Line #39 HistoricalVillainUpgrade/ComicBooks


1	{{Historical Villain Upgrade}}s in comic books.
2	----
3	!!Examples with real-life historical figures
4	* ''ComicBook/OneHundredBullets'': UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy murdered Creator/MarilynMonroe, and was in turn [[WhoShotJFK killed by]] Monroe's ex-husband, baseball player Joe [=DiMaggio=].
5	* ''1899'': This Chilean comic book paints the Peruvian Miguel Grau as a mad scientist and cyborg. The same Miguel Grau who got the nickname ''El Caballero de los Mares (The Gentleman/Knight of the Seas)'' from the Chileans because during the UsefulNotes/WarOfThePacific he would routinely rescue the Chilean survivors from the warships he'd just sunk and set them free instead of making prisoners of war.
6	* ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'', which admittedly [[RuleOfFunny was never intended to be a history lesson]], does this with Brutus, making his animosity towards Julius Caesar purely based on resentment and desire for power, rather than fear of Caesar striving for autocracy. His [[{{foreshadowing}} future]] assassination of Caesar is also made more villainous since the comic portrays him as Caesar's adopted son, rather than just his friend. In ''Asterix and Son'' he even goes from a humorous background character to a full-fledged ArcVillain who WouldHurtAChild (more specifically [[spoiler:Caesarion, Julius Caesar's illegitimate son with Cleopatra]]), causing Caesar to [[PapaWolf finally turn against him]].
7	* ''ComicBook/AtomicRobo'' also depicts a heroic Tesla (creator of Robo) as the opponent of a supervillainous Thomas Alva Edison who, among other things, uses the ghost of Rasputin in an attempt to murder Tesla and nearly blows up Manhattan in an attempt to contain the "Odic Force".
8	* ''ComicBook/TheDarkKnightReturns'' famously depicts UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan as a trigger-happy cowboy president running a totalitarian state whom forces ComicBook/{{Superman}} to do his dirty work and muscle against American’s enemies and resistance in general. Eventually having Supes go after his old friend Batman simply because the Dark Knight was making the government look incompetent. Although Reagan was definitely not without his flaws, he was still largely considered a upstanding leader and little like the malevolent caricature of him that Frank Miller satirically depicts.
9	* Chester Brown's biography of Louis Riel turns Sir John A [=MacDonald=] into a Machiavellian schemer who provoked Riel in order to raise publicity for his railroad project.
10	* ''ComicBook/TheFiveFistsOfScience'' portrayed UsefulNotes/ThomasEdison as a [[Creator/HPLovecraft Lovecraftian]] sorcerer attempting to summon a demon, opposed by Creator/MarkTwain and UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla.
11	* ''ComicBook/{{Hellboy}}'' plays with this trope. Rasputin's historical life plays out exactly as it did in real life up until the point of his death. It is only after he dies that his spirit is contacted by the [[EldritchAbomination Ogdru Jahad]] and he becomes their demonic servant.
12	* ''Impaler'': In this Image comic, The UsefulNotes/OttomanEmpire summon a demonic army in a desperate attempt to conquer Europe forcing Vlad III Dracula to take immortality and fight them back.
13	* Older ''ComicBook/IronMan'' comics featured many DirtyCommunists as villains, and they were led by "Comrade K," an [[NoCelebritiesWereHarmed extremely thinly disguised]] version of UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev as a comic-bookish DiabolicalMastermind. With some shades of DastardlyWhiplash.
14	-->'''Comrade K:''' Once again the hated American defender has foiled my plans! [[WeWillMeetAgain But next time it shall be different!]] Next time, I shall ''[[CatchPhrase BURY]]'' Iron Man!
15	* ''ComicBook/{{Iznogoud}}'': Iznogoud could be considered one of the historical and legendary figure Ja'far ibn Yahya al-Barmaki, vizier to the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (notice the similarity with the Caliph's name). Far from being a scheming EvilChancellor, the real Ja'far al-Barmaki was a patron of the sciences who introduced new ideas from India and China into Baghdad and persuaded the caliph to open the Middle East's first paper mill in the late 8th/early 9th centuries, and was actually a heroic protagonist in several of the ''Arabian Nights'' tales. He eventually fell out of favour with the caliph and was beheaded in 803, a turn of events that would be unthinkable in the world of ''Iznogoud'' in which the Caliph trusts his vizier absolutely despite all evidence that he should not.[[note]] Sources differ on the cause of Ja'far al-Barmaki's downfall, but one version holds that Harun al-Rashid, conflicted over his attraction to his own half-sister Abassa, had her enter a marriage of convenience to his vizier to keep her in his life. Unfortunately for all involved, she fell in love with her arranged husband and, one night, took the place of the slave woman who spent the night with him, a liaison that resulted in her bearing twin sons. When the caliph found out, he had the vizier executed, and Abassa was either exiled or also executed.[[/note]]
16	* ''ComicBook/KaptenStofil'': this Swedish superhero parody does this sometimes, [[PlayedForLaughs for comedic purposes]]. For example, one issue features Creator/JulesVerne as an evil superscientist inventing a [[GiantRobot Mecha]] Queen Victoria to exploit colonial India, until it is defeated by Indra and Ganesh.
17	* ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'': "The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut" has "General Estaban" as the villain, based of the real-life [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Huertas Esteban Huertas]]. In his author's notes on the story, Rosa admits that the real Huertas wasn't actually a bad guy, and that naming the fictional character "General Estaban" was meant to differentiate him from the real Huertas. In his research on the construction of the Panama Canal, Rosa found that there wasn't actually anyone all that evil involved, but, needing an antagonist, he thus swiped Huertas's first name and put it on what is effectively an OriginalCharacter.
18	* ''ComicBook/TheManhattanProjects'' invokes this [[PlayedForLaughs with tongue firmly in cheek]], jokingly depicting various famous political and scientific figures as absurd supervillains trying to take over the world. Amongst other things, UsefulNotes/HarrySTruman is an Illuminati sorcerer, Enrico Fermi is an evil shapeshifting alien, and UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson is a sociopathic cowboy who [[WhoShotJFK helps murder John F. Kennedy]]. There are numerous [[HistoricalInJoke historical nods]] to show that Jonathan Hickman [[ShownTheirWork knows his history]] and is just playing the whole thing for BlackComedy.
19	* The Creator/MarvelComics version of Louisiana Voodoo Priestess Marie Laveau[[note]]who got a slightly more sympathetic treatment on ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryCoven''[[/note]] was initially a victim of circumstance but as time went on she developed into a villain desperate for immortality and later still for employing assassins.
20	* In Creator/NeilGaiman's ''ComicBook/Marvel1602'' ("Marvel superheroes in 1602 AD"), several historical characters suffer from this, most notably King James VI of Scotland and I of England, whose BurnTheWitch tendencies become his main character trait in a world filled with superpowered individuals.
21	* ''ComicBook/MsMarvel2014'': The first rogue to join Ms. Marvel's [[RoguesGallery gallery]] is the Inventor, a monstrous [[MixAndMatchMan human-cockatiel hybrid]] who was created when an attempt to clone UsefulNotes/ThomasEdison went awry. All of the worst qualities of the historical Edison are taken up to eleven by his avian counterpart: he is selfish, manipulative, downright vicious to the animals in his experiments, and his ForScience approach to everything leads him to conclude the only way to save the planet is to turn every young person in the world into {{Living Batter\|y}}ies, for surely, no future generation could ever produce genius of ''his'' caliber.
22	* ''The Red Menace'' has Roy Cohn not only as a supervillain, the eponymous Red Menace, but also orchestrator of a plot to nuke Los Angeles and blame the Soviets.
23	* The entire [[UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire British Empire]], already an entity with a less than spotless historical reputation, gets this treatment in the Ian Edginton comic ''Scarlet Traces''. Ten years after the Martian attack on Great Britain in the 1890s portrayed in Creator/HGWells' Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds, the British have reverse-engineered Martian technology so that their empire is three times as powerful as it was in RealLife-and consequently as transparently evil as ever. The story includes vignettes like working-class Scots, rendered unemployed by the overnight hyper-mechanization of industry, marching for food and work and being cut to pieces by British army heat rays. It's later revealed that the British government found out how to reverse-engineer Martian technology by keeping a single Martian in captivity and feeding it by draining the blood of numerous young women lured to their doom via a fake employment agency.
24	* In Jonathan Hickman's ''ComicBook/{{SHIELD}}'', the immortal UsefulNotes/IsaacNewton seems to represent Bad Science, in contrast with the time-traveling Creator/LeonardoDaVinci, who represents Good Science. Newton, in addition to torturing Nostradamus to get details about TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, which he then seems disinclined to prevent, also murdered Galileo to take his place as leader of SHIELD. The ''SHIELD Infinity'' one-shot reveals he even has his own Supervillain CallingCard -- in the Franchise/MarvelUniverse Newton's rivals Hooke, Flamsteed, Pascal and Liebniz were all found dead with an apple beside them. The last issue of the first miniseries suggests [[OrderVersusChaos Da Vinci's desire for change is just as fanatical as Newton's desire for control]], and the ''real'' Good Science is the balancing force of Michelangelo and UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla.
25	* In Dynamite Entertaiment's 2014 reboot of ''ComicBook/{{Turok}}'' Genghis Khan is given an army of Dinosaurs and a Pteranodon riding daughter! Also he invades North America.
26	* In ''ComicBook/TheUmbrellaAcademy's'' first story, they fight against a weaponized Eiffel tower controlled by... [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot Zombie Robot Gustave Eiffel]].
27	* ''ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}'' is a classic example of Villain Upgrading UsefulNotes/RichardNixon, in the manner described above. In this case it's used as part of the {{Deconstruction}} of superheroes, with Nixon dispatching the powerful RealityWarper Dr. Manhattan into UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar. Manhattan singlehandedly wins the war for the U.S., and as a result Nixon's popularity climbs so high he's able to repeal the 22nd Amendment and get elected three more times with very little opposition.
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29	!!InUniverse examples
30	* ''ComicBook/LuckyLuke'':
31	** UsefulNotes/CalamityJane suffers this in the book ''Ghost Hunt'', where a legend spreads about her being a cruel witch and demoness who died cursing a town, and is now haunting its ruins as a cannibalistic ghost. [[spoiler:It's eventually revealed to be a ScoobyDooHoax created by a group of bandits who want to keep unwanted people away from a deserted town where they discovered a new gold mine]]. She is ''not'' amused.
32	** This also happens to her in the very early story ''The Gang of Joss Jamon'' where Joss Jamon calls in a jury made of the ''worst'' people from the Wild West, including EarlyInstallmentWeirdness and unrecognizable versions of UsefulNotes/BillyTheKid, UsefulNotes/JesseJames and UsefulNotes/CalamityJane, clearly made in a time that author Creator/{{Morris}} had no clue (or documentation) to see how these people looked on photographs. The inclusion of Calamity Jane as ''evil'' is particularly odd.
33	* ''ComicBook/XMen2019'': In canon, [[Characters/ScarletWitch Wanda's]] [[ComicBook/HouseOfM depowering and near extinction of mutants]] was the result of her being manipulated and suffering several mental breakdowns and has been something she seriously regrets and tries to atone for. However, when [[Characters/MarvelComicsExodus Exodus]] starts teaching young mutant children the history of mutants, he makes her out to be a horrible, Satan-like figure who lurks in the shadows and threatens to do it again. This has resulted in a culture that hates her, and even lead to in-universe memes and slang at her expense.

Context HistoricalVillainUpgrade / ComicBooks