Richard Hall - The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television

The American Villain

Encyclopedia of Bad Guys
in Comics, Film, and Television

Richard A. Hall

Copyright 2021 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hall, Richard A., 1969- author.

Title: The American villain : encyclopedia of bad guys in comics, film, and television / Richard A. Hall.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020005076 (print) | LCCN 2020005077 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440869877 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781440869884 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Villains in popular cultureUnited StatesEncyclopedias. | Villains in mass mediaUnited StatesEncyclopedias. | Villains in motion picturesUnited StatesEncyclopedias. | Villains in televisionUnited StatesEncyclopedias.

Classification: LCC P96.V48 H35 2021 (print) | LCC P96.V48 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/35269203dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005076

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005077

ISBN: 978-1-4408-6987-7 (print)

978-1-4408-6988-4 (ebook)

25 24 23 22 211 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an eBook.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

The following work is rife with massive spoilers of some of the most popular fiction of the last half century (with a few examples from far, far earlier). These spoilers are necessary to properly examine the concept of the villain in modern American and some imported fiction. What do modern Americans see as evil or villainous? A growing tendency in television, literature, and film in recent decades has been getting to the heart of why villains go bad, presuming that people are inherently good and must have some manner of tragedy to slide them to the dark side. This has not always been the case. Going backward through time from Dracula to Satan, evil was simply evil. Even in the real world, no rational person questions the evil of Adolf Hitler; he is recognized as simply the evilest person to ever live. In the decades since World War II, Western society has become increasingly obsessed with solving the riddle of evil, and that quest has been made manifest throughout popular culture. This work examines some of the most popularand even comedicexamples ever produced.

Equally fascinating and frightening is that the same culture that creates heroes also creates villains. The same society that inspires individuals to become soldiers, police, or firefighters also inspires some to become mass murderers, domestic abusers, or corrupt politicians and business leaders. Of course this is determined to a large degree by individual experiences and personal background. However, the fact that such fine lines separate good from bad in American society has been an area of concern for most of the countrys history. Slavery, perhaps the greatest example of American villainy, was inherently bad. However, there were slave owners who were kinder to their slaves than industrialists in the North were to their free laborers. It is quite possibly this strange gray area that has so fascinated everyone from authors and actors to historians and philosophers who dedicate their careers to examining the human condition.

That quest for understanding lies at the heart of the work that follows. The vast array of villains appearing in this book was specifically chosen for their diversity. Many perusing the following pages will likely notice popular villains who do not appear, and for that, we sincerely apologize. The final list was compiled in the interest of brevity, diversity, and the personal reading and viewing experiences of the authors, and any exclusion should not be interpreted as a lack of the authors interest or characters importance. In fact, the initial list comprised more than five hundred characters, half of whom were the adversaries of the heroes covered in my previous work, The American Superhero: Encyclopedia of Caped Crusaders in History (Greenwood, 2019). Narrowing the list to one hundred was personally excruciating.

My first exposure to villains came in the form of reruns of the 19661969 ABC live-action Batman series. As a young six-year-old, Penguin, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman, Egghead, King Tut, Mad Hatter, and Mr. Freeze appeared to me to create a constant, nonstop threat to the poor people of Gotham City, with only Batman and Robinand eventually Batgirlto protect them. The following year, I was exposed to Darth Vader, who would haunt my young nightmares for years. Then, as I spent my nights in front of the television utilizing my Luke Skywalker action figure to keep the threat of Vader at bay, I could overhear the nightly news as my parents watched television, learning of Americans held hostage in Iran and the constant and growing threat of all-out nuclear war from the Soviet Union, which President Ronald Reagan dubbed an evil empire. On Sundays in church, I would hear my minister father speak of the never-ending threat of Satan, dedicated to tempting everyone toward an eternity in hell. It was clear that the threat of villains was everywherefrom my own hometown, to a galaxy far, far away. The only comfort to my young mind was that heroes existed to save the day.

As an adult, I noticed that popular culture was beginning to examine why villains turned to the dark side. Good and evil became even more of a gray area. In one interpretation, the Joker was just a failed comedian who experienced one very bad day (Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke, 1988). Darth Vader was simply a young hero who wanted to save his wife (George Lucas, Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, 2005). Quentin Tarantino showed bad guys with good hearts, men and women who did bad as their chosen vocation but who, when pressed, were decent people who did the right thing more often than not. As such, when I began my career as a pop culture historian, the concept of villains became a fascinating one, and I began to notice consistent tropes in what writers considered bad or evil.

For most of early American history, bad guys were often groups: the British military, savage Native tribes, Mexican bandits on the border. That changed with World War II. With the rise of dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, Americans began to focus villainy much more on specific individuals with nefarious plans of mass murder and/or global domination. The 1970s saw an epidemic of insane serial killers, often with no rhyme or reason for their blood thirst. Politicians like Richard Nixon and business leaders like Ivan Boesky drove home the frightening prospect that even those entrusted with the foundations of our society possessed their own motives of greed and power. Radical religious organizations from Al-Qaeda to the Ku Klux Klan tainted the very idea of religion. These have all become the basis of what Americans consider to be villainous, and their shadow will be seen in each and every one of the examples presented in this volume.