I miss Zodon. He featured heavily in the first several issues of PS238, a humorous comic book about a grade school for superheroic, or at least super-powered, children by Aaron Williams, but hasn’t had much attention in the last several issues.
Zodon is not a young superhero; he is an unabashed megalomaniacal villain in the making. He is extraordinarily intelligent, with a bent for high technology. All you ever see of him is his face and upper torso; the rest, is concealed in a levitating, egg-shaped vehicle of his own construction, complete with mechanical pincers. What really defines him, however, is his sardonic remarks. Like a proper villain, he likes to lord his intellect over his fellow students, dismissing them with comments like, “Some day, when we are pronounced villain and hero, I will look back fondly on the days when I could have defeated you merely by confusing you to death.” Why is he tamely agreeing to a supervised education? That’s not clear; perhaps it’s to size up his future competition, to gain access to PS238’s extraordinary facilities, or just because mocking the good guys is so much more fun than actual world domination. Add the fact that the faculty has corrected his potty mouth by implanting a chip into his brain that inserts random words in place of any curses, and forces him to sing show tunes when he really loses his temper, and the guy is just hilarious. (“What the gumball did you do to me, you windshield?”)
Unfortunately, Zodon has taken a back seat for several issues, and what space he has is wasted with Victor von Fogg, another will-be villain. Both consider one another far greater rivals than any young superheroes, so do nothing but trade cheap shots. They aren’t funny. One mean-spirited wunderkind is great; two is strictly dullsville.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a second self-appointed evil genius with a gift for cutting remarks ruin a terrific character. Zodon is cut from the same cloth as the Brain from “Pinky and the Brain,” Stewie from “Family Guy,” and Brent Sienna from the “PVP” strip, and I really, really like all of them. (Feel free to speculate on what this implies about my own personality.) All of them are smart, though not as smart as they like to think. All of them get their kicks from manipulating and belittling everyone around them. And every one of them has a creator who thought it would be fun to pit him against a mirror image. It never works. The idea of characters like these being more concerned with the evil genius pecking order than actual evil geniusing looks good on paper, but the execution always descends into a rapid-fire exchange of insults. With no one to play straight man, the mockery falls flat, partly because there’s no set-up, partly because the audience can’t identify with a single, superior alter-ego.
Comedy creators! Preserve what makes bitchy egotists worth our attention. One insolent wit, good; two insolent wits, bad.