My Favorite Villainess

Loren's post about his favorite supervillainess got me thinking about mine.

I think my favorite supervillainess in comics is probably Roulette. I like Roulette a lot. She's clever, quick on her feet and resourceful. She also has awesome taste in clothes.

I particularly like the nature of her games and how they're so often specifically designed to their victims. She does her homework and it shows.

I wasn't as big a fan of her Superbuddies appearance, but her JSA ones were gold. Her games led to some of my favorite sequences: Sand and Carter in the race for the antidote, Michael and Pieter in the Chess game to the death... She pairs up the characters for the challenges in really really interesting ways.

I think mostly what appeals to me about a villain is how much the resonate with an idea that is genuinely scary. Johnny Sorrow for example is scary for me because of his obsession and divorce from reality. The man waited decades to get revenge on the child that killed him and that revenge is more important than even summoning the elder god that is his master. He's scary because he dramatizes everything to the point where it's like he's the star of a really creepy horror movie (like say Freaks) and his motto is ultimately the show must go on. It's surreal and unreal and just...scary.

Dementor is another favorite villain for me. In his case, he's more viscerally disgusting. He looks horrific, his comments are vomit-inducing. There's something very disturbingly childish about the concept though. So simplistically evil, he's like a child's concept of the boogeyman, the monster under the bed, the weird noises coming from the parents' room at night all rolled up in one. That is not the sort of monster an adult invents. Adult monsters are human, recognizeable and familiar, if warped. Dementor is definitely, definitely not.

Roulette has a different sort of resonance for me. She's dispassionate rather than passionately obsessive or monstrous. She's the roman commander watching the Christians get torn apart by the lions. Everything's about entertainment and profit with human emotion and human life never really resonating on her radar at all. Roulette is cold, rational and in her own way far more inhuman than either Sorrow or Dementor. She's like the embodiment of a normal human's real potential for evil, when the average joe becomes so lost in greed or hedonism that they use, abuse and destroy other people in the process without feeling anything. And while you or I will probably never become a Sorrow or a Dementor, we all have a capacity for complete self-centeredness deep inside us, which, if we gave into it, could cost us our souls. We wouldn't be human anymore.

I find her interesting. And I'm particularly drawn to her interactions with Michael Holt. It's the only time, aside from speaking to her grandfather's portrait, that actual emotion ever enters into her portrayal at all. It adds an element of chaos into the mix.