By Jacob Cordas — We are gonna to need to get mean for a second. We are gonna need to get mean the way that Ionesco got during Rhinoceros, the way that Sam Greenlee and Melvin Clay got during The Spook Who Sat By The Door and the way that Garth Ennis got during The Boys. We gotta take a moment and talk about the necessity of this meanness. 

In satire, especially satire oriented around power structures, meanness is a necessity of the storytelling. To paraphrase Chris Morris (the greatest living satirist today), there is no point to satire that the target being satirized can walk off. You do not stab someone in the back only to wait for them to turn around and chop your head off. Being kind in this form benefits no one but the institution being ridiculed. It allows them the security blanket that they are not so bad. They don’t have to identify with the villain and even if they do it is so cartoonish that it’s not as if they have to take a message to heart. 

It was the biggest flaw with Stephen Universe*, where kindness was so prioritized that a critique of colonialism was thrown to the wayside to prioritize a genocidal war criminal having an unearned turn to the side of good.  And it is the biggest flaw in Villainous #1, where every element of the morality at play is wrapped up in such a nice little bow that any critique it’s attempting gets reduced down to “maybe the good guys are the real bad guys.”

It’s a shame because there is an outline of a strong comic buried in here, with small moments hinting at something sharp and cutting.

Standing out is the use of coding in regards to RepTilly, the protagonist. Our hero is a non-passable superhuman. Her otherness exists in every element down to her assigned code name. Hell, when the heroes (spoiler alert) fake her death and then frame her for her death they just use a simple picture of our hero for the new villain adding only a more sinister name. Because she exists outside the white standard the heroes predominantly have, no other information needs to be presented. 

She is inhuman. She is a monster. She is different. What more do you need?

And if the comic could have maintained a tone closer to that, we’d have an amazing comic. Instead, writer Stonie Williams softens the world to a degree that makes even this harshness just seem a little silly; look how little the true antagonists tried and not look at how easy it is for people to fall into bigotry. Characters telegraph morality and reduce complex moral questions down to button presses. 

Narratively it reminds me of a table-top rpg. Where the DM has built an interesting world and designed the characters enough that with the benefit of collaborative storytelling and table based improvisation, everything will come together. I know I’ve done the same thing for a bunch of players. It works. But without the benefit of friends so fried on Mountain Dew they can't stop pushing all the soft spots, that lack of innards becomes glaring. You get the skeleton of a satire, not the satire it wants to be. 

The art by Jef Sadzinski with coloring by Joana Lafuente leans more into the cartoonish side attempting to flush out the world through a more childish artistic lens. And, generally speaking, it works. The art is fun and high energy. The characters bounce across the page. Emotions are easy to read. Special attention is given to body poses so every moment has energy to it that carries the reader through to the next panel. 

And Lafuente uses an array of vivid bright colors that makes everything feel fun. The green color chosen for RepTilly is especially a great choice. Green can often be a hard color to work with for heroes but, whichever specific variant she went with, immediately keys you in on the joy and giddiness of our protagonist. 

But at the end of the day, this is a narrative medium and the narrative just isn’t quite there. It doesn’t come together the way it could. It wants to be fun more than it wants to be pointed, even though it chose to be a critique. It wants to have its cake but never cut it into slices. Villainous needs to get meaner, or the very thing it is critiquing wins. 

I mean it is about a goddamn lizard person. Get cold blooded already. 

Overall: Villainous #1 is a satire without sharp enough teeth. It definitely has the pieces of a more interesting story, but this book still needs more time to develop and reach its full potential. 6/10

*Worth noting, Stephen Universe is excellent at postcolonialism critique but truly doesn’t know how to handle raw colonialism. It excels discussing the traumas once they are past but struggled whenever having to deal with the lived-in realities of that political system. I do still think it’s a good show, but this element often gets left out of discussions with it. 

REVIEW - Villainous #1

Villainous #1
Writer: Stonie Williams
Artist: Jef Sadzinski
Colorist: Joana Lafuente
Letterer: Justin Birch
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Price: $3.99 
Tilly, one of the newest super-powered people to join the Coalition of Heroes, is doing her best to navigate the dizzying world of superheroes. Working with her idols should be a dream come true, but when she learns the truth, Tilly's dream quickly becomes a nightmare. Now, Tilly has to make a choice - Get in line and stand with her heroes, or take a stand and risk becoming something more... Villainous.
Buy It Digitally: Villainous #1

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My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am not qualified to write this.