There are many types of villain in the Marvel Universe. Some are witty and charming, sprinkling their evil doings with bon mots and a zesty joie de vivre which makes it really easy to see why their minions would get swept up in all the excitement and follow them to their doom at the hands of a morally superior but far less pithy band of heroes. Some of them are really quite dim and violent, which isnt to say that theyre worthless or unengaging; quite the opposite, in fact. Their muscular, bro-tastic clobbering style has a kind of wistful old-school purity to it: the law of the playground gone intergalactic. Some of them are your bog standard megalomaniacal schemers, brutalisers and pretentious windbags; the kind of cookie cutter villain who stands in the narrative space as a plot device, forcing the principle characters to work together and giving them something to shoot at. In these cases, you might as well have a mannequin wearing a post-it note with the word EVIL scrawled on it in crayon commanding the fleet of battleships which are about to wipe out humanity and turn Earth into a scorched ball of rock. Itd add about as much to the plot. Others still manage to miss all of these categories, and end up being not simply confusing or absurd - that would at least give us all a decent laugh - but just really, painfully underwhelming. These are the villains painted in creamiest of the beiges, parping out the lamest of fourth-hand witticisms, making conquering the universe sound like about as much fun as creosoting a fence on a wet November afternoon.
