Blogging about the Archie Comics version of The Shadow got me thinking about how heroes having a nemesis seems much more important today than it used to be.
As Section 244 noted in review that Shadow, Shiwan Khan was the Shadow’s arch-enemy in the pulps … but that only amounted to four out of more than 300 pulps. Archie used him in seven out of eight issues. DC’s The Shadow Strikes made him the main adversary of the run, and emphasized that he and the Shadow came from the same school of mystic secrets (as did the Alec Baldwin The Shadow film).
Doc Savage faced John Sunlight only twice, but almost every comics adaptation since has used him. He even turns up in Roger Zelazny’s Roadways, though without formally acknowledging who it is (cover by James Bama, all rights to current holder)
The Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon appears in the background of the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, and plays an even more shadowy role in The God in the Bowl. He never met Conan, never targeted Conan, but in the Lancer series of Conan novels, he was elevated to mortal enemy. And he’s played a correspondingly large role in the Cimmerians’ comics adaptations. Likewise Thulsa Doom, who appeared in one of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull stories, became a running foe in later versions.
Heck, even Professor Moriarty only appears in two Sherlock Holmes stories (The Final Problem, Valley of Fear). He (or variant versions of him, for example in the Cumberpatch Sherlock), play a much bigger role in later writers’ hands — the early 20th century Arthur Wontner film series, for example (one of the first Definitive Holmes) used him in multiple movies.
Part of this, of course, is the same reason we enjoy continuations of series (James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) long after the creator has passed on. If a character’s good, we want to see more of them.
But I also wonder if this isn’t some sort of cultural shift, though I’m not sure what or why. After all, it’s now routine for TV cop shows to give homicide detectives a nemesis in the form of some particularly nasty killer. In addition to the ones at the link, the CW’s TV series of Frequency turns the Nightingale Killer into the same sort of arch-foe.
So does this indicate anything significant? And if so what? Or am I just following the human tradition of seeing patterns that don’t exist?
I think that there’s a sentiment, among writers at least, that a hero is measured by the stature of the villains they overcome. Batman facing a series of common criminals wouldn’t be the same – having the Joker as a nemesis elevates them both.
There’s truth to that. And partly it may be that so many more stories come out now–starting in the late sixties the amount of Conan material became way more than Howard ever wrote. So perhaps it’s easier than creating multiple formidable villains, which Howard certainly managed.
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In the comics, it helps to have multiple recurring villains. In the early years of Marvel, some titles had villains who showed up so often they might as well have been co-stars, such as Dr.Doom in the FF, Red Skull in Captain America, Magneto in X-Men, Zemo in the Avengers, Mordo in Dr. Strange, etc. Of course, Ditko had the bright idea of making the recurring appearances part of extended storylines rather than done-in-ones, such that the Leader appeared in many early Hulk stories in Tales to Astonish, but all as part of one multi-issue epic, as with Mordo and Dormammu in the latter part of Ditko’s run on Dr. Strange. That works better, IMO, than a sequence of stories in which the main baddie shows up, causes trouble, gets defeated, then shows up again one or two issues later for a rematch, and over and over again.
John Broome avoided overuse by creating cool villains then dropping them. Sinestro appeared in five stories over a year and a half, then disappeared for four years. Tattooed Man never fought GL again in the Silver Age; Dr. Polaris disappeared for three years afterwards.
You have a point about using villains in multi-story arcs. The Time Trapper having a continuing battle with the LSH over about a year and a half fit into that category.