Rounding up psychopathic super villains and using them to enforce the Superhero Registration and Control Act never works well. Putting Green Goblin in charge is particularly bad.
I'm trying to think of a WORSE choice for this particular operation. Totally psycho AND smart enough to figure out ways to use the situation for his particular goals. Doctor Doom would be worse, but of course he's not subject to our laws and wouldn't play the game anyway.
In the Marvel Universe, I would have to say Loki, or one of Dr. Strange's more horrendous Dormammu-inspired foes. Most of the really intelligent villains are not gratuitously cruel the way that the Osborns are.
Well, I was implicitly talking about other supervillains in the common sense. Gods and Nigh-gods like Loki, Mephisto, Dormammu, D'Spayre, etc., are in an entirely different CLASS. (for one thing, I can't imagine how the U.S. Government would have enough hold over any of them to make them do ANYTHING).
So I was comparing him to, say, Doc Ock, or Magneto (though he's pretty high up in the Cheese department).
If he wasn't dead, MY preferred "villain to catch villains" would be Kraven the Hunter.
Oh, it gets worse. I'm way behind on my reading, but from what I've skimmed of the current books, I gather that Osborn has managed to parlay his control over the Thunderbolts into (essentially) control of SHIELD.
It's exactly as you say: the scary thing about him is that he's just rational enough to do a really good job of capitalizing on his position...
There's a REASON I stopped reading Marvel back in the 80s. Inferno was the last straw, but I was growing annoyed for quite a while.
Dagnabbit, when I was readin' comics the HEROES were HEROES, the VILLAINS were VILLAINS, and there was really only a couple what blurred the boundaries. Wolverine was the damn edgiest guy in the world, and no one would've gone an' hired a villain to do a hero's work, and if they DID they kept him on a short leash (until he went berserk and a hero came and trashed him).
In MY day, Gobby trying to take over SHIELD would've resulted in Nick Fury kicking his Halloween-costumed ass up between his ears, no matter WHAT tricks the Green Goblin tried.
Actually, I have to say that I'm enjoying Marvel today more than I have in many, many years. They're in the middle of a relatively cohesive company-wide arc that's been running for a couple of years now, with each section building on the previous in a certain horrible logic.
And really, the heroes and villains are still pretty clear from the reader's-eye perspective. Osborn may be increasingly in charge, but it is *utterly* unambiguous that he's at least as evil as he ever was, maybe worse -- he's just being cleverer about it. It's supervillain-as-politician, and is pretty chilling.
Where they're injecting ambiguity, quite successfully, is in issues of ends vs. means: one of the key matters in the story (still quite unresolved, two years in) is the tension between individual freedom and societal security. There's a very long, very tense and remarkably balanced story about civil rights playing out throughout the bulk of the Marvel line, giving it more depth than I usually expect from the major publishers. And the heroes split pretty evenly over it, which is what gives it so much depth.
As for Fury, that's one of the major storylines unto itself. Suffice it to say, he finally pissed off the Powers That Be one too many times, and has been running his own underground for some while now. Indeed, one of the main subtexts is that the person who *looks* like the hero on the surface, and who is politically viable, can be quite different from the real good guy. Fury's clearly the hero, but he just isn't politically correct enough to run SHIELD any more...
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Date: 2009-01-10 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-10 02:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-11 01:01 am (UTC)So I was comparing him to, say, Doc Ock, or Magneto (though he's pretty high up in the Cheese department).
If he wasn't dead, MY preferred "villain to catch villains" would be Kraven the Hunter.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-14 12:30 am (UTC)It's exactly as you say: the scary thing about him is that he's just rational enough to do a really good job of capitalizing on his position...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-14 01:01 am (UTC)Dagnabbit, when I was readin' comics the HEROES were HEROES, the VILLAINS were VILLAINS, and there was really only a couple what blurred the boundaries. Wolverine was the damn edgiest guy in the world, and no one would've gone an' hired a villain to do a hero's work, and if they DID they kept him on a short leash (until he went berserk and a hero came and trashed him).
In MY day, Gobby trying to take over SHIELD would've resulted in Nick Fury kicking his Halloween-costumed ass up between his ears, no matter WHAT tricks the Green Goblin tried.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-14 01:13 am (UTC)And really, the heroes and villains are still pretty clear from the reader's-eye perspective. Osborn may be increasingly in charge, but it is *utterly* unambiguous that he's at least as evil as he ever was, maybe worse -- he's just being cleverer about it. It's supervillain-as-politician, and is pretty chilling.
Where they're injecting ambiguity, quite successfully, is in issues of ends vs. means: one of the key matters in the story (still quite unresolved, two years in) is the tension between individual freedom and societal security. There's a very long, very tense and remarkably balanced story about civil rights playing out throughout the bulk of the Marvel line, giving it more depth than I usually expect from the major publishers. And the heroes split pretty evenly over it, which is what gives it so much depth.
As for Fury, that's one of the major storylines unto itself. Suffice it to say, he finally pissed off the Powers That Be one too many times, and has been running his own underground for some while now. Indeed, one of the main subtexts is that the person who *looks* like the hero on the surface, and who is politically viable, can be quite different from the real good guy. Fury's clearly the hero, but he just isn't politically correct enough to run SHIELD any more...