Conceptually creating a convincing villain is actually terribly difficult if you want to do it right.   When you consider, foremost,  coming up with a strong enough motive to possibly justify said villain’s behavior.   Which, is not entirely the most difficult part of the process, but it’s close.   The most popular justification is the ‘one bad day’ scenario.    As is the case of many comic book heroes and villains, is that quite a few had one.   One moment in their lives that was so awful and terrible it bent and twisted them, one way or the other, into acts of extreme depravity or heroism.   Just a few examples.    Spiderman decided to use his powers to be a hero for good when his Uncle is gunned down in the streets after he (Spiderman) had a fight with him.   The Punisher is another great example.   Retired delta force officer, takes his wife and kids for a stroll in the park, and they all get gunned down in front of him, caught in some mobster’s crossfire.  Batman, for example, he too has one bad day, seeing his parents killed in front of him by a mugger.   These moments fundamentally change their lives, sending them off to be heroes.   The mentality being of course, that they cannot allow what happened to them to happen to anyone else.    Though, I feel I must clarify that I don’t technically view the Punisher as a hero per say, he just kills criminals.   I cannot really fault him for just killing them rather than simply capturing them and allowing them to get loose over and over again.   Which, is a fault of the character of Batman, who only seems to contain the damage his villains cause rather than put an end to it for good.   It’s arguable as to who’s methods are more effective, but not exactly the point of this entry.

The villains also have a similar origin pattern, often simply being a mirror version of their nemesis.   In this way, it makes their reason for fighting each other almost a co-dependent relationship.  The hero needs the villain to satisfy his urge to save the day and protect villain, and the villain needs the hero to give them something to fight against.    A great example of this would be Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, which depicts the Joker’s origins as similar to Batman’s.   One bad day is all it took, and his world was destroyed and he went insane, in a different way.   Or as The Joker himself comments in the comic, “You had a bad day once, am I right?… Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?”  In this intricate dynamic your villain and hero cannot really carry a story on their own and therefore the story becomes co-dependent on this element to always be present.   The villain acting and the hero reacting.

But that’s just the comics, but do not mistake that sentiment for me being dismissive, as I still actively read graphic novels.   Not so much the typical superhero fare anymore.  The problem as I see it with the ‘one bad day’ scenario is that it’s too clean, too easy to justify or explain.  It’s not realistic or, honestly, very believable.  Villains are not just the result of one terrible tragic moment, some villains are born twisted.   Some are slowly, and gradually, driven towards the inevitable event horizon of their own person mental apocalypses.  Some just make a string of increasingly amoral decisions based on morality or greed or patriotism until they have become crooked on the inside.  The real world equivalent of super villains, people like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and (to a lesser extent maybe) Osama Bin Ladin.   People like that aren’t just born from having their parents killed in front of them or their village tragically burnt to the ground.   They are also proof of one statement that I have heard, but cannot remember the source exactly, so allow me to paraphrase: “No villain written could be as bad as history’s worst.”   Which, I semi-agree with.   Who could match orchestrating the deaths of millions of people to a comic villain pouring some fear inducing powder into a cities water supply?  The problem I have always felt with villains I have seen in some stories is that they don’t feel realistic.