Which Supervillains Could Benefit From a Lighter/Darker Take?

Basically this thread will be about the tones for certain villains in superhero comics. Which ones do you think will be better off if they were portrayed as darker characters? And which ones will be better off if they were lighter/less brutal?

For me, I;d like to see Sportsmaster portrayed similar to his Young Justice animated version. A mercenary with sports themed weapons but is still a serious threat. Maybe even invoke some Jason Voorhes imagery with him being good at setting Hunger Games style traps.

Joker needs to be lightened up. Not significantly, but taken back to the point when he had goals beyond "kill as many people as possible". As is, he's completely one-note, and the attempt of each author to recreate The Killing Joke is not helping.

Thread bump.

The problem with that is the Joker's been all mass murder all the time for too long. There's no going back with him as a character. The Rubicon has been crossed. Really, only way to pull off what you want would be to kill him off and replace him with another, equally inexplicable successor.

Or there's the Marvel route and just never bring up the Joker's killing sprees again. It's how the Doomwankers were able to continue Doomwanking even after everything Doom did in "Unthinkable".

Speaking of which, think a lot of Marvel's villains and villains-cum-antiheroes-even-though-they-have-no-remorse (looking at you, Ms. Frost) need to be darkened up, not just Doom. Think a fairly big reason why so many Marvel story arcs for the last ten years have just been Let's You and Him Fight is because none of the inmates Running the Asylum want their pet villain looking bad (both in the sense of their evil needing to be acknowledged and them getting egg on their face).

edited 1st Jun '15 4:08:53 PM by ElkhornTheDowntrodden

I've heard this before but I've never really bought it. The MU is hardly short on villains even with certain villains that have turned anti hero. It really just boils down to writers liking hero vs hero stories were the villains are inexplicably absent or aren't involved in the story that much.

There might be something salvageable from having a Lighter and Softer Joker on the defensive run from a DC universe that has grown Darker and Edgier and still has scores to settle with him, and just barely managing to stay alive through it because of his wits and still madcap skills.

To be honest, it's hard to pick a DC villain that couldn't use a lighter take right now.

I think a lot of the "loser" villains could benefit not so much from being darker, but just by being taken seriously. It's very frustrating to me how villains with less popularity will be thrown out there and treated as completely unthreatening - Mr. Hyde, the Wrecking Crew, and Dr. Faustus off the top of my head have been written as jokes in ways that irritate me. The Wrecking Crew in particular have absolutely no purpose except The Worf Effect. It just makes the setting feel less real to me that a group of guys that strong are treated as jokes, instead of guys powerful enough that they should be a walking disaster area regardless of how stupid the non-Thunderball members are.

Only problem is that the sorts of things writers do to prove that they're Totally Seriously Dangerous Gaiz almost invariably serve to make them grimmer and/or darker.

All of them should lighten up. Except Ambush Bug. He's fine.

They could also keep the Joker just as murdery as ever, but play his violent antics for comedy rather than drama or horror.

The problem isn't that Joker is a mass murderer. That's fine. The problem is that lately he has no goals beyond murder. Keep him as a killer, but give him some actual objectives to work towards.

Neil Gaiman did an "origin" for the Riddler back in the '80's Secret Origins comic where the Riddler, in a warehouse full of Dick Sprang-esque props, bemoaned how violent all his contemporaries had become. "The Joker's killing people for God's sake! Did I miss something?"

All they'd really have to do is play him as he was portrayed on Batman:TAS, which is, as Mark Hamill posited, not (at least in his own mind) a crook, but a brilliant, tragically misunderstood artist whose medium is crime and mayhem.

edited 4th Jun '15 4:30:36 PM by Robbery

They could also keep the Joker just as murdery as ever, but play his violent antics for comedy rather than drama or horror.

Eh, the heroes' reactions will keep being the same regardless. Do you think Batman cares if Joker killed those twelve people at that dinner with whoopie cushions carried by trained ostriches or if he just machine gunned them down? True, playing the comedy angle does service the villain's portrayal itself, but it doesn't change what the Joker means for the setting too much, or really lessens the 'why doesn't Batman kill him already?' ongoing train.

That is what we call a Straight Man.

Nicholson's portrayal is much the same, or so I find, regardless of whatever other issues the film has.

I have to note up front I only have second hand familiarity with the current depiction of the Joker in DC Comics, but it's sort of as a lone wolf serial killer (targeting Batman and allies), right? And I know at some point he lost his face, right? (and I guess at about the same time lost his sense of humor).

He's definitely an easy answer to this in that the DCAU Joker, the two previous film Jokers (and probably the upcoming one too) and even the horrific joker of the eponymous graphic novel had one thing in common- They were all sane and personable enough to have minions.

I mean in all cases the Joker is a Bad Boss and in most (perhaps all) of these we've considered him a Complete Monster, but what they share is that the Joker is a person (a terrible person, but still...). He's not Slenderman.

One example that I had on the Marvel side is Mysterio- Although his presentation has varied, there have been a couple of notable occasions which has shown Mysterio using his powers of manipulation and illusion to really horrible effect. All of these stories are well-regarded, but I hope that if/when Mysterio enters the MCU, it will be more along the lines of his relatively harmless Spectacular version.

Yeah, Mysterio doesn't wear darkness well. He's a goofy-looking villain whose motivation is egotism. That's the kind of character you use for your lighter superhero stories. Even in the case of his Ultimate Universe shenanigans, it was the same deal - he was just treating the universe as a video game, and that worked well (even if it does point to him being fairly sociopathic).

Thing is that type of portrayal (a guy who sees the world as a video game) pretty much lends itself to a grimdark villain. If your villain is a guy who approaches crime as a sport or a game, you won't gain them much sympathy from the audience.

The problem with Mysterio, and all illusion-dependent villains, is that none of it's real. You know that going in. Illusions is a very limiting gimmick.

I remember at the end of Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do they teased a new Mysterio who actually had mutant powers. Did they ever do anything with that?

The thing about a dark and gritty Mysterio is that not only does it not work, it's totally unnecessary. Someone want an illusion casting sadist who lives to break the wills and minds of his victims? That's what Mastermind is for.

Now one could argue that Mastermind is an X-Men villain and Mysterio a Spider-Man villain, but given that perhaps the most famous of Mysterio's dark turns was in a Daredevil storyline, that doesn't really hold water.

Yeah, Peter David's Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man had an arc that dealt with that Mysterio and pitted him against a sorta-resurrected original Mysterio. It was pretty good.

Thread bump.

I really liked what James Robinson did with Ragdoll in his Starman series. He made a pretty forgettable, goofy villain into something truly frightening, in a reasonably believable way.