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Visit the original place where these letters of comment appeared ar the Avengers Message Board See Ian's parody fan fiction from Baron Zemo's Lair at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Nebula: The Waste of a Perfectly Good Villain Who would you say the really first league villains are? Doom, Magneto, Thanos, the Red Skull, Loki, Dormammu, perhaps the Leader, the Mandarin, Apocalypse, Kang? What do they all have in common? Well, most of them come from the first flowering of Lee/Kirby imagination, suggesting that it is very hard to establish new arch-villains because there can only be so many supreme evils in one comics universe. But the main similarity is that THEY'RE ALL MALE! Can anyone think of any female comics villain (of any company) of a stature to match most of these bad guys? Some of the outstanding villainesses in comics have foundered because of the unwritten Laws of Comics Chauvinism, which state: 1. Most villainesses also have to be sexually dangerous. In the tradition of Eisner's Spirit, many villainesses must therefore flirt with or be attracted to the hero. In extreme cases, they must reform for the love of a good man (e.g. the Black Widow). 2. Most villainesses cannot be as nasty as male villains. They are women, and their soft feminine hearts will stay their hand at the last minute. If they are being bad then it is clearly because they have been led astray by a man (á la the Scarlet Witch by Magneto). They can therefore reform much more easily, because they haven't murdered or tortured too many people. 3. Since about 1984 its been OK for previously established villainesses to join X-Teams. Reformed "bad girls" include the White Queen, Rogue, and Mystique - all perfectly good adversaries whose potential as arch-criminals has now been lost. 4. Just as few black superheroes can get away from storylines that address their "blackness" (e.g. everything ever written about the Falcon), few female villains can get on with their plots without some element of their femaleness getting in the way. This is especially true of "feminist"-based villainesses like Superia All of which brings us to Nebula, surely the most neglected and abused Avengers villain in the post-Stern era. Here we had a character of mystery and power, allegedly Thanos' granddaughter (through some liaison we have yet to hear about as far as I know), who hatched plots on a cosmic scale which actually required Earth's Mightiest heroes to stand a chance of stopping them. She was adept at manipulating minions, even whole races, to reach her goals. She was a thief on a galactic scale, working to an agenda which was never fully realised. Ruthless, brilliant, a schemer, a dreamer, she was gradually working her way up the league table. Later things got horribly complicated for Nebula. According to "The Terminatrix Objective" it wasn't Nebula who infiltrated the Cross-Time Kangs and later seduced Dr Druid (that was an alternate Ravonna, who apparently died somewhere just before Avengers Forever #3). This is probably good, since previously Nebula had never had to resort to sleeping with adversaries to achieve her objectives. It may have been the original Nebula who tried to conquer the universe around Avengers #318, but that was her final moment of glory. She last appeared (again, as far as I know) in Infinity Gauntlet #6, where after being mutilated and tortured by Thanos for about four issues she grabs the Gauntlet, takes over infinity, and becomes the villain Thanos and the heroes must team up to destroy. Starlin first uses her as a prop to show how bad Thanos is: "Wow! He's so bad he beats up Nebula before breakfast!" and then later as an excuse for keeping Thanos around despite all the appalling things he's done: "Sure, Thanos did wipe out two thousand planets, but he sure helped out over that Nebula business so we'd better let him go!" Nebula actually had - maybe still has, if someone takes the trouble to sort out her origin and history - the potential to make the A-list of villains. Of all the Avengers rogues gallery she is the one I would most like to see again - so long as she's done right.
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