There are very few instances in fiction (that I can think of) in which a pure villain is the main character. MacBeth does some shitty things but his wife is even more vicious than he is. Stories where evil men get redeemed are pretty commonplace. Also, stories where good people get corrupted are common (but they usually end up having some sort of downfall). Dracula really isn't the hero of Dracula, despite his name being on the cover. American Psycho is more of a satire in that (kind of like Dexter) we are tricked into finding a murderer heroic because of who he chooses to kill. Protagonists are usually dynamic characters in some way. Villains, by their nature, are static. Iago starts off evil and ends up evil. The Joker is the same way.
While the villains can be the most entertaining characters to see in any given work, they are very difficult to build a protagonist narrative around. In a medium as conservative as comics, villains are almost always static. They are motivated by madness (Joker), jealousy (Lex Luthor) or (mostly) greed (everyone else). While maybe all of us, as readers, have felt jealous or angry enough to kill someone, Western narrative tradition has instilled a morality clause into popular works. From Hamlet's uncle/father to the teens at Camp Crystal Lake, if you commit an evil action, you will be punished in some way.
With this in mind, if you are trying to be entertained, you don't want your own moral failings thrown back in your face. You weirdly want to be assured that, should you give in to your murderous impulses or greedy desires, you will pay a karmic price for them (or a divinely mandated price depending on which abstract power enforces justice in your worldview). Basically, all entertainment boils down to is being able to explore an alternate lifestyle without repercussions or effort.
So villains kind of stink as your protagonists. While it can be fun to explore your darker side by reading the adventures of killers and psychos, they can't be redeemed, captured (for long) or even punished or your storytelling engine falls apart. That moral slap on your mind's wrist never comes and you are stuck thinking, "Oh, I identify with these horrible characters...what is wrong with me?" And then you don't enjoy it anymore.
John Ostrander (my favorite comic book writer) was the first person in a mainstream book to make villains as heroes work, kind of. He has admitted to being inspired by the movie The Dirty Dozen. In that film, a group of military prisoners (deserters, rapists, murderers) are offered their freedom in exchange for running a suicide mission against the Nazis. As Tarantino tested in Inglorious Basterds, you can put some pretty despicable people in hero roles if they are killing Nazis.
Ostrander dusted off an old title (used for one of DC's old World War 2 comics) and decided to make this the premise: what if villains were offered the chance to go free if they performed missions for the U.S. government? Ostrander populated the team with those dozens of little used villains that appear once or twice and then vanish from comics. Most of them were characters he created himself on titles like Firestorm. Of course, the Dirty Dozen couldn't be trusted to stay on task without a "straight" character or two and neither could the Suicide Squad. Ostrander hedged his bets by including Colonel Rick Flag and Bronze Tiger (the former was also a hero and the latter was a reformed villain).
Eventually, the heroic members were sidelined or phased out and the team started to be made up of more and more villains. That it ran for five and half years surprised me since we were being asked to engage with and encourage the actions of thieves and killers. In the first mission, Captain Boomerang (oy) lets one of his teammates die because she made fun of him and hurt his pride. This petty vengeance makes him a pretty low character but he became a fan favorite. Likewise with Deadshot, who lived to kill (more about him later). The Dirty Dozen trick didn't really work because you would be hard pressed to find villains more villainous than these guys in the DCU. I thought the formula was pretty much perfect, go do these good things or we kill you. Bad guys stayed bad, being forced to do good against their will. You get them to stay true to their cores but still send them on missions where you have a vested interest in their success.
Of course, by the 90s, the anti-hero had taken over comics. Best exemplified by characters like Wolverine and the Punisher, these protagonists were killers and merciless but had their own code of ethical conduct. In a way, this was even more conservative a value system than even the simplistic black and white morality of the Golden and Silver ages. That is an essay for another time but the point is, villains killing for their own gain fell out of favor as heroes killing for the greater good gained that favor.
Subsequent attempts to revive the Suicide Squad have failed. That the Secret Six did not is fascinating to me. Here is a group of villains, no heroes, who offer their services to the highest bidder. At least, that is the premise. Like the Dirty Dozen, they are often set against bigger evil. The Society was certainly more evil if only in quantity than quality than the Six in their first arc. The second arc is all about Dr. Psycho and Vandal Savage, two of the more disturbed villains in the DCU. There is a scene late in the second mini-series where Psycho and Cheshire sit down to eat with Vandal, who tells them a story about the last person who failed him. His guests quickly realize they are eating the subject of the story. Cheshire is sickened but Psycho asks for more salt or says it is a little tough or something horrible. These are horrible people that make other villains look better.
There is a great ending to the mini-series where Mad Hatter finally earns his keep. A moment of pure pathos arises and then is quickly squashed by a revolting act of betrayal. It is comedic and a little sad at the same time. It perfectly captures the tone of the series as a whole.
The Six then vanished for a bit. Gail Simone was still writing Birds of Prey and (again, speculation on my part) wanted to prove the Secret Six concept could fly. So, she wrote them into an arc on Birds of Prey. This time joined by Harley Quinn, the Joker's woman, the group found themselves tangling with the Birds of Prey while that group went through its own power struggle. Here was the essential problem: which team do you highlight? The team whose book you are writing or the team whose book you want to write?
A "Mary Sue" is a comic character that is technically meant to represent an idealized version of its creator but I just take it to mean any pet character. You can always tell which new character is a writer's Mary Sue because they feel the need to make them super competent and better than long-established characters. In this storyline from Birds of Prey, Spy-Smasher is the character Simone is trying to build up so she has her neutralize Deadshot almost immediately. The real fun of the arc comes from Catman and Huntress slowly falling in lust with each other even though they are on different sides of the fence.
Of course, the Birds of Prey get the upper hand as they are good guys and the Six discover that, once again, they were lied to by the people who hired them. The Six join forces with the Birds and, along the way, a dead Justice Leaguer is brought back to life (which was kind of nice). These issues made a good case for the Six as villains and maybe anti-heroes but making them easily duped and defeated doesn't instill confidence for a long running series.
The Six pop up once more in Birds of Prey for one of their cast to be killed off (as necessitated by a crossover). If you didn't happen to pick up that issue, you would have no idea what had happened at the beginning of the Secret Six ongoing series. Even if you had picked up the issue, you might have been like me and thought, "Where the hell did Bane come from?"
Bane was a Batman villain that came out during the anti-hero boom of the 90s. He was the man who broke the Bat and made it necessary for Bruce Wayne to hand his heroic identity off to a mind-controlled assassin of an ancient religious cult (ah, the 90s). In Secret Six, Bane quickly forms a paternal bond with Scandal Savage and takes it upon himself to protect her and teach her how to be a better warrior. Bane's was created with a warped code of honor but in the context of the Six, he becomes a kind of speed limit sign for the group. He condones all sorts of criminal enterprise and violence but he won't hurt children or innocent women. Anyone without that level of morality has to answer to him.
Catman, meanwhile, is called out in earlier stories for wanting to be a hero. He wants the respect of people like Green Arrow and Batman. There is an amusing exchange between Catman and Deadshot in the first issue of their ongoing where the two debate whether the team should be evil, good or continue to just work for whoever has the biggest bank account. Deadshot and Catman enter a convenience store that is being robbed by skinheads (ah, the old Nazi ploy). As Catman insists he can be a hero and Deadshot argues that there is too much violence in his nature to be accepted by the big boys they ignore the robbery around them. Eventually, Deadshot turns the tables on the robbers out of annoyance and tells them all they are doing wrong. He then robs the place himself and walks out. He has to remind Catman that they just left armed angry skinheads alone with Hispanic hostages. Catman has a nice, "Oh, right, I guess a hero would go back and save those people" moment. He does rescue the hostages, Deadshot waits in the car.
The whole scene sort of nicely brings up how these two different Batman villains approach their work with the Six. Both of them did their part to save the lives of the hostages, but Deadshot did it so he could rob the store himself while Catman did it out of an urge to redeem himself. Whatever the motivation, a good deed was done but for selfish rather than altruistic reasons.
The first arc of the ongoing focuses on the hunt for a special "Get out of Hell free" card that entitles the owner to sin as much as they want and still get into heaven when they die. This then, right away is action free of consequence. What if you knew every selfish, evil decision you make isn't counting against you in some imagined afterlife? Would you still live the same way?
At some point in the series, all the Six get their hands on the card. Their individual reactions really helped define them and where they would draw the line of villainy going forward. Of course, they are put up against a monstrous mob boss named Junior who lives in a crate in a basement. Junior is set up as the ultimate evil through scenes we witness and through other characters talking about Junior.
By the end of the first six issues, we have the new core group in place. In fact, the team grows but the early habit of killing off members falls to the wayside. There is not a cop out ending in that one of the Six does end up with the Hell card.
Inevitably, without the threat of death looming over these characters and without being completely amoral, the team starts drifting down the redemption path. Like Lost, the plans to redemption are a little different (Catman vs. Bane seems to be the main philosophical split) but the group ends up being wayyy more heroic than villainous. And the rest of the series is a really good read but it goes to prove the point...purely evil villains can't be protagonists for very long.
Next time, I look at my favorite comic character of all time, Deadshot, as he is pulled between his loyalty to the Six, his loyalty to the Suicide Squad and the fact that he has no loyalty at all. How a character changed from a two-bit Batman knockoff to one of the most engrossing characters I've read should be a fun read...so join me.
In the meantime, ever been exposed to a narrative where you wished the villain was the protagonist? A lot of times, watching slasher horror movies from the 80s, the characters would be so annoying I would be pulling for Jason or Michael Myers but they were never portrayed as the protagonists.
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