Criminals in the comic world are similarly encouraged by the Peltzman effect. We’d like to deter criminal behavior but the way crime is regulated isn’t effective. In fact, the weak system of enforcement creates incentives that lead to more misconduct, or at least to more supervillains. Fame and fortune are accolades in the criminal world. Add to this the reality that heroes won’t kill you and that villains are rarely successfully prosecuted for a capital offense and you’ve got the making of the Peltzman effect for criminals. Why do villains in the comics keep coming back for more? Other than the occasional fight-induced bruise or cut and a week-long stay in the slammer, what reason can you find not to be a criminal? If you are risk-loving, a little crazy, and are looking for the potential to earn a spectacular income at little to no cost, then this might be the job for you.
Tournament of Champions
Speaking of dream jobs, who among us has never once imagined being up on stage in front of thousands of people while millions more watch on television? Maybe your daydream isn’t performing, rather you fantasize about a last lap pass to win the Monaco Grand Prix, blasting a backhand down the line to best your opponent at Wimbledon, or draining a putt on number eighteen to win the Masters. Surely you have considered that if you ran for political office, you would do a much more competent job than the clowns currently in power? Perhaps you’ve had the thought of taking over the top boss’s position and really setting things right where you work. In these instances, the reality of being in the spotlight that accompanies a job like a superstar entertainer or athlete, a political veteran, or CEO is far-fetched for most of us. Serenading millions of fans is laughable if you can’t carry a tune in a bucket and winning an automobile race isn’t realistic if driving over 100 miles per hour scares the dickens out of you. Running for office is almost a literal slog through a pig’s trough, and becoming the CEO requires a level of schmoozing that you don’t possess. The point is, while you might be able to visualize yourself in these positions, attaining them is ludicrously difficult. If you try and don’t succeed, you’ll be cast aside like the legions who have tried and failed before you. Becoming a star, be it as an entertainer, athlete, politician, or business executive can be extraordinarily profitable, but to quote Blake from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross “first prize is Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize’s a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired” (1992). If you don’t win the top spot, there is a huge drop-off to second and third place, so much so that if you’re in third you might as well be on the street.
To an economist this incentive structure is fascinating. It’s basically a winner-take-all proposition. Sure, there are nice parting gifts for second but the notoriety granted to the world’s great second place finishers usually comes from parents and immediate family. Young children (and adults, too, for that matter) have a hard time naming former presidents of the United States. Ask them who the losers of previous elections were and if you’re lucky you’ll get a blank stare. The winner-take-all contests that make up certain kinds of professions are studied under the moniker of tournament theory in economics.7 Consider jousting in the Middle Ages. As depicted in the movies, a jousting tournament consists of combatants charging at each other on horseback with long poles, attempting to knock each other off their mounts. If you fall off, you lose. The last knight standing typically wins the hand of the king’s daughter in marriage, or some other highly sought-after prize. It seems barbaric, but the winner is usually the one the princess wanted to marry anyway, so all’s well that ends well, right? At least in the movies. The relation to tournament theory is that, as in jousting, a tournament can have only one victor, and that is what makes tournament theory so interesting.
People behave differently when they know there is a huge payday for winning. Just consider the depths to which candidates for office will sink to sully the image of their opponents. For CEOs and athletes, the cost of their position typically takes the form of insane hours at the office or on the practice field. They sacrifice relationships with children, spouses, and friends, driven by the golden ring of success. If everyone in tournaments were simply given a participation trophy and a bag of orange slices, the behaviors that go along with the tournaments would likely dissipate. But if that were the case, the intensity would go out of a lot of the entertainment that we enjoy so much. Sure, there is still the underlying drive to beat an opponent in a contest, but if you end up sharing the spoils of the battle it’s like sharing the king’s daughter, and that gets rather uncomfortable.
This helps to explain part of the manic behavior of villains in their pursuit of their nemeses. For most of us, after a few defeats at the hands of a superpowered adversary, we’d just give up, break out of prison one last time, and try to get a job in some quiet, little town that doesn’t have superheroes patrolling the streets. Supervillains don’t give up that easily. Eventually the real prize sought by the true arch-nemesis of a hero, the real reason to break out of prison, the driving force in their lives, is to become the one who whacks the hero. These villains are vengeance seekers. They are obsessed with destroying or discrediting a hero for some real or perceived affront. Possibly the most obvious example of this is Lex Luthor. Luthor’s backstory involves a bit of a man crush on the young Superman. They both live in Smallville and, upon hearing that Superman’s only weakness was kryptonite, Luthor, already a budding genius, begins working on a way for Superman to resist the green mineral. Unfortunately, his skills in the lab are slightly deficient and a fire breaks out. Superman comes to the rescue and extinguishes the flames, but in the process Luthor loses his hair and his research and is ever after trying to convince the world that Superman is a threat to civilization (Siegel and Plastino, 1960).
One part of Luthor’s hatred of Superman is jealousy. Luthor envisions himself as humanity’s greatest hope for a brighter future, but the rabble are blinded by the flying man from outer space. Another part of Luthor’s obsession is xenophobic. Superman is an alien, after all, and if you aren’t from here you can’t be trusted. This hysteria is most palpable in Superman: Red Son, where at the end of his long life, Luthor concedes that his greatest achievement was not being president of the United States, curing cancer, or ending war, but defeating Superman (Millar and Johnson, 2014).
Luthor is consumed with killing Superman, and no one had better get in his way. This is nowhere more obvious than in the famous story of Superman’s death. In the DC animated version, Luthor’s reaction when Doomsday kills Superman is basically to go crazy. He is apoplectic that his prize has been taken by an intergalactic interloper (Superman: Doomsday, 2007). Luthor reacts similarly after Silver Banshee kills the Man of Steel (Byrne and Williams, 1987).8 Luthor has also prevented the death of the Big Blue Cheese by others because he insists that it be him who ends the Kryptonian.9 When Superman battles Metallo, a kryptonite-powered villain, the end seems near for our hero. In the nick of time, Luthor’s forces show up and haul Metallo away. In Superman Villains Secret Files, #1, Lex tells his infant daughter the story of how he couldn’t allow “a fool like Corben [Metallo’s secret identity] to enjoy the killing blow” (Immonen, 1998, p. 10).10
Don’t You Touch Him
This is the issue faced by vengeful villains. They have a bone to pick with a hero, for whatever reason, and their mania drives them. The ultimate goal isn’t so much taking down the hero as it is being the one to take them down. This is the “take what you want from the rest but leave (fill in the blank with a hero name) to me” reaction. As there is only one prize and only one person can claim victory, the bad guys are in a tournament. Second place is the first loser. As a result, they engage in activity that they might forego in other circumstances, even if that means turning on other villains.
In The Amazing Spider-Man #12 (Mackie and Byrne, 1999), Sandman gets the Sinister Six back together,11 reluctantly allowing Venom to join the gang.12 Sandman’s goal is to finish off Doc Ock (long story). In the next episode, continued in Peter Par
ker: Spider-Man #12 (Mackie et al., 1999), Venom agrees to help the Six track down Ock but warns them to stay away from Spider-Man. If anyone is to kill the Web Slinger, it is to be Venom. When Sandman tells Spider-Man he can go free, Venom freaks out and attacks Sandman.
In a similar DC storyline, (beginning with Justice League #23 [Johns and Reis, 2013]) evil doppelgangers of the Justice League from another dimension called the Crime Syndicate believe they have killed the members of Earth’s vaunted hero society. Aquaman’s arch-nemesis, Black Manta, is stricken. He has been hunting Aquaman to avenge his father’s death for years. In Aquaman #23.1 (Bedard, Johns, and St. Aubin, 2013), Manta is seen kneeling near his father’s grave, apologizing for failing to kill Aquaman. In retaliation, he swears to wipe out the Crime Syndicate for depriving him of his revenge. By the end of the story arc the heroes are back, and to set things right Manta returns Aquaman’s trident with the attached message: “I’m glad you’re not dead” (Johns and Finch, 2014b). The thinly veiled intent of the communication is that Manta would be fine with Aquaman’s death if it had been Manta’s doing.
We think of Joker as wanting Batman dead and this is true, but only if it is at the hands of Joker. In the interesting crossover Spider-Man and Batman, the Joker keeps the villain Carnage from killing Batman because that is the Joker’s job. After all, Gotham is “my [Joker’s] town—and [he is] my Batman!” (DeMatteis and Bagley, 1995, p. 43). Even Robin isn’t immune from the Joker’s revenge fantasies. In the series Robin II: Joker’s Wild, Tim Drake has taken over for the recently deceased Jason Todd. Robin catches Joker while Batman is away on holiday (sort of). Once he’s back at Arkham, Joker menaces the inmates, warning “none of you touch him [Robin]. He’s the Joker’s property from now on” (Dixon and Lyle, 1991, p. 24). If you recall, Joker already killed one Robin. Now Tim Drake is on Joker’s hit list.
These examples all point to an unhealthy obsession with killing a hero. In part, this has to do with a deep-seated psychosis. These are bad folks who are looking to do bad things. But it isn’t all psychology, there are some economics involved too. For an arch-nemesis, winning the hero-killing tournament is like being elected president, becoming a movie star, and drinking from the Stanley Cup all at once.
And the Answer Is …
Villains may be cowardly but they’re not stupid. The arch-enemies of heroes are some of the most intelligent characters in the comic world. Sure, they might go a little mad, but they know how to solve problems that have stymied lesser intellects, be it inter-dimensional travel, living forever, or curing cancer. Nevertheless, the main reason bad guys do bad things is that they are, at their core, bad people. There’s no getting around this. Whatever your backstory, it is difficult to say that blowing up a school full of children, distributing mind-altering drugs, kidnapping and selling kids into slavery, or eating planets are excusable behaviors. To compound the problem for villains, it seems as if their actions are doomed to failure. Every time they try to get away with something they are confronted and, except for very rare circumstances, defeated by superpowered do-gooders.
But villains don’t go quietly. If at first they don’t succeed, they try, try again, because they know that the heroes won’t kill them and the prisons won’t hold them. There is a moral hazard in place. The negative incentives that might normally cow a run-of-the-mill criminal aren’t nearly strong enough to alter the actions of super-criminals. When the punishment is taken away, the villains come out to play, and they never go home. Additionally, because of the self-imposed regulation that most heroes have adopted not to kill the bad guys, that cowardly lot gets more brazen. As we have seen in this chapter, the Peltzman effect comes into full force as that part of the hero code makes villains feel safer, with catastrophic results.
Some of the more jilted villains find themselves attempting to win the title of taking down a hero. This tournament of destruction results in the repeated interactions with an arch-nemesis, but more than that it sometimes leads to villain on villain crime. If Lex Luthor isn’t going to take down Superman, no one will! Lex wants to win the tournament of killing the Man of Steel. Not only does he see this as his duty as the smartest man in the world, but it will bring with it an everlasting fame. There is no prize for second place. Lex is playing to win, no matter how many tries it takes and regardless of who gets hurt.
Endnotes
1. In golf, for example, the money might be good for coming in second at the Open Championship, but there is no Claret Jug for second place.
2. Lex Luthor first appeared in Action Comics #23 (Siegel and Shuster, 1940).
3. The Green Goblin first appeared in The Amazing Spiderman #14 (Lee and Ditko, 1964a).
4. Using an intricate plan that involved breaking the criminally insane out of Arkham, Bane surprises Batman at Wayne Manor after the caped crusader is worn out from collecting those who were AWOL from the asylum. Bane beats Batman badly and breaks his back, leaving him a paraplegic, but only temporarily (Moench and Aparo, 1993).
5. In comics, the corruption in law enforcement is a regular theme in cities where criminal activity is rampant, as is the excessive bluster on the part of the judicial system advocating against the “vigilantism” of a hero. Part of this is certainly in the public interest. Amateur, masked crime-stoppers often end up dead in the comics. However, part of this is a reaction to the success of the hero and the threat to the corrupt members of the police department.
6. If you’ve never seen the movie Thelma and Louise, then I fear I may have spoiled the ending. Oh, and there are no superheroes in that movie, so you can imagine what driving a car off a cliff might look like at the bottom of said cliff.
7. Tournament theory was introduced to the economics field in the seminal work of Lazear and Rosen (1981).
8. Supes wasn’t dead of course, but Luthor didn’t know this.
9. Captain Thunder called Superman the “Big Blue Cheese” in Superman #276 where DC is poking fun at Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel has been called the “Big Red Cheese” (Maggin and Swan, 1974).
10. There is a silver age comic story where Luthor kills Superman by exposing him to massive amounts of kryptonite radiation. He rejoices but is sent to the phantom zone as punishment. Fortunately (or frustratingly), this is just an “imaginary story” (Siegel and Swan, 1961).
11. The Sinister Six was a group originally organized by Doctor Octopus (Doc Ock) to fight Spider-Man (Lee and Ditko, 1964b). All of the members held a grudge against the wall-crawler. In typical criminal teaming up fashion, ulterior motives abounded and the team failed to achieve its objective. The members all turned against Doc Ock and, after he was killed, one more effort was made at reconstituting the group with Sandman as the leader. This version met with no more success than prior incarnations.
12. Venom is a combination of Eddie Brock and an alien symbiote, a lifeform that acts as a parasite living off the emotions of the host. Brock’s hatred of Spider-Man drove the symbiote mad, and the symbiote provided Brock with a super suit and powers to battle his nemesis.
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