An interesting collection of the Top Ten Villainous Moments in Comics, “the ten most memorable moments in villainy” that had “the greatest impact on the stories, the characters and us as readers.”
Not sure that I could come up with a better list. Numbers 10 and 9 are relatively small potatoes, but the rest are pretty significant. I’d have probably put the destruction of Coast City in there, myself, but I can see why they’ve subsumed that into the Death of Superman storyline.
(Warning: Needless to say, there are honking spoilers in this, including one at the top of the second page that had me blinking, akin to actually explaining what Rosebud is, or what’s going on at the Bates Motel — sure, everyone who wants to know should know by now, but, still, one just doesn’t talk about some things!)
My problem with a lot of them is that several of them aren’t being talked about as ‘moments’ and more of ‘well, this moment was cool and so was all the stuff that came after it for a while’.
#10 is the only one I haven’t read. It is on my short list of things to pick up as a collected volume sometime soon.
While I hate the character, never liked how it was written, I think #9 had one of the single most powerful panels of art depicting any of those scenes.
The whole story of #8 is good, and that may very well be one of the evilest moments in that whole comic.
#7 was always for me very much a case of “Why they hell didn’t he just do this in one of the insane number of other times they fought?”, that and the entire story surrounding the event just didn’t sit well with me. The entire thing felt like “If he could do this, why hadn’t he already done this instead of one of the zillion other insanely stupid plans he’s had in the past?”
And the prize for desperate stunt to bring readers in goes to #6. They killed sooo many people in that story and the one hero who everyone talked about dying was the only one to come back. Personally, I found it to be really very dull by the time you got to the end of it. One of the aftermath events, Coast City’s destruction and Hal Jordan becoming Parallax and trying to rework the galaxy from Day One seems to be a much eviler story to me, just not as many people read that story…
#5 is one of the best stories ever told in comics, and has one of my favorite villains of all time. The scene it takes place in is wonderfully well done. One of the most clever bits of villainous writing I’ve read.
#4 was actually pretty cool. The villain in question subsequently got written as a complete moron, which makes you wonder how he managed to plot and plan this event out as well as he did, but the actual ‘grab-smash-crack’ was nice on the villainous achievements list. Though given it wasn’t really final, not sure I’d rate it this high up.
The comic did #3 so much better then the movie did. It really has been horribly and continiously re-imagined and re-depicted ever since it happened, but it really was one of the biggest and most dramatic bits for that character.
The big thing about #2 is that she was still living when she got tossed from the bridge, the hero in question carried around a huge load of guilt for years because he might have been to blame for breaking her back while saving her. She lingered very much as a ghost of guilt for a long time, and way later ( I think around the time of the ‘Evolutionary War’ cross-over ) after he got married a half-baked clone of her showed up again and his spouse comments that she was more afraid of him facing her then of him facing any of the super-villains he ever went off to fight.
To this day I wonder if the vote about #1 was rigged. Seriously. Think about all the fall-out and work that had to go into the aftermath, especially since comics are usually written six to nine months in advance ( well, at least that seems to be what they are at currently ). As for an actual event, I never liked the character that died. I think that for this title #8 was far eviller.
And the prize for desperate stunt to bring readers in goes to #6. They killed sooo many people in that story and the one hero who everyone talked about dying was the only one to come back. Personally, I found it to be really very dull by the time you got to the end of it. One of the aftermath events, Coast City’s destruction and Hal Jordan becoming Parallax and trying to rework the galaxy from Day One seems to be a much eviler story to me, just not as many people read that story…
I agree. It was an interesting idea — but clumsily done (epitomized, in some ways, by the final issue, where every page was a full-page splash). I found the follow-up stuff — from Coast City to the whole “Supermen” thing — to be more interesting and more long-lasting in impact.
But none of those things necessarily had to follow from Supes dying. So …
I agree that #2 is a lot more significant than #1. I never had the sense of moral outrage over the actual poll, but I didn’t find Bats in that era to be all that interesting.