Scans_Daily

For the longest time, I'd always thought of Black Mask - especially the 2000s-era take on him - as Hush, but even worse. Hush might have been a huge Villain Sue with artificial competence and a wholly unoriginal composition, but at least he had the grace to leave the Bat-books (temporarily) as soon as Loeb was done with his debut story. Black Mask had all of the above (possible exacerbated by the fact that he was previously an unremarkable C-lister in Batman's rogues gallery) with the added caveat that editorial was in love with him for some reason, so we got him shoved down our throats as TEH MOST BADASS CRIMELORD EVAH for most of Gotham's mid-2000s status quo.

I'm not going to recap the disgusting mess that was "War Games" here - there are plenty of posts on this community devoted to covering that already - but suffice to say, BM got very little love from the female readership, and his fans in the male readership basically amounted to people impressed that he'd killed a Robin.

But then I sat down to Judd Winick's run on Batman, and realized that holy shit, apparently the newbie writer on the block agreed with me.

( The life and times of Roman Sionis, behind the cut. )

Yeah. I had a bunch more "Villains Being Awesome" moments to post, but there are so, so few days of October left. Ergo, I decided to lump several of them into one post!

As a last-ditch effort to establish some kind of connecting theme beyond "Batman villains", I chose the three villains featured in what popular opinion has deemed the worst Batman film to date, Batman & Robin. If anyone deserves to have their awesomeness trumpeted and the reputations that that movie gave them destroyed, it's these three. And I say that as a guy who's usually apathetic (at best) to two of them.

( Behind the cut: What Ahnold, Uma, and Swenson should have been! )