Ah, Mr. Hyde. What's not to like, right? There's the literary connections, the snazzy neo-Victorian duds, the unremitting psychopathy. I'm not normally a fan of that last one there in my villains, but Hyde is the pitch-perfect ax-crazy megalomaniac. If there's one villain who should scare the crap out of the heroes, it should be him.
Unlike a lot of the other villains I write about, Hyde actually gets used quite a bit. He pops up fairly regularly, and gets used in pretty much the same fashion every time. Either he's playing 'tank' for another villain (the Cobra, Baron Zemo, the Hood, etc.) or he's selling drugs (because he's a chemist, see?).
Now, the latter is interesting, because it really illustrates just how unpleasant Hyde is, in either persona.
Let's take it by the numbers. Calvin Zabo, mild-mannered sociopath and polymath, creates a chemical solution which will, ala Robert Louis Stevenson, unleash his inner psychopath, so that he can indulge his warped fantasies to the fullest. Zabo gets the capital to create this wonder-drug via theft and murder, so right there we know that this isn't just a spin on the Hulk or even the literary origins of Hyde's moniker. Zabo is bad, but Hyde is worse. Where Zabo is calculating, amoral and quite intelligent-sort of like a low rent Henry Pym-Hyde is impulsive, sadistic and violent-basically, an evil version of the Gray Hulk. So, essentially, what we have here is two villains in one, and most writers to-date seem to get that...Hyde wrecks things and Zabo acts creepy, strung-out and unpleasant.
But that's it. That's as far as they go. And that's short-sighted.
Wait, what?
Yeah. Not my usual line at all, but frankly, this works well. See, Hyde, like his namesake, is supposed to be the basest desires of an already terribly unpleasant example of a human being given form. He is the twisted fun-house mirror of humanity, and no perversion, calumny or crime should be under his radar. Hyde is pure, capital 'E' evil. He's nightmare fuel. For other villains, you have to twist them and their backstory a bit to make them 'scary' (Dr. Light as a rapist, for instance). With Hyde...well, the nastiness, the adult situations, it's built right in.
Think about this...Hyde isn't a brute in the traditional sense. He's not dumb but his goals should be relatively fluid and chaotic. He's not a bank robber or a world-beater. He's a destroyer and a corrupter. The ultimate anarchistic sybarite, one who wants to light the world on fire and watch it burn and feel the flames on his own skin. He wants to break down society intimately, obviously and eternally and indulge every vice that has so long been denied him. And he wants you to join him.
But Zabo isn't like that. Despite his desire for what Hyde offers, his addiction to it, he's not that kind of monster. Zabo wants hedonism without the heresy. Zabo is the bank-robber, the drug-dealer, the planner, the thinker. He's petty and materialistic and slightly afraid of the thing he's created.
What if, all this time, the Hyde we've been seeing, the one who partnered with the Cobra, who joined the Masters of Evil, who does super-villain-y things...what if that was Zabo indulging himself, even as Henry Jekyll did when he first turned into Hyde? And what if, slowly, bit by bit, Hyde was (even as he did in the book) becoming his own seperate identity? Getting stronger and stronger, even as Zabo becomes weaker and weaker. What if, one day, Zabo found out that he couldn't control Hyde anymore?
What would happen then?
...that we had seen more adventures of Marvel's Dracula in space in the Star Trek universe. Because what's more entertaining than reading about Tomb of Dracula Dracula turning the Enterprise into his personal hell-ship and joyriding around the universe, just f@ck!ng $h!t up?
This is how Wolverine: Origins should have played out. I would have paid money for this, if only because it makes Wolverine semi-interesting. Also, we need more radioactive animals in comics. Ferrets, Wombats, Platypi, I don't care what they are, as long as they are radioactive and unpleasant.
Ah, Mr. Hyde. What's not to like, right? There's the literary connections, the snazzy neo-Victorian duds, the unremitting psychopathy. I'm not normally a fan of that last one there in my villains, but Hyde is the pitch-perfect ax-crazy megalomaniac. If there's one villain who should scare the crap out of the heroes, it should be him.
Ol' Groove has one of my favorite issue of Marvel Two-in-One up for perusal by fans of that sort of thing. Either click the pretty picture, or click here to go visit Diversions of the Groovy Kind for an awesome read!
