Necessary Evil: Super-Villains of DC Comics Page #6

NARRATOR:
A hero's motive

is usually straightforward:

Save the day, serve

justice, defeat evil.

Villains, however, are

driven by a variety of forces.

It could be as grandiose

as taking over the world...

...or as direct as forcing

others to share their agony.

They can be much more complex,

personal and often even relatable.

What makes a villain the most memorable is the

reason they're doing whatever it is they do.

It's not the crime. We've

seen a hundred thousand crimes.

We've seen Luthor break into banks.

We've seen all these

characters do weird things.

But why they do it.

Every one of us is driven by, you know,

our own singular, you know, needs and wants.

So are villains.

A character like the Anti-Monitor

from Crisis on Infinite Earths...

...needs to absorb all the universes.

And that's the only

way he could survive.

ANTI-MONITOR:
Behold the

definition of true power.

WOLFMAN:
He's not doing it

because he cares at all about life.

And that makes him frightening

because you can't reason with him.

He's not an intellect that

you can talk to and say:

"Don't you realize you're

doing something bad?

Can't we figure out something else to

do?" He's not interested. He has one need.

When I created Clayface llI at the

behest of the late Julius Schwartz...

...I came up with a

character who was a monster...

...because he had screwed up.

He was someone born with acromegaly,

essentially the elephant man disease.

And in trying to fix himself...

...became somebody who basically can

draw the calcium out of your body...

...and reduce people to

little clay-like masses.

But he didn't want to.

It's just how he survived.

There may also be,

certainly, revenge involved.

A lot of villains feel that

they've been wronged in some way...

...whether it's by society

or a loved one or the police.

With Mr. Freeze, when we developed the

character for Batman: The Animated Series...

...I thought, "Somebody that cold

has to be that cold for a reason. "

Essentially he had some funding to carry

out his research to cure his wife, Nora.

And the man who pulled that funding...

...he then became the focus

of Mr. Freeze's evil-doing.

His mission is to go after the one

man who took away the love of his life.

He actually says to Batman:

"This is my sole purpose, and if you

get in the way, you'll pay for it. "

Which kind of implies, Look, if you

just step aside, I won't harm you. "

LANGLEY:
As a villain, you can

argue whether he's a villain or not.

Atrocitus, he was motivated by anger

at the Guardians of the Universe.

His family got killed because

the Guardians of the Universe...

...they created these

manhunters, androids...

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