Ironically, in the paper I'll be presenting in a couple of hours, I talk about the effect certain parts of my library have on me when I stand before them - the effect of making me feel like a super-villain. I like to think, however, that I'd be better at it (or is that worse?) than poor Peter Willis in this comic.
Left a "Tornado Belt" by his only friend, the despondent Willis sets out to become a super-villain. And while I do like to think I'd be better at it than he, the list he sets for himself, inspired by the best of the super-villains one finds in mainstream comics, really is, if I'm to be honest with myself, exactly the same kind of list I'd likely end up using. Henchmen? Check. Evil Laugh? Check. Sinister(-ish) transportation? Check.
Thank goodness I don't know anyone who owns a Tornado Belt.
I had a quick search for Rick Lundeen and for Epoch Publishing, and was delighted to see that he spends much time illustrating Doctor Who comics now. A gentleman after my own heart.
This comic came to me while I was running The Magic Mirror back at the beginning of the millennium (which sounds far more magnificent than simply saying "2001"), and falls into an interesting category of independent superhero comics I've begun to notice from that era. Much like Doug Myers and Amilton Santos' Generic Comic (which we'll get to eventually), it takes the tropes of the genre and casts an occasionally uncomfortably self-aware gaze on them. The process through which Willis goes in this comic really must echo the unseen origin stories of many of the wackier super-villains that populate the Marvel and DC universes, but here they're examined to their most ridiculous extreme. I've chatted often with friends who are superhero fans about the inherent ridiculousness of the genre, and about how that ridiculousness, more charitably seen as hyperbole or extremity, perhaps, is a fundamental aspect of these kinds of stories. When a superhero story verges too closely to reality, it ceases to be a superhero story. They need this kind of extremity to tell the metaphoric stories at which they excel. That said, we also need to recognize these extremities for the metaphors that they are, and that's where a work like Super-Villain becomes important.
It's also vital to this kind of story that it be told in an independent comic. While we can identify stories like this in mainstream (i.e., the Big Three!) comics, those tales are always inflectionally-bound by the narrative constraints of the universe within which we read them. While we can appreciate the humour and satire of Aunt May becoming the herald of Galactus, by dint of the fact that it's happening in a Marvel comic, we know it can't possibly be "real" in that universe. The independently-produced Super-Villain suffers no such narratological constraints and so, though patently a fairly ridiculous story, it has the opportunity to also be a "real" story, rather than an "imaginary" one.
I'd quote that old saw from Alan Moore here now, but I should probably go and eat and get ready for my conference.
Onward!
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