Grant Morrison's villains

[flint_marko]

This was posted on /co/

"Morrison hates shades of gray. It's really that simple. You're either a hero or a villain in his book. And his villains tend to be either pure evil, pathetic manchilds/people that can't man up and deal with shit, or all of the above. There's very little room in his work for sympathetic bad guys or antagonists that actually kinda have a point."

Can anyone think of any "sympathetic bad guys or antagonists that actually kinda have a point" that Morrison has done?

Comments

[darkblade]

Do Damien's initial appearances where he tried killing Tim could as villianous?

[flint_marko]

IDK, he still wasn't a villain .

[thanekos]

Seven Soldiers's Neh-Buh-Loh wasn't really any of those, was he?

Of course, there's his Mirror Master as well.. but they're not really major antagonists, so they probably don't count.

[kagome654]

Yeah, McCulloch is probably too low on the villainous totem pole to rate. It's too bad as he was/is a 'bad guy,' a hired goon happy to backhand Animal Man's wife, but Morrison wrote him with some standards and 'shades of gray.'

I seem to recall Namor as written by Morrison defying the ' must be a hero or villain' thing simply by being so (arguably) amoral and motivated by immediate desires (I think Sue compared him to a shark given human form...or something), but I'm not sure he counts either.

[nezchan]

Hank's been packin' away the muffins there, hasn't he?

[bewareofgeek]

The Brotherhood of Dada?

[fungo_squiggly]

Motto. The Brotherhood of Dada were most definitely not pure evil, and they could sometimes be considered sympathetic.

I'd even go so far as to say that they actually kind of had a point. Kind of.

[xammax]

Closest I can think of is Joker. Sympathetic in any way; no. However he is not portrayed as pathetic and if one is extremely nihilistic he almost has a point.

[q99]

I gotta say, in both those cases... it's a pretty long deserved telling off. Both villains are simply caught in loops and have been for decades, Morrison didn't make them that way.

[flint_marko]

The whole "Why aren't you curing cancer" bit could easily be applied to someone like Reed or Pym (I'd also mention T'Challa, but he already has a cure).

[turtlefu]

So? So what if he doesn't do "shades of grey" villains? What's wrong with that?
Just because there ARE shades of grey villains doesn't mean EVERY villain needs to be that way. Sometimes evil people are just plain old evil.
And that's a meta-comment onto itself.

[flint_marko]

No, but that doesn't mean every villain has to be plain old evil either.

[jarodrussell]

Do The Invisibles count as bad guys, since they were terrorists?

[jlroberson]

No, we like them, so they're revolutionaries.;)

Also, more seriously, they are pro-active in their actions. They go to get things, change things, stop things. A terrorist can only act negatively, in that they intend to force an action by their target through intimidation. The Invisibles don't care about that, they want to tear down and build, which may overlap but isn't the same. They are therefore revolutionaries, strictly speaking.

[q99]

-
Can anyone think of any "sympathetic bad guys or antagonists that actually kinda have a point" that Morrison has done?-

Lesse, I'm trying to think through his JLA run. His take on Lex Luthor wasn't bad, Lex was doing his thing and was neither pure evil nor looking too bad.

Triumph.. while there was some "can't deal with shit," there was the matter that crap kept happening to him and the JLA did chose to remember him as a hero and he wasn't treated as pathetic for it. The opposing 5D genie in the story also wasn't exactly evil.

Arguably Prometheus. Evil, sure, but for a very human motive of revenge for a family gunned down in front of him and wanting to knock the JLA off it's mountain. Similarly, even the CSA got a ting of sympathy, what with Owlman calling off the attack because his father was dead in the main world and in it's own twisted way that hurt him.


Oh, in the Tomorrow Woman story, TO Morrow, and Ivo all came off pretty well. Sure, the two mads were trying to destroy the JLA, but just for the challenge! They went down smiling.

[flint_marko]

His Luthor in All-Star is pretty evil though.

[kingrockwell]

How about Red Mask from Animal Man #7? Or, for that matter, Red Hood in Batman & Robin (though more an antagonist than villain)?
Fun fact! They had the same costume.

[flint_marko]

Morrison's Todd was basically a parody of the 90s anti-hero, IMO.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

In fairness, this is hardly a new trend. Most writers seem ti mistake acts of brutality on the part of villains with characterization

[stolisomancer]

Morrison has said on multiple occasions that he writes his superhero comics for a theoretical bright fourteen-year-old. There don't need to be any real shades of gray there; he writes heroes who are very, very heroic, and villains who are unequivocally evil.

If you want to read a Morrison book where everything is gray, then The Invisibles qualifies about eight times over (i.e. "Best Man Fall," the story of a generic guard that King Mob killed ten issues prior, or the security system that causes its targets to generate auto-critique), and The Filth is pretty high up there too. Just because his current output is something he regards as young-adult children's-lit doesn't mean he's allergic to moral nuance.

[jarodrussell]

Wasn't everyone in The Filth a nuanced villain? It's been a long while since I read it...and I read it with the cognitive bias of These are the baddies from The Invisibles...but where there actually any good guys in there?

Maybe the cat?

[nickfury90]

At least he writes totally evil badguys really, REALLY well. Sooo many great badguys from Doom Patrol, JLA, New X-men, Marvel Boy, Batman, etc.

[silverzeo]

"Bab, villains, very bad. You get no pudding with Oreroes."

[silicondream]

Morrison does tons of gray-area characters, just not as much when working on famous Big Two superguys. Here's a short list of characters I'd call sympathetic villains.

Zenith: The Lloigor are--especially from Morrison's own POV--very sympathetic villains once you find out their backstory. And you could spend any amount of time arguing over whether Peter St. John is a villain or not.

Animal Man: Both B'wana Beasts (kinda), the trucker who hunted Crafty the Coyote, the Red Mask, the Mirror Master, the Thanagarian artist dude in the Invasion! crossover issue, the Time Commander, and the Psycho-Pirate. Even the assassin who goes after Buddy's family has humanizing touches. Frankly, the most unsympathetic villain in the story is probably Grant Morrison himself.

Doom Patrol: The Brotherhood of Dada, Mallah and the Brain (they were in Lurve, after all), everybody on that one war-torn alien planet the DP visited, and Niles Caulder.

Flex Mentallo: There's a guy who calls himself the villain, but…well, just read it.

Arkham Asylum: Two-Face was quite sympathetic, and for most of the villains their mental illnesses overshadowed their evilness. I think, anyway.

Kid Eternity, The Invisibles, The Filth, Kill Your Boyfriend: Pretty much all the main characters blur the line on heroism and villainy, no matter what notional side they're fighting for. As others said, the "Best Man Fall" issue of The Invisibles really stands out here.

JLA: Triumph, and the Ultramarines. Mirror Master's characterization is continued here, as when Batman buys him off with a donation to his old orphanage, and also in the Morrison/Millar Flash.

New X-Men: I'd say Quentin Quire and his crew are portrayed pretty sympathetically, as is Cassandra Nova when you take into account her whole life-story from beginning to end (confusing and inconsistent as it is.)

All-Star Superman: The Bizarros are pretty sympathetic, as a race. Bar-El and Lilo, too.

Seven Soldiers: Neh-Buh-Loh, Sally Sonic, Don Vincenzo, and I, Spyder. And then there's Klarion, who's…Klarion.

We3: Drs. Trendle and Berry, the scientists overseeing the program.

So there!

[kamino_neko]

Zenith: The Lloigor are--especially from Morrison's own POV--very sympathetic villains once you find out their backstory. And you could spend any amount of time arguing over whether Peter St. John is a villain or not.

And Zenith himself, while undeniably the hero, is not really a good person by most metrics, which is the other side of 'shades of grey'.

[darkknightjrk]

In his big-two work, maybe, but IRL I don't think he believe in that at all. He talks about that near the end of his infamous Disinfo speech. Here's the video, if you're interested--it's very fascinating, getting into Morrison's perspective on magik and comics.

[stig]

Sounds more like Millar.

WE3 - the main badfies are the general, who wants the animals put down for their own sake, and the scientist, who has the best of intentions but the wrong idea. The scientist actually gets a note of sympathy by the end.

THE FILTH - The self-styled 'ugly villian', Secret Original, calls himself that name because his nature has become corrupted when he left the four-colour world of Silver Age comics and entered the brutal age of the 90s - in keeping with the book's general theme of good people becoming corrupted. The only real villian is Spartacus Hughes, and he's an artificial creation.

BATMAN RIP - Le Bossu is torn between being a good man and obeying his evil urges; it takes the Joker to send him off the deep end.

BATMAN & ROBIN - Professor Pyg is extremely deranged and suffers from an inferiority complex, making him slightly sympathetic; he may be the victim of scientific experiments/torture. Jason Todd is a corrupted Robin - 'Thus ugly world had other plans for me'. The Flamingo was a good man tortured into villiany. Etc, etc.

ALL STAR SUPERMAN - Luthor is another of those villians with good intentions - his No. 1 goal is 'kill Superman', his No.2 'save the world' - hislast line is "I could gave saved the world if not for you!". Look also at Bizzaro, whose evil is in his nature because he was born on a backwards world - yet there is also a glimmer of hope in that that world created Zibarro, an intelligent, 'good' creature. Even Superman himself becomes corrupted (or seems to), and the two scientists from Krypton who challenge him have a happy ending despite their tyranny. Lois ultimately expresses the lack of interest there is in a villian who has little backstory when she is saved from Mechano-Man: "The guy has Alzheimer's. It'sbarely a story".

Ultimately Morrison is more about good people becoming corrupted through tragic lives rather than Evil people just being Evil for the sake of it. Quite a lot of the time, his villians are actually trying to save the world, in a twisted way. They serve as a contrast against the heroes, who are saving it the right way.

[icon_uk]

BATMAN RIP - Le Bossu is torn between being a good man and obeying his evil urges

Except we never see him even try to actually fight against those urges. He revels in his horror he creates, murders innocents without a qualm and whislt he chafes under the social constraints he lives within, he doesn't regret his actions. The Joker just made the outside match the inside, and removes the constraints because he can't go back to the life he had.

BATMAN & ROBIN - Professor Pyg is extremely deranged and suffers from an inferiority complex, making him slightly sympathetic

Again, the fact he has an inferiority complex doesn't really make him sympathetic. It explains, but doesn't excuse. (And the same can be said about the Scarecrow, who was basically bullied for his entire life, any whilst you can by sympathetic, it;'s sort of drowned out by the horror and death he's inflicted)

[ian_karkull]

Correction, Morrison tends to write the Big Name Villains as unrelentably evil and I have to say THANK GOD for that. I'm quite fed up with the constant attempt to justify every villainous plot with some poorly thought out sob story. In writing the popular antagonists (especially the Marvel ones), many writers tend to focus so strongly on the villains sympathetic streaks, that they stretch their own credibility to the breaking point.
If the writer, the story and the fandom all agree that the villain would make the world a better place or has a legitimate agenda, the heroes start to come off as spiteful egotists that foil the villain's plan simply because they consider themselves morally superior without any proof that they actually are, other than their name being in the title of the book.
A story has to clearly show that the hero is the better man/woman and that the villain is in the wrong, otherwise what's the point?
There's nothing wrong with nuanced characters, but perpetually shouting "he's not evil, just missunderstood!" is not nuanced, it's formulaic.

A "morally gray" villain does not automatically make for a more "sophisticated" character (whatever that is supposed to mean), on the contrary, it's a terrible cliche. One can have a tragic past and still be an utterly unrepentant asshole.
Just as an example: Despite being a brilliant genius, Doom (and Luthor too) is a pathetic, petty little man with delusions of grandeur who wastes his intellect obsessing over a pointless, imagined slight.
Magneto's past suffering has made him blind towards the bitter irony that his world view and actions have become frightenly similar to those of his former tormentors.
These I think are core elements of those characters that are often overlooked in favour of adhering to the gray cliche.

Besides, as has been pointed out, Morrison usually writes the "little bad guys" sympathetically. His goons, minions and mid-level villains tend to be fairly ordinary people who do bad things because they are trapped in a bad spot or simply because they see no other alternative. Only those in a position of absolute power are also absolutely evil and even they are usually just sad, small-minded creatures who use atrocities to mask their own shortcomings that are to be pitied rather than feared.
It's one of the critical aspects of his works and much closer to what "morally gray" actually means, IMHO.

[golden_orange]

I find myself agreeing with a lot of this. I can't say for most of Grant Morrison's works or villains, having not read them, but I think the thing with the two provided examples is that the villains being raised in the scans examples -- especially in the Marvel and DC universes -- have not typically been quite as complex or 'grey' as many would like or believe them to be. There seems to be a tendency these days to look at our villains through rosy-tinted glasses, and it's not a tendency that is entirely helpful, in my view.

Take Doom, for instance. Common discussion of him tends to revolve around him being a noble demon of sorts, someone who does the wrong things for the right reasons. And he gets a load of crowning moments of awesome and everyone thinks he's the coolest villain ever and blah blah blah. But most of his character is traditionally based around him obsessively blaming someone else for a mistake he made and then seeking out various forms of either disproportionate revenge or grandiose one-upmanship. That's not grand and noble, that's ridiculously petty. Sure, Doom cloaks himself in the trappings of nobility and power -- his castle and his kingdom, his cloaks and his suit of armour, even his pompous way of speaking -- and he tends to get a few crowning moments of awesome thrown his way (to borrow a phrase from TV Tropes), but that speaks to me of vast insecurity, not complex awesomeness.

And yeah, you can say that the people of Latveria love him and he's a benevolent dictator and all that jazz, but hell, leaving aside the fact that 'benevolent dictator' is a complete oxymoron, it's possibly fair to say that they aren't the most reliable of witnesses; Stalin was pretty popular in the Soviet Union back in the day; people threw parades for him and wrote poems about how great he was and rioted out of anguish when he died. That kind of goes with the territory when you're a dictator who's word is law enforceable by death. Not many people eager to tell you you're a bit of a cock in those situations.

So maybe Morrison does have a tendency to make his bad guys blacker than black, but sometimes that's not a bad thing. Not every devil has to be sympathised with.

[crabby_lioness]

Yes, that is one of the two problems with Grant Morrison's work. While every hero doesn't need to have "shades of gray" it's far more unrealistic that every single hero is unrelentingly evil.

It's also boring, and that is a serious flaw. You see a Grant Morrison story and you know every Big Bad is going to be evil personified just like in every other Morrison story and you know Morrison's going to pee in the sandbox before he leaves just like in every other Morrison story. *Yawn.* Somebody wake me when his contract is over.

[protogarrett]

But remember, this isn't Magneto. It's the evil Xorn twin, Shen Xorn.
*sigh* ...yeah.

[flint_marko]

No, this was Kuan-Yin Xorn. Shen Xorn was the twin who showed up later.

As bad as the retcon was, it was better than leaving Magneto as a Nazi.

[savitar]

What about Mirror Master?

In his JLA run of yesteryear MM was working for the Injustice Gang or whatever they were calling themselves lead by Luthor with the likes of Joker in the group. Turns out MM was the inside man working for Batman and pretty sure he took the money he got paid and donated it to an orphanage or something like that.

Didn't Batman even say something of the like "Never underestimate a sympathetic Scotsman?" when asked about it all.

[eightleggedbeast]

:D I like this.

[charlemagnne]

Klarion and Sally Sonic from Seven Soldiers, if no one has mentioned them yet.

[charlemagnne]

I see someone has mentioned them already, nevermind.

[proteus_lives]

More like Morrison didn't want to put the effort in.

Both Magneto and Doom are far, far more complex then Morrison's versions of them.