4 Mystery Villains The Marvel Movies Have Already Set Up

Spoiler Alert!

After a huge set piece like Avengers: Endgame, viewers are wondering what’s next? How do you top that?

Sure, the Black Widow prequel is coming out soon, and the Disney+ world has listed a number of projects, such as Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and my personal favorite: What If?

While these projects are fantastic, they lack the structure that the Avengers movies lent to the world. Everything was built around the Avengers, Thanos, and Hydra. This kept everyone up-to-date on the same basic story. We forget that Thanos was introduced in the first Avengers movie.

Who’s the next villain that can unify the Marvel world against them? Will it be the Mandarin, who will make his first appearance in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? After all, hints of his existence were dropped all the way back in the first Iron Man movie, which started it all.

However, I have a few more ideas of villains that could easily be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Maestro

This book is phenomenal. Check it out.

The Maestro is the smart Hulk turned evil. First appearing in 1992, The Maestro has all of the Hulk’s brutality and all of Banner’s intellect. He rules an alternate future and carries dead heroes’ weapons as trophies, such as Captain America’s shield and Wolverine’s claws.

The finale of Endgame sets this up perfectly. We have a smart Hulk using a time travel device. It was Banner’s decision to create the “Time Blip” that brought people back, but didn’t change things. What unforeseen circumstances did he mistakenly create? What better way to bring in one of the most dangerous villains the Marvel Universe has ever known?

 

 

Kang and the Young Avengers

The Young Avengers was a team that stepped up after the Avengers were disassembled. Each member had some link to an official member. However, it was not in the way you would think. Variations of this team have already been introduced:

Hawkeye: Clint Barton’s daughter was already seen teaching his daughter how to shoot. He called her Hawkeye and that character will be the star of her own Disney Plus series.

Wasp: Ant-Man’s daughter was shown all grown up in Endgame, and able to take on her father’s role.

 

Yeah, this Sean Astin-looking kid could be a super villain.

 

 

Iron Lad: The Young Avengers’ answer to Iron Man was a teenaged boy from the future. It turns out that he’s a teenaged version of Kang the Conqueror. Kang is someone who travels throughout time, amassing armies, weapons, and power. Kang had been collecting younger versions of himself from various timelines. This particular one didn’t want to grow up to be a monster so he escaped through time. He tried to find the Avengers to get help, but found the team had disbanded, so he started his own team. This could be Harley Keener, the prodigy that helps Tony Stark in Iron Man 3 and shows up at his funeral.

This collects the first stories.

Hate Monger

If there was ever a time for us to need to see Captain America punching out hate, it’s now.

First appearing in Fantastic Four 21, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Hate Monger was a hooded figure who manipulated people into fighting each other. In his first appearance, it turns out that the Hate Monger was actually a clone of Adolph Hitler. Future incarnations have different people under the hood.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has already introduced the Red Skull and Nazi Germany, so there’s not much of a stretch to have another step in this direction. They have also showed how an organization like Hydra can infiltrate every level of American life. Even Arnim Zola, who appeared in the Captain America movies, played a role in keeping Hitler clones and the Hate Monger alive.

This collection includes the first appearance of Hate Monger.

 

This is the first appearance of Hate Monger.

 

The Void

Robert Reynolds was a homeless man battling addiction, with gaps in his memory. As it turns out, he was one of the world’s most influential heroes, the Sentry, with powers that would take too long to list. In the course of his career, he cured the Hulk, and made Peter Parker a famous photographer, and basically made everyone’s lives better.

But no one remembers this. That’s because the Sentry had a dark half called the Void. In order to keep the Void at bay, Dr. Strange and Reed Richards had to wipe out the memories of everyone who had ever seen the Sentry.

In other words, the Sentry and the Void could be behind the scenes of every Marvel movie so far. He could have helped the Hulk cure himself, prevented Thanos, and everything else, but it had to be undone because the Void was even worse than what transpired.

 

 

Who Wrote This?

I did. My name is Chris Lundy, and I also write short stories, children’s books, comic books, gaming stuff and YouTube comedy and things like this:

What I Hope To See In Avengers: Infinity War

Besides just hoping beyond hope that the movie will be as good as it looks, there are some things I really want to see in Avengers: Infinity War.

Cameos: Presumably, the movie is going to end with a cliffhanger where Thanos blinks half the heroes out of existence. Therefore, they need to recruit some more for the next movie. I hope that the final scene, or the after-the-credits scene, is of Nick Fury trying to recruit someone. You don’t see who they are in the beginning, then the camera pans out to show Patrick Stewart and Halle Berry. Also would be good to see Ian McClellan or Hugh Jackman there. This would make everyone go nuts. Colossus would be a good choice, too, because it would hint that maybe Deadpool would be in the next one. Or, you could have Deadpool leaning on the window of the X-Mansion looking in, with a sign that says “I want to be in the crossover, too!”

Room To Breathe: With this many characters, it’s going to be hard to give them enough room where the whole movie doesn’t feel rushed. At this point, they are all established, so we don’t need to waste time on reminding people who they are. Captain America: Civil War did a good job of having a lot of characters and still feel true to them all. This would be the next step.

A Simple Plot: Screenwriters try to dazzle us with labyrinthine plots (later Pirates of the Caribbean movies), to show how smart the villain is (Batman Vs. Superman). These usually fall flat. Thankfully, Thanos is not known for his subtlety. Following the MacGuffin that has been weaving through the entire MCU since the first Captain America movie should be enough.

What happened to comic book ads?

Paging through Marvel’s monster 104-page Amazing Spider-Man #600, there were only 3 ads. The inside covers and the back cover. And they were all for Marvel licensed products. Jackets, toothpaste holders, and statues.

Maybe this was done on purpose. It’s a big, special issue. And a lot of ads would have been needed to reduce that $4.99 cover price. (I was expecting to pay that much anyway. It’s worth it for a milestone issue.)

But where have the advertisers gone? I’ve been reading the original Transformers series from Marvel. In the late 1980s, movie companies advertised for films like “The Last Starfighter” and “The Heavenly Kid.” There were pages broken up, where advertisers bought half page and quarter page ads. Even eighth page! A lot of this space was taken up by people trying to sell comics out of their store or collection. Asking readers to send 50 cents for a catalog.

It could be that comics’ readership is harder to define these days. When you think of the average comic book reader, it’s an adult male. These are not people to whom you would market Reese’s Pieces or Bonkers candy. I think adult readers’ tastes are too different to sum up in any area.

Also, I think the speculation craze in the 1990s hurt this as well. A comic might have sold 200,000 issues, but half of those were bagged and boarded and never read. And maybe advertisers found that out.

A few years back, I looked up DC’s ad rates. They had them broken up by age bracket: All ages, tween, teen and adult. So if Sony was marketing a kid’s video game, they would put it in the all ages books like Batman Adventures.

A little bit of a spiral has taken place. Readership has gotten older. Publishers cater to the larger crowd. Advertisers drop off. Prices go up.

Lost and Comic Book Event Fatigue

An article in Entertainment Weekly questioned if there will ever be another show as good/popular as “Lost.” The short answer is probably not.

What they excluded in the long answer is a term coined in comic book coverage called “event fatigue.” Basically, there are so many huge stories, one right after another, that readers grow weary. In comic books, it’s like: “End of the Avengers Civil War Skrull Invasion” and it never ends. Readers just don’t have the emotional capacity to care anymore. Like crossovers, and the return of a beloved dead character, the industry took something good and overdid it.

So, no one has the capacity to get into another hour-long show full of mysteries that may or may not ever be solved. TV stations routinely try to duplicate a formula. “If it worked once, it will work a million times,” they think. But none of them have heard of event fatigue.

In my own comics, I’m prone to wanting to do big events, because that’s what I’m reading. But when I step away from it for a minute, I realize that the stories I really remember, that really feel good, are short and sweet. One-shots, even. Nothing even has to “happen.” You could miss this issue and still understand the continuity. All you’d miss is a really good issue.

An Emotional Hook

Tom Brevoort’s blog: http://marvel.com/blogs/Tom_Brevoort/entry/1674.Emotional_Truth

He mentions an “emotional hook.”

The hook is what brings people into the story. Usually it’s a plot device. Here, he’s using emotion instead. How quickly we forget that.

Or, like someone said in “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” “I don’t care if he’s a god-damned wolverine, what’s his reason?” (Paraphrasing how they were trying to find the motivation for their character, and how the motivation was more important than gimmicks like costumes or gadgets.)

I often look for a hook in one of my stories. Something that it has that nothing else does. However, this could be taken as a gimmick, too. And a gimmick isn’t nearly as strong as an emotional hook.

What’s the difference?

A gimmick is meta. High concept. You can throw “post-modern” or any other 3-cent words into the mix to try to class it up. “These are realistic super heroes, deconstructed in a modern setting.” Very self-aware. They work on the conventions of comic books rather than within them. You don’t have to even like the character. You just have to like the concept.

Emotional hooks involve a choice. There’s a character you like. And he’s going to make decisions, and they might not always be the right one.

This isn’t to say that a story can’t be both. High concept with emotion. That’s probably key. Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside.

It’s probably true that the gimmick is more of an initial draw, but the emotional hook is what keeps readers around. Your book has to promise something different than what’s already out there-that’s the gimmick. But after you read the first issue, there has to be something emotional there to make you want to read the next few.