Panel Vision - Evil Duplicate Guide

Evil Duplicates, they’re such a staple of genre fiction it seems almost inevitable that they infect every aspect of geekery.  As one might expect, there are a ton of evil duplicates in the realm of comics, mainly because most superheroes have been around for decades and decades and rather than reuse old characters authors love to make up their own spin on the concept.  That actually proves pretty fruitful as so far a lot of the evil duplicates we’ve got have proved pretty diverse an interesting as far as takes on a very well established concept go.  Granted it helps that we’ve also had decades to weed out the stuff no one cares about but that just means the stuff now is even more interesting.  Given The Flash’s obsession with evil versions of the hero and Supergirl’s premiering Bizarro, I figured now would be a good time to give you the run down on the evil duplicates of DC and Marvel. 

CRIME SYNDICATE

I’ve spoken at length about the Crime Syndicate previously but leaving them out of a list on evil duplicates would be a mighty big oversight.  Created in 1964, a full 3 years before the Star Trek episode with the same concept, the Crime Syndicate were a parallel Earth version of the Justice League from a world where everything was inverted.  In their world, Columbus discovered Europe, Abe Lincoln killed President John Wilkes Booth, and evil always wins.  They were cool antagonists, requiring both the JLA and Justice Society to take down.  They’ve come back a number of times since then, going through multiple reimaginings.  Grant Morrison explored the nature of moralism in their world through the meta lens of narrative morality in Earth-2 and more recently they were featured in the DC event comic Forever Evil. 

These guys are the quintessential evil dopplegangers, complete with inverted lives and biology to support their inverted ethics.  For instance, Ultra Man, the team’s leader, is a human astronaut who was experimented on by Kryptonians and now gets his power from Kryponite.  That kind of complete concept swapping is part of what’s made the Crime Syndicate so influential and long lived.  Filling out the ranks is Power Ring, who has a mystic genie to do his will, Owl Man, who was raised by the ma who killed his parents and has a drug enhanced brain, Johnny Quick who uses super speed drugs to stay fast, and Ultra Woman, her lasso can turn into anything she wants.

REVENGERS

A much more recent Marvel analog to the Crime Syndicate are The Revengers, evil alternate Earth Avengers.  The twist here is in the kind of evil at hand.  Where the Crime Syndicate were amoral criminals, fueled by self interest and their own brutality, the Revengers are really just pawns to a greater power.  In their world, rather than allowing the hero Captain Mar-Vell to die of cancer, the heroes banded together and made a deal with Cthulu to save his life.  What essentially happened was that the hero’s deal ended the very concept of death in their universe, causing it to fill beyond capacity with living nightmares in the style of H.P. Lovecraft stories.  They were nicknamed the Cancerverse and eventually came to threaten the main Marvel universe only to be opposed by Death’s greatest champion: Thanos, the mad titan. 

That little swap is a big part of why people love evil duplicates, they give us an excuse to root for other villains that we may find bad ass but also pretty evil.  Casting Thanos, the guy who once murdered ½ the universe, as a hero against an even greater threat is perfect way to raise the stakes and give us a unique kind of adventure we haven’t seen before.  The comic, entitled Thanos Imperative, stands as one of the best Marvel cosmic stories and coolest evil duplicate tales as well, especially when the Cancerverse breaks out their freakish and broken version of Galactus. 

BIZARRO

Though not overtly evil Bizarro is one of the most important figures in the realm of superhero duplicates.  The original idea for the character was that he was created using a duplication ray that had a flaw in it, so it created a flawed duplicate.  Future writers picked up on this and combined it with Superman’s super-memory ability to reason that a flawed super memory would cause Bizarro to speak in backwards talk.  I’m not a terribly huge fan of the backwards speaking Bizarro though some creators have done some really freaky things with it, most specifically in Justice in which Bizarro’s reversed mind means he has a malignant hatred of all life. 

However, backwards Bizarro still has his place and especially so when Bizarro world, a cube planet full of Bizarros, shows up.  I’ve always loved the Bizarro league, complete with Yellow Candle, the slowest man alive, and Batzarro.  It’s a screwing kind of idea but also perfectly endemic to the bronze age of comics.  This was the time when big crazy ideas like they had in the Silver Age were being filtered through an increased focus on character and development rather than one off weirdness.  At one point, DC published a graphic novel full of the amazing Bizarro world set stories and it’s immensely worth reading in how well it uses Bizarro’s backwards ways as a source of comedy.  The character can also work really well for tragedy, as a figure who wants to do good but is just incapable of it because of his fractured mind.  Both Supergirl and Superman, the animated series, featured very compelling Bizarros in this maner. 

MIRROR UNIVERSE

Get ready to get weird because it doesn’t get much stranger than the Mirror Universe.  To be clear, the mirror universe isn’t just a repeat of the Crime Syndicate, at least not exactly, it’s a very peculiar Flash concept that, despite a major role in the Silver Age, was more or less forgotten till Geoff Johns Flash run.  The idea is that Flash villain Mirror Master had discovered an entire alternate reality hidden within mirrors.  Eventually, Mirror Master managed to actually go to this mirror reality where he found a world of inverted ethics but identical visuals.  In this world, the Flash is a criminal and Mirror Master a hero.  The big difference between the mirror universe and the Crime Syndicate is that in the Mirror Universe good still always triumphs so Mirror Master was considered a great hero while Flash was a rogueish bad guy hunted by the law rather than a global prince like Johnny Quick in the Crime Syndicate. 

The Mirror Universe concept fell away after the inception of the Crime Syndicate but eventually came back through the character of Plunder.  Plunder was a mercenary fighter in the Geoff Johns run that became a part of the Rogue War, a feud between the older Flash foes under Captain Cold, a group of rogues turned FBI agents under the Trickster, and a new crop of villains led by the Top.  It eventually turned out Plunder was the mirror universe version of a police detective who had killed his main self and was now living in his place as a way to get close to the Flash.  So far the mirror universe has yet to appear in the Nu52 or on The Flash show and it probably won’t resurface any time soon but if it does; now you know. 

DOPPELGANGERS

Free spoilers here: despite this section being tied to the Infinity War comic event there’s a 0% chance of any of this making it into the Avengers: Infinity War movie.  With that out of the way: Infinity War was the sequel comic to Infinity Gauntlet, the comic that Marvel is actually drawing from for their big Avengers 2-parter.  In it, an evil dude named the Magus collected a ton of incredibly powerful artifacts as part of a bid to assemble the Infinity Gauntlet for bad doings.  As part of his plan, he sought to take out the hero’s of Earth by creating an army of evil monstrous doppelgangers for each of Earth’s heroes.  I’m not really sure why Magus decided to make the doppelgangers monstrous versions of the heroes instead of just straight up replacements but it gave the writers an easy method for generating tie-ins: just have the hero of your comic meet his monster duplicate and fight it out. 

Even if the idea was a little screwy it certainly fit the Magus who was also an evil duplicate of a hero…sort of.  Magus isn’t a perfect duplicate but the evil personality of the Marvel cosmic hero Adam Warlock, the usually keeper of the Soul Gem and cosmic mainstay.  Infinity War proved a damn popular event and Marvel even used the monster duplicate set-up for the bad guy sprite design in the video game Marvel Heroes: Quest for the Gems.  It turns out when you can just make monsters out of the heroes it’s really easy to crank out the content. 

DARK AVENGERS

This is a bit of a cheat but it’s still very much worth talking about.  The Dark Avengers aren’t technically evil duplicates, not in the same way the Bizarro league or the Crime Syndicate are anyway.  Instead, they were a team of Avengers that spun out of the Marvel branding initiative Dark Reign.  The central concept of Dark Reign was “what if evil won,” in so much as Norman Osborn was made the head of SHIELD and had more or less outlawed the various heroes of the Marvel universe.  However, as a way to cement his seeming legitimacy, Osborn pulled together a group of villains to have pose as heroes for his Dark Avengers.  There was Daken, the son of Wolverine filling in for his dad, Bullseye taking the place of Hawkeye, Venom posing as Spider-Man, and Moonstone impersonating Ms. Marvel.  Osborn himself repainted an Iron Man armor to become the Iron Patriot, filling the roles of Captain America and Iron Man for the team.  Rounding out the team there’s Ares, a villainous God that people thought reformed for a time, Noh-Varr, a Kree soldier currently using the Captain Marvel name, and the Sentry, an unhinged superbeing with God-like powers. 

Though the Dark Avengers weren’t terribly long lived they were a pretty cool group, especially in seeing how Osborn had to walk the line between his own agenda and public relations.  The team actually did fight villains in addition to going after heroes like the X-Men or Thor.  Speaking of, there was also a team of “Dark X-Men” to go along with this idea made up of Emma Frost, Namor, Cloak, Dagger, Beast from the Age of Apocalypse continuity, and Omega, a villainous mutant not worth talking about.  Eventually, Osborn’s regime ended though he still has a version of his Dark Avengers working for him off the grid. 

ERADICATOR & CYBORG SUPERMAN

Let me take you back a couple decades here: in the mid-90s DC launched the event to end all event comics with the Death of Superman.  At the time, event comics sold like crazy thanks to people buying them in the hope those issues would appreciate in value over time and this was the biggest event DC could manage.  After Superman’s death, DC wanted a way to shake things up before having him inevitably return.  To do that, they introduced 4 new characters all claiming to either be Superman or have a claim to his legacy.  Eradicator and Cyborg Superman were the ones claiming to actually be Superman returned.  Both characters emphasized a new vision of Superman that was heavy on the inhumanity angle, whether through the lens of Cyborg’s robotic bits or Eradicator’s identity as a more alien character.  Additionally, both of them were willing to kill bad guys, which really should’ve been a big red flag that neither one was actually Superman. 

Both characters were actually old Superman villains no one cared about that the authors brought back for no discernable reason.  Eventually Cyborg Superman went crazy and killed Eradicator who, in turn, re-powered/revived Superman.  Cyborg Superman continues to plague the DCU to this day as a weirdly suicidal super villain while Eradicator tends to come and go in his appearances, most recently popping up as part of the New Krypton story arc. 

EVIL FLASHES

One of the weird things about the Flash is how many evil versions of the character DC has put together.  We’ve already met Bizarro Flash, Johnny Quick from the Crime Syndicate, and the mirror universe Flash now meet the Reverse Flash, Zoom, and the Black Flash.  Reverse Flash makes the most sense, as it were, for a Flash foe.  All of Flash’s bad guys are defined by their super power as they need a really tricky power to get the better of someone who can move faster than the human eye.  In the case of Reverse Flash AKA Professor Zoom, he’s was a psychologist/historian in the future who became obsessed with the Flash and eventually recreated the accident that gave Barry Allen his powers so as to become super fast himself.  It’s a dopey concept sure but it fit the tone of the Silver Age and gave Flash a more threatening foe amid the cold guns and flamethrowers. 

Zoom is a more recent follow-up character to the Reverse Flash, sort of a legacy villain to the original.  Real name Hunter Zolomon, Zoom was a cop who lost the use of his legs and tried to get the Flash to go back in time to help him avoid the incident.  Flash refused but Zolomon tried to go back in time on his own only for the machine to explode and give him time-based super speed.  This makes him one of, if not the, fastest being on Earth. 

Finally, there’s the Black Flash, probably the strangest double we’ll ever see.  See, in the comic universe it was eventually introduced that the Flash gained his powers from an extra-dimensional energy source known as the Speed Force.  All speedsters had the power to access it and it could be used for a number of things like absorbing kinetic energy, moving super fast, and avoiding the damages of friction.  However, it also turned out the speed force had a dark side, an avatar of death born from living speed that no man could outrace: the Black Flash.  The Black Flash stalks all speedsters and is just one of the many embodiments of death in the DC universe along with the Black Racer from the New Gods and Nekron from the Green Lantern mythos. 

THE CLONE SAGA

And so we come to the bottom of the barrel: the Clone Saga.  Remember how I said that in the ‘90s event comics sold like mad?  Well Marvel recognized that too and wanted to get their slice of the event comic pie and their pitch for that was the Clone Saga, a 3 year long Spider-Man event series that’s largely considered one of the lowest points of the comic medium.  It all started with one of the best Spider-Man stories: the death of Gwen Stacey.  People tend to forget that in that story the Green Goblin, Peter’s long-time nemesis, also died.  As such, the search was on for a new bad guy to fill the Goblin shaped hole in the Spiderverse.  One such attempt was the Jackal, a villainous genetics professor who mastered cloning and created a clone of Gwen Stacey and Spider-Man as part of his villainy. 

The story would’ve lived and died unnoticed by history but the Marvel writers decided to bring it back several decades later.  The idea was introduced that the clone Spider-Man would return and cause some tension only for it to be revealed that the clone was the real Spider-Man and the guy we had been following for the past several decades was the clone.  Readers didn’t take to it at all and Marvel spent 3 years and 4 additional clones trying to solve the problem.  The first clone adopted the name Ben Reilly and the superhero identity of the Scarlet Spider, dawning a sleeveless hoodie to show how extreme he was. 

Additionally there was Kaine, a clone whose gimmick was that his powers were all exaggerations of Spider-Man’s abilities.  Finally there was Spidercide, the dumbest named and dumbest designed bad guy who was a shapeshifting Spider-Man themed bad guy that often ranks as one of the worst super villains ever conceived of by man and committed to the printed page.  The whole thing proved an embarrassing debacle that helped to shephard Marvel into their bankruptcy in the late 90s/early 2000s.  Despite this, both Ben Reilly and Kaine continue to pop up in the Marvel universe today.  Turns ut there are really no bad ideas in comics, just bad executions. 

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