When it comes to the bad guys, some of them just have what it takes to excel, and some of them come up short. Doctor Doom has never been anybody's patsy, and never will be. Paste Pot Pete, however, has been alliteratively pathetic from his first bucket of glue forward. Even other make-believe people have never taken him seriously.
So what do you need to really get your bad on in the comic book world? Well, I think that, like anywhere else, it all comes down to motivation. Vengeance and world domination are the two most common motivators. The need for world domination generally comes from some deep seated inseurities which the comic books rarely spend any time explaining. As for vengeance, someone has either been done wrong or believes that they have. The aforementioned Doctor Doom probably is as good of an example of this category as anybody. He was a real cock-for-dolly science wiz lab college student until he got careless and blew up his face one quiet Wednesday afternoon. Somehow this was, in his mind, the fault of his nerdy school rival Reed Richards - so they both end up super-powered, and Doom just naturally wants to eradicate Richards while the good Doctor is on his merry way to world domination. It's kind of a side project with him.
My friend Erik suggested to me that another possible motivation for a person to go down an evil road is sometimes as simple as their name. Could Sinestro have done anything other that be consumed by evil? I do suspect in many cases the name came after the manifestate of ultimate evil in their souls, however.
More interesting to me, however, is the bad guy who is motivated by the particulars of his own natural misfortune. Let's look at one quick example of this: Doctor Strange's arch-nemesis, the "Dread Dormammu". Now this sucker is really pissed off. Even Ultron-5 can't match the naked, unbridled anger of Dormammu.
Dormammu is a powerful being from another dimension, so naturally the physical laws of our world do not apply to him. This doesn't stop him from frequently kicking down the door between the realities, and barging in on us like your drunken Uncle Mert does at the family Thanksgiving every blessed year.
Dormammu is one hundred percent mad; he is solid gold mad, he is Grade A Certified furious. He is never not mad. He sleeps mad. He wakes up in the morning - mad. Gets dressed in his cape and body suit, has some breakfast - still mad as a wet hornets' nest. Gets in the car - drives to work mad. Really mad, in traffic on a weekday. Wait, you thought Dormammu worked at home? No way, Jose; he has an office gig and punches the clock. He is especially mad at the clock. And he does, literally, punch it.
Now, what is there about Dormammu's plight that just naturally makes him so mad? What is it that totally hacks him off, twenty-four seven? Well it should be obvious. It should be especially obvious to Doctor Strange; and you would think by now he would have a simple cure for the Dormammu blues, to be implemented each and every time the big D crashes our party here on earth and goes on one of his all-powerful, mystical death sprees.
Dormammu cops this horrible attitude for one reason, and one reason only: HIS FUCKING HEAD IS ON FIRE! As in, engulfed in flames. All the time. Day. Night. In the shower. At the municipal pool. In the pouring rain. Sitting on the john. Doesn't matter. His head is flaming. Can you imagine trying to lie down in bed and get some rest when your head is on fire? Ain't gonna happen, dude. Not likely.
Now I can't speak for Dormammu and say whether or not this condition is painful. I would bet that it is. But the sheer inconvenience of it, on a day to day basis, almost makes that detail irrelevant. Get in the car, burn up the headliner, burn the headrest, burn the back of the seat. Get within fifteen feet of a chick and he is going to singe her eyebrows, melt her eye liner, and probably cause a conflagration on her scalp - particularly if she favors hairspray. Try to get a drink of water, it's probably boiling in his mouth before he can swallow it. On the good side, raw sushi would be a lot less disgusting since it would cook as he brought it near to his mouth. But that is one small consolation; one very small bone that he is being thrown by the cruel Hand of Fate.
So if Doctor Strange (self-described Master of the Mystic Arts) wants to diffuse the universal threat that is Dormammu, there is one obvious avenue which he should be pursuing, and which he blatantly ignores: that is, he should be cooking up some potions or a spell of some sort that will put out the fire on Dormammu's head. Snuff it, just like that. Master of the mystic arts, should be able to handle that - right? You know I'm right about this.
Put out his head fire and Dormammu is bound to mellow out, and right away. Who knows how many hundreds of years his head has been on fire? The absence of such an affliction would bear immediate fruit. He might actually become a nice guy. He might pick up a pizza on a whim and bring it to the Stephen Strange residence, unannounced, on a Friday night. He might found a greeting card company. It could be anything - but you know it would just turn his world around. Period. End of story.
At the least he would probably go back to his goofed up dimension and start a pet shelter or a soup kitchen for homeless magical weirdos. There would have to be a big improvement. There would just have to be. His primary motivation towards doing evil would be gone. Poof. Just like that. Up in smoke, you might say.
So how about it, Doctor Strange? Ask the Ancient One for an old family recipe that will extinguish the flaming head of a rival. Seems like it would probably be a pretty basic spell, like making macaroni and cheese from the recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook. No problemo. Piece of cake, so to speak.
My wife also suggested that maybe just a fire extinguisher would do the trick. I seriously doubt this, since Dormammu's flame is of a magical or mystical nature, and probably would not succumb to fire extinguisher technology.
Let's all sit down, right now, and write a letter to the Editorial department at Marvel Comics. We can get this done. We can do it to help out our fellow man - or demon, or whatever Dormammu actually is underneath all the soot and smoke and angry bluster. Do it. You'll feel better; you'll be glad you did. And Dormammu's family will thank you. Especially his wife or girlfriend. Especially her. So do it today - and on behalf of suffering super villains everywhere, I thank you in advance for your kind deeds.
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