration of the supervillains’ backstories beginning in the eighties appears to be a response to the transformation of many of the superheroes they battled against. The heroes are now being given more complexities as characters, they are making and acting on decisions that seem questionable. Where before the line was drawn, there are now eraser marks. Before this it was easy to determine who the heroes and villains were in the context of the actions being performed, typically in the presence of civilians or victims, since “the establishment of a victim usually precedes the search for villains or heroes” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 232). If there is a robbery, an attack, a murder, whoever is doing the protecting or saving is the hero, and whoever is performing the crime is the villain, and whoever is suffering is the victim. This element completes this superhero genre motif: the hero needs a villain, the villain needs a hero, and they both need a victim, “A correctly cast victim. . . (can) motivate action and encourage recruitment to a cause. . . Heroes form a rallying point, increase agreement among members, and boost commitment to a cause” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 229), and in superhero comics the cause is bringing the supervillain to justice. The victim is the key

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 for the existence of the superhero, and the supervillain exists because the hero needs its antithesis in order to be classified as a hero. The victim is the missing piece.

However, a new storytelling technique became more popular in the early eighties for comics in terms of the victim. While the superhero became more comprehensive with the rise of the antihero and for the questioning choices they were now making, the supervillain is also presented with a new identity, that of the victim. While the villains’ victims suffer at the hands of these bad guys, the characters themselves are now the victims of others: of child abuse, of abandonment, of wrongful persecution, etc. These characters themselves are the products of evil, they are victims, and “If there were no victims, there would be no evil” (Baumeister and Beck, 1). This idea of the villain and victim relationship can now be seen two ways. The first is the traditional sense, of the villain existing because the victim defines them as such, and the second that there are two victims, “victims are fairly neutral on evaluation, but this may simply cover the fact that some victims are extremely sympathetic. . . while others are actually bad people”

(Bergstrand and Jasper, 242) an idea that was fully coming to realization in superhero comics.

Yet, this idea of the “victim” offers another element present in the superhero comics in consideration of this idea of sympathizing the villain. In each story there appears a formula when it comes to the character . There, of course, is the hero, the protagonist that carries the story forward. The superhero comic was founded for the purpose of telling stories of these costumed characters who fight evil to protect civilians from harm. However, how is a character defined as a hero? There are both

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 powered and non-powered heroes, there are those who fight and those who offer support, the variety of superheroes would make it challenging to define a character by their gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. So, what is left to make a group definition? It is the evil they fight. Though their adversaries differ, the superhero battles those who mean to cause harm to the innocent which can range from thieves to galactic warlords. These characters fulfill the next role in this cycle, and that is the villain. Without the presence of villainy, heroism can never exist. In order to define them they must have an adversary to face against. Without the supervillain there can be no superhero. Now it is imperative to determine how a villain is defined. There can arguably be just these two causalities to create this relationship. After all, if a hero is someone who fights to protect society from evil, and a villain is what causes the evil, a villain is then defined by the presence of a hero. However, a third element is necessary in order to complete this cycle, and that is the role of the victim. Without a victim, the superhero does not have anything to protect against the supervillain who persecutes for a self-defined purpose. The absence of a victim negates the presence of a superhero, and also deprives the supervillain of a goal; the hero and villain’s purpose will no longer exist.

However, this becomes intricate when it is revealed that the supervillain themselves are the victim. It reveals a cycle in these stories that interferes with the classic hero/villain trope, in which both sides are characters that have experienced trauma. Yet, it is the supervillain that receives the negative attention because they were unable to rectify their emotional response to their trauma, and as a result traversed into the world of evil,

Their phenomenological perspective rests on the belief that processing of

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social information can become distorted as a result of trauma in childhood. Consequently, victimized children are likely to view the world in distorted ways, which could lead to the misinterpretation of appropriate social cues. They may view the intentions of others as hostile, and thus perpetuate the cycle of violence. (Neller et al, 153). This cycle of violence continues as the supervillain, unable to cope with their trauma, lashes out at others. They believe that their attempts—their crimes—are with the betterment of the world in mind. Their misconceived actions, their response to their victimized past, result in the creation of new victims, and so the cycle continues.

The victimization of the villain should not be disregarded. After all, to write off someone who was raised in an abusive home is to erase the harm that undoubtedly affected this person for life. Likewise, condemning a Holocaust victim is the epitome of cruelty, and their actions against further persecution due to being different is almost forgivable. “What a culture considers heroic and what it considers villainous says a lot about that culture’s underlying attitudes—attitudes that many of us may be unaware that we have, and which represent culture currents that we may be equally unaware of being caught up in” (Alsford, 2), and the growth of leniency given to supervillains coincides as more revelations are given about their sympathetic origin stories. The act of forgiving their wrongdoings is becoming justified when their actions are based off traumatic wrongdoing done to them, because many of their distressing stories are based on experiences that are recognizable or that are generally known to the greater populace.

Sympathy can be garnered, and forgiveness can be bestowed since “forgiveness must have a meaning” (Derrida, 36) in order it to occur. To forgive a supervillain is a new concept that this era in comics introduces, and it is a movement that only picks up in practice as comics went into the Modern Age.

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CHAPTER V

“FORGIVENESS IS DIVINE”: THE Modern Age

The superhero comics of today differ so drastically from their origins; art style is more experimental, the cast is more diverse, the platforms are larger, and the roles are no longer clearly defined. Older audiences are not hesitant in questioning characters when they do fall within established roles of times past and are more interested in learning about the deviations in them than with how they follow these standards.

Redefining the superhero role has caused a significant amount of conversation to be had, especially if a hero should be identified as such if they fall into the antihero role.

As for the “villain” position, the new sympathetic origin stories have created a new title of “antivillain”. As already discussed, villains have had a growth in their stories over the past seven decades, going from generic cliché bad guys to victims of cruelty who believe that the only way to halt any further cruel acts is for them to take over the world themselves. As victims, they understand where malice comes from, and as such, they believe that they are the most qualified at determining the best course of action to eliminate it. Their stories have become sympathetic, seeking empathy and understanding from the audience, not agreement per say, but at least an acknowledgement of a potential awareness of why they have chosen the course of action that they have. They especially look for the corroboration of the superhero, the character that has been accepted by society for knowing what is right, and who represents everything the supervillain is not,

“He wants the approval of the hero, who is by definition superior and not afflicted with the inferiority complex of the villain” (Coogan, 51). With this understanding, they hope

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 to create justification for their actions, and acceptance of the reality they perceive to be true and accurate, as well as the agreement that their way is the best to resolve it.

Validation of a crime can also be considered as a pardoning, a forgiveness of what they have done in acknowledging that it was done for the greater good, again as they perceive it. With the knowledge that they only have the best intention for the world, many supervillains believe this to be the foundation on which they will be forgiven in current adaptations of the characters. However, this is not necessarily the case. While the addition of sympathy causes a stir of compassion for supervillains, the lack of empathy the supervillain often shows to their target—again in the name of the greater good— discourages forgiveness. While Lex is a victim of child abuse from both his parents and his foster parents, this does not outweigh the vicious murders that he commits. It is a conflicting strategy meant to cause the reader pause, to dispute the tale, to make the supervillain more human; however, more than that, a victim, which many can find recognition in because of personal experience or a greater awareness due to the larger outpouring of social media. Then, once the audience “‘understands’ the criminal, as soon as she exchanges, speaks, agrees with him, the scene of reconciliation has commenced”

(Derrida, 49). It is a complicated matter that has become more prevalent in the supervillain arc.

Many modern comics have now taken this a step further. Adding sympathetic origins permits there to be some hesitation in condemning evil acts. Some stories are even expanding on this to exhibit the supervillain now performing heroic acts. By making the character redeemable to the point where they become a superhero changes the outline

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 of the superhero comic genre. Mike Alsford argues that “The potential for the hero to collapse into villainy is an ever present one and hinges on the individual’s sense of engagement and solidarity with the rest of the world” (41). Who says then that this cannot happen to a villain? Alsford stipulates that engagement and solidarity is what keeps someone a hero, therefore the lack thereof is what causes their downfall into villainy. So, if a supervillain—assumably, with these parameters in mind—has lost their connection to the world, they can arguably find their way back again. Now, these characters, while attempting to find forgiveness and redemption, are also plagued with their past, a past that superheroes are not at times willing to forgive. Superheroes falling into the good guy category that they do, are expected to protect the supervillains if they are in jeopardy, save them if they are in trouble, and give them a chance to surrender to the authorities.

The declination of traditional supervillain archetype places superheroes in an odd position, one they are discovering how to navigate.

Today, Lex still encapsulates the persona created in the eighties. He is still a rich genius who believes he can save the world by getting rid of Superman. However, instead of trying to kill the Last Son of Krypton, Luthor decides to prove that he can be a better hero, a better Superman. In the most current iteration of the Superman mythos, Lex

Luthor becomes a superhero, bearing the crest of the House of El on his chest, calling himself Superman, and claiming to be even a greater hero than the Man of Steel. In fact, in the most recent DC reboot Rebirth (2016) Lex Luthor is fighting alongside the Justice

League (at one point he is even a member), battling supervillains with Superman as they protect Metropolis. This is a far cry from the tune he has been singing for the past seventy

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 years or so. He acknowledges this when he is showing Lois his new battle suit boasting the iconic “S” on his chest, as well as his reasoning and caution behind his decision, “The truth is, Metropolis—and the world—will always need a Superman. However, the time has come for a man to fill that role. Not a being who appeared from out of nowhere, without explanation as to who he truly is. . . with unknown motivation” (Action Comics

#967, 13). Luthor, for most of his time in print, argues that he is the best option for

Metropolis, and that mankind should be the ones to defend themselves, that someone like

Superman is the ultimate “Other” and could never be one of them. And if he can never be one of them, how can he fully protect and understand them? Lex Luthor now offers an alternative solution for a hero, himself.

In his new role of superhero, Lex is presented as cocky and self-assured as he has always been. His exuberant confidence in his ability appears as bumptiousness, and even the way he is drawn is reminiscent of his evil history. For example, in the second panel on page 9 of the digital copy of Action Comics #968, as Luthor defends himself against the attacks of the God Slayer L’Call, he squints his eyes in anger, and the image depicts him with seemingly no eyes, only two black pits where they should be, creating an intimidating image alluding back to his evil history.

However, in this current continuity things are a little more multifaceted. Prior to the Rebirth reboot, DC Comics had been publishing a continuity based on their New 52

(2011) series, completely reimagining their characters. Granted, most followed their classic origin stories, but their personas shifted ever slightly, causing new adaptations of them to appear. During the story event (2015), the worlds collided making a

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 new Earth where the Superman from Earth One—that is the Superman prior to New 52 and who has been the longest running iteration of the character—arrives and becomes the

New Earth’s Superman after his world dies. There he once again runs into his old enemy, not believing this new, good guy persona Lex claims to have adopted. He finds himself facing a Lex Luthor who criticizes him for his two-facedness, for telling others to not kill

Lex on crimes he has not committed while Superman himself has investigated Luthor without anyone knowing, trying to find something he has done wrong. Stranded together on a foreign planet, both being hunted by two assassins determined to kill Luthor for crimes he has yet to commit8, the image depicts the two on even ground, forced to work together and to come to some understanding. Superman says that he believes that Lex’s battle armor mimicking his crest is meant to turn the people against him. Luthor responds in the negative: “It had nothing to do with you. It was a tribute to a Superman that learned to accept me” (Action Comics #971, 18). The superhero that is praised for being the definition of good, the ‘ole farm boy, the Boy Scout, at one point accepts the evil Lex

Luthor. At least, one version of him does, the New 52 iteration, the one that died and who is being replaced by the original Superman. The New 52 version of Superman had accepted Lex Luthor—despite having a negative history with him— and now Luthor is once again faced with a Superman who believes him to still be evil. However, even this

Superman pauses in the realization that his trusted Luthor, and even

8 In this story, L’Call the Godslayer comes to earth after the future is revealed to him, a future where Lex Luthor destroys multiple worlds. His mission is to kill Luthor before this future comes to fruition, and save the billions of people he is predicted to kill. After L’Call captures Lex and takes him into space, Superman is able to free him but they both end up stranded on another planet (Action Comics #967-#972). 66

Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 seemed to forgive him. For the first time, even a Superman is convinced that Lex Luthor is good, and despite the lack of trust he receives, Lex Luthor continues to confirm his new superhero identity by protecting the Last Son of Krypton.

When Superman questions Luthor’s sudden altruism, Luthor allows that it has grown in time through his failed attempt to save the life of Thomas Kord from a helicopter crash, and through his tenure assisting the (Action Comics

#971, 18). He admits that his new transformation is not one born of an epiphanous moment, but gradually over a period. He realizes that he can do more for the world than his evil exploits in the name of doing good. This new challenge heightens when the

Superman he knew, the Superman who believed in him, dies. Luthor chooses to take on the mantel, to honor him by continuing his good works. Now, not only does Lex Luthor have to prove himself once more to Superman, who is a beloved superhero, but also must reconcile with the fact that he must share the emblem of the House of El, a symbol that he believes is rightly his to bear because he does so in honor of the now deceased hero, whom he as well as everyone in that world regards as the true Superman.

Previously in the comics, Luthor uses emotional falsification in order to condone his business in the name of having others support him. The empathetic shift in his story from war starter to superhero almost removes him from the category of “villain”. Even

Superman struggles with this new version of Lex Luthor, still having evocations of the

Lex Luthor of his world before it was destroyed. In this world, of the Rebirth relaunch of

DC Comics, Lex pushes for his heroic legitimacy, and even Superman grants his innocence but is still laced with trepidation, “Lex Luthor. I first met him—the one I

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 knew, anyway—in Smallville. Even then, I could sense that he was manipulative—a conniving source of trouble. A man not to be trusted. Today’s Luthor purports to be different, but I’ve had my doubts” (Action Comics #970, 5). Superman has had a long history with Lex Luthor, a majority of which they were nemesis. With such a long history riddled with strife, he cannot let go of what he has known to what he is witnessing now, struggling with forgiving him. Superman is aware that genuine forgiveness is challenging for him to give to Lex, “the difficult, but morally praiseworthy task of forgiveness is always unilateral, and thus that genuine forgiveness is unilateral forgiveness” (Moody-

Adams, 162), and while he is aware of the change in Lex, he cannot dispel his long carrying antagonism toward him.

While Lex Luthor struggles to gain the acceptance of his newfound righteousness, so does Magneto. Magneto in the last twenty years strives to do good, particularly for mutants. He aids in creating a safe haven for mutants, a place where they are free to live away from the persecution of humans. While at times it is under human supervision via the mutant killing robotic Sentinels, instead of it being solely mutant desire to isolate themselves from humanity, he learns to hone his abilities in ways to protect mutants without killing humans, despite his desire to still do so at times. However, this road is not an easy one for him. He still struggles with his inner villainy—born out of his experience during the Holocaust—continuing his fight against humans and the X-Men who doggedly defend them. Whenever tragedy strikes, whenever something goes wrong, he reverts back to his villainous self. When these moments happen, they are again in service to fellow mutants.

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In the 2014 Magneto series, Magneto is in hiding after he experiences a significant loss in his mutant ability after teaming up with the X-Men, and he decides to help mutants once again on his own accord. While he still does not possess a great love for humans, he now only targets those who have a direct hand in harming mutants, for example he kills a contributes to anti-mutant organizations, all of which are identified as hate groups and terrorist organizations (Magneto #1, 6). While he has succumbed once more to his villainous way of life, he recognizes the kind of man he is.

The comics show him, for the most part, alone in rundown motels as he plans his attacks on the next person—human or mutant—who has harmed or intends to harm innocent mutants, “I won’t be answering for my wrongdoings any time soon. But I’ll make sure others pay for theirs” (Magneto #1, 7). He is aware that one day he will atone for all the evil he has done, an admittance and awareness of his place on the side of the villain.

His struggle of being a heroic figure is one born of his childhood ordeal during the Holocaust. While he attempts to do good, he cannot overlook the evil that he witnessed during that time. The perfect reflection of the Nazi hatred of Jews then and the human and mutant struggle now convinces him of his right to his distrust and violent attitude toward all humans. This is what convinces him that evil acts are the only way to combat evil, because he cannot relinquish his abhorrence to anyone who is not a mutant like him. While he still wishes for it, he repeatedly renounces hope in receiving forgiveness and understanding from those around him, “In forgiveness, a victim rejects constricting that make anger, resentment and revenge seem inevitable and irreversible, and combines condemnation of the wrong (he) has suffered with hope in the

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 possibility of moral renewal and change in (his) own life and that of offender” (Moody-

Adams, 162). However, Magento’s experience on the side of the hero, on trying to make amends, reveals to him an interminable amount of tragedy.

While his actions and ideals for human eradication is an incredibly evil pursuit, the audience is most likely to feel confliction over any condemnation of Magneto due to his time in Auschwitz. Even today, Nazi Germany still stands as the epitome of evil, and

Magneto is a victim of such evil; the cycle of victim, villain, hero continues. In a later story Magneto: Testament (2009), which explores his time surviving in Nazi Germany, he reveals his thought process even more in a letter he writes and buries while imprisoned in Auschwitz:

My name is Max Eisenhardt. . . I watched thousands of men, women, and children walk to their deaths. I pulled their bodies from the gas chambers. . . I saw thousands of murdered people burning in outdoor pits. I have seen at least a quarter million dead human beings with my own eyes. . . and I couldn’t save a single one. . . any more than they could save me . . . (87 90). His trauma is detailed here, black words surrounded in white narrative boxes on black panels. A sobering series of panels after the plethora of images of the infamous concentration camp and the victims within.

Shredder, the newest arrival of these three, has not had as much time to alter his origin story as the others have. However, his sympathetic story, as already revealed, has been subtly shared since his beginning; the hurting young child who grows up and avenges his brother’s murder. Today, Shredder still resides in this space, although his origin story has had similar slight modifications, similar to the other supervillains. Today,

Shredder has taken his fight against Homato Yoshi from feudal Japan to modern day New

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York. The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2011) comics shows the origin of the

Turtles, Splinter, and Shredder as being reincarnated, their fight spanning centuries after

Homato Yoshi—who is now Splinter—abandons the Foot Clan, disagreeing with Saki’s methods and desiring to live an honorable life with his wife and four sons. Seeing this as a betrayal of their clan, Oroku Saki finds them and executes them for what he views to be treachery.

This initial reintroduction to Shredder does not offer much sympathy. However, in 2019’s Shredder in Hell series, a daunting title that depicts Shredder after his death, sympathetic elements are revealed. While in , Shredder discovers that he has been a prisoner to a vengeful dragon god who has been controlling Oroku Saki his entire life, guiding him to commit evil acts against everyone, including his friend Homato Yoshi.

Even with the realization that he was being manipulated, Oroku Saki still feels guilt over his crimes when he was living, “So many lives I’ve destroyed. . . And all for nothing”

(Shredder in Hell #4, 13). Unlike the other heroes used as examples in this paper, Master

Splinter/Homato Yoshi is quick to forgive his former friend and longtime foe, even sacrificing his chance at reaching Nirvana in order to help Saki through Hell so that he might find peace in the afterlife. Even though his actions were influenced by the ancient deity, Shredder still feels the guilt of the crimes done by his hand and of the hate it cultivated toward others, that he permitted it to occur. Splinter, being aware of this, assures him of his forgiveness and encourages him to keep persevering.

Since looking at the growing sympathetic storytelling of supervillain origins, the idea arises concerning the idea of forgiveness and redemption with these characters.

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Supervillains are beginning to perform more heroic acts, they are starting to turn from their evil ways and ally themselves with the heroes that they have fought against for decades. Superhero comics are traditionally told with the idea that the audience falls on the side of the hero, supporting their fight against the evil villain, albeit with more hesitancy as the villains’ revealing traumatic back stories appear. So the question is presented for the hero and for the audience, is forgiveness for the supervillain possible?

Can they be redeemed of their crimes?

To give true forgiveness to someone who has caused harm to an individual or individuals can be a challenging prospect. As mentioned above, Superman is facing this difficulty of forgiving Luthor of past sins as he acknowledges his current innocence, and even the possibility of him being good. Magneto’s adversaries, the X-Men, are shown with this same struggle, yet continually offer forgiveness to the man, though their trust might be wary. Shredder’s story with the Turtles is still new, as well as any thought of forgiveness, yet the Turtles are shown several times offering a truce to the villain in the name of protecting the greater good, and of course it is shown that Splinter endows his forgiveness. None of these superheroes are able to do this easily, yet these stories do not downplay the power that is given with forgiveness, especially for the superhero.

In fact, forgiveness is insinuated with so much sacristy, that the supervillains do not even ask for it. When the supervillains convert to doing good, they do not implore forgiveness from the heroes. Their pride and ego still seem to be present despite their turning into “good guys”. Instead, the supervillains seek redemption through their actions. Though typically forgiveness and redemption share the same bed, I use them in

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 this essay to differentiate in terms of who they are servicing. Forgiveness, as shown, is the journey of the superhero as they face their former opponents who claim their new innocence and that they wish to now do good. However, the supervillains do not verbally seek forgiveness. Instead, they go straight to using their talents and gifts to benefit others, to assisting the superheroes, to being a hero, utilizing their actions to prove their newfound goodness in order to protect others.

The idea of forgiveness, after all the harm and death they have caused, all the chaos they created, does not seem possible to them. Instead, they become defensive, resorting to the intellectual instead of the empathetic. For example when Luthor confronts

Superman about his unfairness in assuming he has done something wrong: “Maybe it’s time you practice what you preach and stop condemning an innocent man” (Action

Comics #971, 19). He, just like other villains, do not try to plead for forgiveness, only relying on what is evident which includes the physical proof of their positive conversion; they are seeking redemption.

It is this idea of physical proof that separates redemption from forgiveness. Where forgiveness is an emotional and mental choice, redemption must be proven to those whom forgiveness is being sought after. To achieve redemption, a person must prove themselves worthy, and by proving their redemption they can prove their admittance of wrongdoing and thus earn forgiveness, “the idea of forgiveness being conditional of admittance of wrong and the petition of forgiveness leads to an ‘economic transaction’”(Derrida, 34).Within the comics, the act of redemption belongs to the supervillain and the act of forgiveness resides with the superhero. This is the way that the

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 supervillain conveys the change, and that the superhero expresses the acceptance of the change, although proof of redemption is not—and should not be—necessary in order to forgive, “Sometimes, forgiveness. . . must be a gracious gift, without exchange and without condition; sometimes it requires, as its minimal condition, the repentance and transformation of the sinner” (Derrida, 44). If only the transformation can be believed by the heroes, which many are not apt, or willing, to believe. The hero, despite being aware or unaware of the sympathetic back stories of their villains, struggles with forgiving them due to the unwillingness to seem like they are pardoning their criminal activity, “What one has suffered as a victim does not excuse one’s subsequent violent action”

(Baumeister and Beck, 59), and the heroes do not want their forgiveness to be misconstrued as such.

The inherent need of the supervillain to prove to the superheroes that that are good, that they deserve redemption, ties once more to the imperativeness of the superhero/supervillain coexistence. Once the representatives of good, of what others see them as, forgive them of their past transgressions, the supervillain will culminate into their final transformation, that of superhero, “If the villain can gain the hero’s respect and approval. . . he is recuperated back into the community that ostracized and rejected him.

Approval by the hero will heal the supervillain’s wound” (Coogan, 51). The superhero pardons the supervillain, the victim of evil themselves, and the purveyance of good triumphs.

The binary roles these characters play represents the readership, “while the superhero acts as a screen that we (not unproblematically) project our hopes onto, the

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 supervillain acts as a mirror for our worst traits” (Bainbridge, 64). Where at first the comic villains were meant to represent the dredge of humanity, they have grown to become intricate figures that offer disconcerting arguments into why their “evil” ways might be the right choice. By becoming more relatable, confliction arises on what is the

“right” thing to do.

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CONCLUSION

This idea of the hero/villain/victim relationship and its affiliation to this concept of forgiveness and redemption is affected when the supervillain is revealed to be a victim of evil themselves. The hero/villain/victim cycle has been a factor for storytelling since the creation of the protagonist/antagonist, and this tradition carried over when superhero comics were created on the onset of World War II, the stories quite simple in their context. As the stories became more complex over time, the idea arose that just as there is a point for the superheroes to suit up and save the world—Superman in honor of his

Kryptonian parents and for the world that adopted him, Spider-Man in memory of his

Uncle Ben, etc.—the supervillains should have a purpose for their actions as well. Since many of the superheroes face distress in their origin story, the supervillains likewise face similar traumatic events where instead of turning to hero work, they decide that the way to make the world better is through crime. Yet, despite their classification by heroes

“Many perpetrators regard themselves as victims” (Baumeister and Beck, 47). This then causes them to believe that their actions are justified since much of it revolves around making the world a better place. The revelation of the victimization of the supervillain during the early stages of their lives garners sympathy to their plight to a point, but does not exclude them from the title of bad guy.

This conflicts with the established definition in this paper of a “supervillain”, since, once they attempt to do good and to redeem themselves, they forfeit even temporarily their supervillain title. However, for the characters in the comics and for the audience, it is not simple to shed the perception that has been ingrained in them to have

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 toward the “supervillain” for decades. According to Baumeister, this is the need that humans feel must exist, to have a name associated with the fault for when bad things occur, “the mistake of wanting to find a single person who is to blame” (57). This is problematic when it is challenging the conscience of the audience when they blame the person who has always been the one to condemn, after they are revealed to be a victim.

This is also evidenced in the superheroes struggling to forgive these characters, and their hesitancy in rebranding them, thus their title of “supervillain” remains.

Victimizing the villain via their origin story begins the sympathetic push for the character in the perception of the audience, but their continuation on the evil path denies them true forgiveness for their actions. The modern trend of turning them into heroes, though, does offer that opportunity. The cyclical trope that superhero comics have followed for decades is challenged when the victimized supervillain chooses to change their ways to help others through doing good. The cycle breaks, and the attention is now directed to other growing attributes of comics: a forgivable villain and not-so-heroic heroes.

This new questionable side is only being revealed now with superheroes that have been known for their unquestionable . Superman and Lex Luthor are primary examples. Superman, being the symbol of hope that he is, at the first sign of Lex Luthor’s claim and evidence of goodness should offer forgiveness. After all, a hero should want to help villains change their ways, right? Granted, he does not have to trust Luthor, but he displays a level of skepticism that is not the greatest example shown by a superhero, especially one of Superman’s social standing. It is not the image of someone who has put

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 themselves in a position of being a beacon of hope, and of justice. Instead, this causes him to be seen like any other human, making him more like his audience. His holding out on forgiveness of Lex Luthor goes against the concept of forgiveness, that it is a decision of attitude toward a person, and as Derrida speculates, mirroring the theological perception of it, “there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation” (Derrida,

27). Yet, Superman makes it seem like there is a limit and that it has been reached.

Although they attempt to prove their sincerity in desiring forgiveness, the redemptive aspect that Luthor and his counterparts such as Magneto pursue through their good deeds should not be considered in terms of receiving the hero’s forgiveness, “But achieving the revision of judgment that constitutes forgiveness is non-obligatory and unilateral because nothing that a wrongdoer could say or do can rationally or morally compel it” (Moody-

Adams, 162). Despite the attempts of the supervillains, their acts in redeeming themselves cannot guarantee the forgiveness from the superheroes.

Still, there is an element to these supervillains that crave the approval of their prolonged opponents. The continual disappointment they experience from their tragic childhoods to their unremitting botched attempts to change the world in the best way they see fit, and at times failing to do “good”, supervillains have a history of failure and it seems like the only satisfaction, the only reassurance they crave is that of the designated good guy, the superhero. The society that the supervillain wishes to change—often by ruling over them—for the better has denounced them as the true hero, and instead rebuffs them, further implying to the supervillain their low standing in the world.

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With the change in status and understanding for villains and heroes, any action done to further instill the lowly status of a supervillain, concurrently fails to downplay the empathy and familiarity that the audience might share with them. “To negotiate our way through life we are forced into the position of interpreting the world and the things we find in it, we are forced into making judgments and choices concerning the directions we wish to take” (Alsford, 6), and at times the wrong decisions will be made. The idea of someone who has made wrong choices being given a second chance—especially by the people they admire most—is a sign of hope and the potential of change and acceptance.

These changes are a response to cultural shifts that the readers have faced over time, and by these characters reflecting those changes it allows for discussion on how this reflects on American culture as well, “Analysis of characters might point to arenas that could experience broader change in the future as cultural swings captured in narratives and other media could reflect shifts in the cultural assumptions underlying fundamental sentiments” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 242). These changes have already impacted perception in villainy. Supervillains are now capable of being good in superhero comics, where before they were utilized as a tool to stand for everything that the audience hates and should be against.

Villains were once revolting creatures and now most of them are something to emulate sympathy. Even those who have succumbed to their madness, they are still shown to be victims of the circumstances that they were thrust into. This revelation calls to question the innocence of these villainous victims, and their attempt at proving their innocence, something that Superman realizes, “The only thing that’s important now is

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 that I be open-minded enough to judge a man based on what he is—rather than on what I fear him to be” (Action Comics #972, 19). Audiences want those sympathetic elements that opens the way to forgiveness and redemption. It shows that even the worst among us is capable of being redeemed, whether it be something in relation to someone or that person themselves. The knowledge that people can turn over a new leaf fills the reader with more optimism than the complicated heroes do now. “Stories interest us because of the humans who make choices” (Bergstrand and Jasper, 229) whether these choices are for good or evil, they are what interest audiences. The development of the sympathetic supervillain allows for a change to the quintessential element of the superhero comic genre, ignites more interest in the modern audience, and permits more familiarity and character study as a reflection of the audience of the time. The level of sympathy and forgiveness given to supervillains is a sign of the changes that have occurred since the late thirties.

Am I saying that the trend for the sympathetic supervillain is applicable to all villains in superhero comics? Absolutely not. In fact, due to there being more comics today directed to either children or adult readers, comics are able to include excess violence, permitting there to be supervillains that are nightmare inducing in regards to the amount of blood and gore they spill. This also permits there to be tragic villains who struggle with deciding whether to do right or wrong, and who must come to terms with their traumatic pasts that have driven them to do evil, causing them to become the despised figures that they are. However, there are plenty of core supervillains that have made the move from soulless culprit to lost individual who has made regrettable choices

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Texas Tech University, Leah Rae Smith, May 2021 and wishes to make amends, “Villains survive in popular entertainment because people will like to see them—in some important way, they do correspond to how people see the world” (Baumeister and Beck, 64). The sympathetic supervillains are there, they have a presence, one that has been a gradual increase to what they are today, a new trope within the world of superhero comics.

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