Marvel Flipside

Re-villaining: Ms. Minerva

Men call her ... MINERVA!
Okay, stay with me, because this might get complicated at first....

Minerva (or, technically, Min-Erva) was a proud scientist of the alien Kree, but one renowned for her unorthodox and hasty experiments. She went after the Kree hero Captain Marvel (or, technically, Mar-Vell) but was thwarted by her own people and wound up trapped on earth.

No problem right? She eventually gives herself superpowers and hooks up with Captain Atlas, freeing herself and becoming a villain for the hero Quasar-- the same Quasar who himself was a kind of heir to Captain Marvel's mantle "protector of the universe."

Oh, and those powers? She got them by experimenting with the Psyche-Magnetron-- the same device that gave Marvel's love interest, Carol Danvers, the powers of Ms. Marvel. So Minerva's costume-- the same pattern as Ms. Marvel's original duds. All of this was, of course, when Ms. Marvel was touring the galaxy calling herself Binary in a completely different costume, powerset, and, well, everything.

Still with me? Good! Because despite all this, Ms. Marvel's been back and trying to be a capital-H HERO. Which makes her a prime target for when returns--- Minvera!

Sorry for the B&W-- in this case, it really matters! Minerva's the
blue-skinned girl on the left, as if you couldn't tell.

Minerva has often wanted to use her science for the betterment of the Kree Empire, and, hey, if she could better herself along the way, that's bonus! Ms. Marvel has gone a long way from being merely exposed to the Psyche-Magnetron. Minerva is going to need a new subject on how to keep the Kree strong-- and Ms. Marvel is the perfect Guinea pig! This will require:

• Observation: Setting Ms. Marvel up with a variety of traps and enemies and psychological subplots
• Control Groups: Kidnapping and experimenting on normal humans, preferably Ms. Marvel's supporting cast.
• Field Study: Mimicking Ms. Marvel as a blue-skinned alter ego, further deepening the psychological subplots
• Experimenting: Finally uncovering Ms. Marvel's "Kryptonite," the two Misses of Might battle over Manhattan!

Minerva-- the worst evil twin Ms. Marvel's never had!

Re-Villaining: High Evolutionary

How can it be that the High Evolutionary, of all people, has been without a single-minded purpose? Yes, he has dedicated his life in the pursuit of understanding the evolutionary process, and this has led him to experiments and then even manipulation of such forces-- he has enhanced other lifeforms, given rise to whole Counter-Earths, and evolved like unto godhood.

Or has he?

The High Evolutionary should consider all his past experiments as mere trifles, as petty experiments more akin to a child playing with his first chemistry set. He has long realized that humanity doesn't care about the science he has learned, and so now, finally, he rejects humanity in turn. He will pursue the pure expression of Evolutionary Process for its own sake, wholly giving himself over to it, even if he disfigures himself by heightening his own evolution-- into an Elder of the Universe. This, then, will be his purpose!

The problem with being an Elder of the Universe? Your devotion must carry you on past the extinction of your own race. No problem for the High Evolutionary-- he will help the process along. To become the last, he will help humanity evolve so much that it burns itself out, leaving him with the vast cosmic power necessary to bring his Evolutionary study to planet throughout the cosmos, throughout time.

And his hopes lies with the X-Men and Earth's mutants. Instead of simply ignoring them (or using them for a brief experiment or two,) he will profess to help them gain their rightful superiority. After all, isn't beneficial mutation the defining evolutionary idea? The X-Men are torn, however. The number of mutants have been pushed the bring of extinction by the Scarlet Witch, so the High Ev's 'help' might be needed. But what happens if this help would mean the extinction of humans, instead? What happens when lines will be drawn, mutant brother against mutant brother, and, what happens, in the end, if the High Evolutionary will simply discard them all anyway for his own selfish cosmic ambition?  

Additional thoughts:
It's not that I necessarily *like* the High Evolutionary, you know. He's shown up in my Swarm Attack #4 pitch, and "she" showed up in my Flipside fanfic as a Brotherhood enemy (explaining that whole Zaladane mess, to boot.) It's just that there something that's so thematic about the guy that any use of him automatically kicks up a story to a metaphorical level, which I'm a sucker for.

Apropos to this villain is his "evolution" of his design. I wanted to redesign him to emphasize what an evolved human might actually look like. For this guy, his brain would be enlarged, of course, but so would his eyes and fingers, to make him both more alien and more scientist-y, more apt to probe and to manipulate. This wouldn't mean that he should look thin, however, since that implies weakness. Survival of the fittest dictates that stronger, more agile, and more physically impressive specimens would survive, thus his more imposing look. The armor also empahsizes a skeletal structure,for both the scientist and creepiness factors. Here are some sketches that helped me settle on the final look:

Re-Villaining: Elfqueen

Hank Pym is a hero-- even after his failures he continues to strive, to fight on. And yet, it's always his failures that everyone remembers. What people might not remember exactly is a character that got caught up in Hank Pym's failure: The Elfqueen. (Pictured here-- although she was never called Elfqueen directly. Her native name is Linnea.)   

As Yellowjacket, Pym's constant drive to push himself ultimately caused a mental breakdown. At the same time, the woman known as Elfqueen and her lover, the warrior Gorn, left their private glade in the hills of Virginia-- after countless centuries of isolation devoted to each other. The modern world wasn't ready for them, and Gorn was shot. The Avengers responded to the Elfqueen's grief-fueled rampage, and even calmed her down... Everything would have been fine until Yellowjacket had to fire upon her after the situation was defused. The Elfqueen left to bury her lover, and Yellowjacket had to face an Avengers' court martial that would lead to an even greater, and more tragic, breakdown...

But her period of mourning is over, and the Elfqueen is ready to leave her private glade once again.

 The problem is, Linnea comes from an ancient time, one whose culture is so completely different as to be very alien indeed. It is a culture that places great emphasis on "Intensity." Not mere purity, but intensity, extremes. To exist is to be the fullest intensity of existence, and anything less is diluting the definition of your very life. Thus, to fall in love is be Love. To hate something is to be Hate. Sounds fine, until you add other cultural oddities. Blue is Wrong. Leaning on your left side is Wrong. Whispering is Wrong. And obviously, weakness is therefore less than intense, and therefore all kinds of Wrong.  

And that is why the Avengers better not let her see and remember Hank Pym. Her cultural view also interprets Hank Pym's long-ago last-minute attack as something akin to making a "claim" to the Elfqueen, whose lover was then dead. She has finished the ritualistic intensity of being Mournful, and now that she has prepared, she is ready to welcome Pym as her new Gorn. But this Pym doesn't seem at all like the one she knew, nor one worthy of her. She must then take it upon herself to 'prepare' him into the "ultimate" intensitifed version of a warrior, worthy of the Elfqueen!

Swarm Attack #4!!

Swarm intrigues the High Evolutionary. The process that created Swarm may have been an accident, but it opens an area of evolutionary development that even HE has not considered. Perhaps Swarm is an example of what the world's biosphere has been headed for all along-- a true collective in total, where every living being, yea the very Earth itself, has developed into a eusocial relationship, a true realization of the Gaia Hypothesis! So the High Ev captures Swarm for some experimentation... which in turn begins with his favorite location for experiments, the Savage Land! Yes, folks, that means a giant composite being of dinosaur bodies! The Avengers better re-assemble Swarm's Intelligence Collective, because it will take a hero-villain team-up to stop the Evolutionary's plans to unite everyone in a giant mass of symbiotic bodies!

Swarm Attack #3!

Defeat weighs heavy upon Swarm. For all his power, he has but repeatedly failed.

However, what if his failure was in trying to bring the insect's perspective to the human world? What if he tried the other way-- Infusing the human to the animal world? What if he created more swarm-like beings capable of bridging both worlds? Thus is born -- the Intelligence Collective!

Behold-- a new Gypsy Moth, a woman given over to the moths of her namesake! a new Deathstalker, a man composed of such scorpions! and Man O' Worm, a giant brute, a hovering jellyfish-like worm colony! With the success of this new team, Swarm begins to systematically kidnap more human victims in order to turn them all into swarm-like aggregate bodies...

This is not for the purpose of random acts of villainy, of course. I mean, sure, there will be the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torturous scientific experimentation. But it's Swarm's hope to release  these creatures  into their natural, separate states. This way, the animal kingdom will have added to it the human genius to aid its survival. Still, the Avengers won't see this as an "I was going to let them go" excuse. Especially since the process leaves their human hosts as lifeless skeletons. And also since Swarm's next target is Hank Pym, whom Swarm hopes to make into a literal "Ant Man!" 

Swarm Attack #2

I'm unofficially declaring this "Swarm Week" even tho it's really only a weekend. (You did notice that I said  Attack "#1" in my previous Re-Villaining post featuring my favorite Marvel villain, didn't you?) First of all, let's realize that Swarm is very much akin to a horror-type character and not just a supervillain. I'll always remember him from that Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends episode, where the character took a more Invasion of the Body Snatchers form rather than a Kill All Humans form. In that tradition, it's...

Swarm Attack #2!
There's another aspect of bees that Swarm could develop to help his cause-- it's not mind control, per se. It's even more creepy than that. It begins by having Swarm's bees get under his victim's skin-- literally. Burrowing into his victim's ears or nostrils, the bee can taste a bit of that hapless person's memories or skills, then return to collect it all for Swarm. The villain hopes to gather enough scientific knowledge to solve the world's problems by combining all the great knowledge in himself.

Unfortunately, as the bees go to from person to person, each victim gets "cross-pollenated" with a bit of the others' minds as well. Soon, identities and roles become intermingled and mixed, threatening all to devolve into madness. If those minds happen to be earth's greatest scientists, that would be rather bad. Speaking of which, what has gotten into Hank Pym and the Mad Thinker, Mr. Fantastic and the Leader, and Amadeus Cho and MODOK? What has gotten into them all, indeed?

Re-Villaining: Swarm

He is a Nazi, made of bees.

Let me repeat. He is a NAZI, made of BEES. If that's not reason enough to make Swarm your favorite villain, maybe you need to read more comics.

But I'll concede, most of the time, however, he's regulated to just be a villain-of-the-week, trotted out when someone needs an eco-terrorist to battle. Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless the motivations behind it are simply "A: Humans are bad for nature; B: You must eliminate all threats to nature; Therefore C: You must eliminate all humans." It might be hard to make a Nazi-made-of-bees realize that's an false syllogism, but most readers are more sophisticated and demand more complex motivations. So let's begin the re-villaining!

Swarm Attack #1: There is a worldwide crisis that the global community is slow to address-- Colony Collapse Disorder. Whole hives of bees are simply ... disappearing. Worldwide. And no one knows why. Conservative estimates say that 35% of all bees have disappeared, and that means that in 15 years, there could be no more bees. No more pollination. No more flowering fruits and plants for mass consumption.

This is obviously of great concern to Swarm. The public must take note. If 35% of bees have died, he will kill off 35% of the population of Washington DC. The government is quick to call in the Avengers to help with the national emergency, but Earth's Mightiest find it's easier to hit giant robots than deal with tiny insects. Plus, you can't just kill off Swarm-- wouldn't that be contributing to the Colony Collapse Disaster that started it all? It comes down Swarm versus Hank Pym-- Swarm vs. Wasp.  But what if Wasp agrees with Swarm? And what if the true cause of the bees' disappearance proves even greater than Swarm or the Avengers anticipated?

Re-Villaining: Anaconda

There's such a dearth of good headlining female villains in Marvel (which could be a feature of there being so few good headlining leading heroes, but that's a subject others more erudite than I have crusaded.) If you look at the Distinquished Competition, chances are you can rattle off several good villainesses (notably, all Batman roguettes, but again, that's another subject). That doesn't mean there's a complete absence of super-bad girls-- quite the contrary. But maybe a few of them need a bit ... re-villaining. Case in point:

Anaconda!

No, not Angela. Blanche Sitznski. She's super-strong, has a healing factor and adamantium skeleton, and extendable arms with which to crush you. All that AND underwater-breathing. (Too bad it left those gills!) She's gone toe-to-toe with the Thing, Captain America, Iron Man, and Colossus.  Some pretty heavy hitters! But notice, it's always with a team (the Serpent Society, the Femizons, the Six Pack) and it's always versus a team (Cap & and his allies, the B.A.D. Girls, X-Men). The problem is that she hasn't shown too much motivation or ambition except to be part of a team. Until now.

What Anaconda needs is a reason to stand on her own, and against a hero of her very own. Thematically, she should be all about greed, about amassing as much as she possibly can. Works well with the visual of someone with extendable, wrapable arms, don't you think? It also goes well with all we've seen from her so far-- a thief, a mercenary, a bully and a blowhard. And more specifically, she's a "retrieval specialist," fine-tuning her mercenary skills to a specialty. Again, she has a "long reach" indeed. Or, alternatively, she could take the role that Taskmaster left open-- she once worked as one of his lieutenant trainers, and he was conscripted for the Initiative.

But that's not enough. You see, Anaconda, like so many villains, is overcompensating. She knows that she's just been average to below-average all her life. It's why she couldn't even make it through high school, it's why she ended up a lowly steel worker before being impressed into super-powered experiments, and it's why she has a secret fondness for showtunes (the pure essence of simple, unadulterated emotions that she never seems to have herself.) And lately she's just an average to below-average supervillain. Well, no more! All it takes is one more defeat for her to realize her team is holding her down, and she'll do whatever it takes to make it on her own, even if she has to smash through every police officer and super hero to do it! 

She'll need some regular face time if she's to make headliner status. She's already fought Wolverine (albeit in a Cable/Deadpool issue), so why not put her up against him regularly? She'd also work well as a She-Hulk foe (or "would have" anyway, now that her series has been canceled). And how come she hasn't gone up against Spider-Man? She'd be a fine addition to his rogues' gallery. Sometimes you just need super-strong bullying crooks, and if Rhino could make the cross from being a Hulk villain, Anaconda could do the same.

So what do you say? Does Anaconda have what it takes to stand on her own and become a recurring Marvel villain?

Re-Villaining: The Slug

I've been a big fan of Paul O'Brien (The X-Axis) and Al Kennedy (One Hundred Days of Comics) and I really appreciate their podcast, House to Astonish. As a regular feature, they like to play around with the ideas and concepts of bad Marvel villains-- their "Official Handbook to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe." They already tackled the idea of the Hypno-Hustler, which I did here too, and this week's episode, the House looked at the Slug!

The Slug is an organized crime lord, the drug "kingpin" of Florida, who ran afoul of Spider-Man and Captain America at separate times. He was taken down by Cap's protégé, Nomad, which had more to do with Nomad's development as an embittered, hardened vigilante than with any real threat posed by the Slug. In fact, the House guys are right in pointing out that he's really just set up to be an alternate to a big, fat organized crime lord from New York, the Kingpin we all know and love... so what do with the Slug? Read on!

Re-Villaining: Hypno-Hustler!

Inspired by the guys who do the podcast House to Astonish, I'm starting what I hope will be a new series of posts that will take a look at re-envisioning old or lame (or lame AND old) villains of Marvel comics.  And who better to start off with than he who often tops people's list for the "Worst Villains in the Marvel Universe." None other than that Sultan of Sound, that Terrible Tremolo-- the horrible Hypno-Hustler!

Appearing in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #24, Antoine used his "hypno-goggles" and his back-up band, the Mercy Killers, in hypnotizing the patrons of a club in order to burglar them all. Turns out, Peter Parker was dragged to the same club by his friends, so all it takes is Spider-Man and a couple a' ear web-plugs to take out the purloining pop-Pavarotti.

So... a few problems here. (a 'few?!') One, the Hussla is definitely dated. Double dated. The other? The guy was taken out by his own Mercy Killers when Spider-Man finally takes off the villains own earphones, and he gets whammied just like his victims. Talk about getting hoisted by your own petard... (and I still don't even know what that means!)

With that one-two punch to his credibility, how can we ever re-villain the Hypno-Hustler? Here's my go...