#dan slott can get fucked but he did write a really great mysterio in issue 620

[maxwell-grant]

since you mentioned him, why do you like mysterio so much?

Much like I mentioned in that other post, my appreciation for Mysterio is based on "pretty much everything the character's been in, comics in last place" first and foremost, mainly because comics Mysterio, while he's obviously the source and has really great, essential storylines for appreciating the character, also has a lot of moments that make him too much of a scumbag for me to enjoy the way I'd like to, particularly Guardian Devil, I really, really don't like that storyline. It's this problem everyone cursed with a love for comic book characters runs into, especially when they are villain fans who like their favorite villains a little or a lot less nasty / murdery / perverted / etc-y than how most writers prefer to use them, I think you all definitely know what I mean without me having to cite specific examples, so we can put this caveat aside.

So I can talk about how much I love Mysterio in general.

(Art by michalivan)

First off, Mysterio has what is EASILY one of the greatest supervillain designs period, not even just for comic book characters, and I'm that they never got rid of the fishbowl or tried to permanently redesign it into something "cooler", like the fishbowl isn't already unbelievably cool, and that, even with the lengths they took to modernize and blockbuster-fy Mysterio for FFH, they didn't touch the fishbowl and instead used it as a centerpiece for some of his illusions (by far the best part of that movie, really the only thing that made me watch it, was it's depiction of Mysterio and his traps). 

It’s a design that wouldn’t look remotely out of place in a Power Rangers or Kamen Rider show and I mean that as a compliment, tokusatsu supervillain designs are generally a cut or several above comic book supervillain designs, partially because, much like how fighting game characters need to be appealing at first sight in ways other videogame characters do not need, tokusatsu villains, especially in monster-of-the-week formats, need to strike up an impression and be distinguishable and show you what kind of threat they pose or character they are, often with nothing BUT their design. And so Mysterio stands out in any line-up, next to any candy-colored criminal mastermind or deformed gangster or animal-themed superthug.

Mysterio’s look, even at it’s most basic form, strikes a weird, confusing, mystical figure. What should be a fairly obvious albeit still cool supervillain look, with that green bodysuit and purple cape and wrist ornaments, turns almost into some kind of weird abstract art piece, with the net pattern over his body and those wretched eye ornaments attaching his cape and of course the fishbowl, obscuring and dehumanizing his features beyond even the usual  monstrous mask, evoking something far less bestial than the other Spider-rogues, instead pushing it to the truly alien and dreamlike, something you’d find minding it’s business in M.C Escher rooms squirreled away in unexplored depths of subconscious, something that only bothers to look human so it can better taunt you with just how stupid and ignorant you really are about the world around you. 

And of course, Mysterio is not some grandiose, godlike alien, he’s just a theatrical asshole with parlor tricks, and his design excellently communicates both of these aspects to him, especially when the fishbowl is inevitably destroyed and suddenly the entire illusion is gone. Or is it? He always finds a way to get you the hardest when you think you’ve got him down and he’s got no more illusions to pull, and then he turns out to have a whole ensemble of extra illusions, or just good old fashioned dirty tricks, because Mysterio is nothing if not a resourceful bastard.

I mentioned atop that I don’t like some moments where Mysterio is made too much of a bastard for me to enjoy the character as a fun supervillain, but that is in no way me saying that I don’t like Mysterio as a bastard, quite the opposite. I love that he in particular, out of most of the major Spider-Man villains, is the one with the least tragic reasons for becoming a villain. He wasn’t turned into a monster, he wasn’t screwed over unfairly out of his life’s work, he didn’t have any mental illnesses or conditions to push him to crime (which gives him less of an excuse than fucking Carnage, of all people), he didn’t even have a tragic life story prior to taking up the costume.

His backstory is that he was an accomplished VFX artist and stuntman, with steady employment, who became bored and, failing to transition into acting, decided to take up costumed supervillainy (a retcon later established that he was blacklisted after one of his special effects injured someone, but that doesn’t mitigate anything as he could have, and indeed has, found any number of workarounds for this). Even adaptations that try to give Mysterio more concrete or understandable (and sometimes less fun) reasons for becoming a supervillain don’t do anything to mitigate that this guy, while not nearly as cruel as the Goblin or the Symbiotes, or as dangerous as Doc Ock or destructive as someone like Electro or Scorpion, is a piece of shit who became a costumed terrorist purely to sate his ego, because he had the means and resources to become a supervillain and the idea appealed to him, so he did it.

You know how Breaking Bad appears at first to be the heartbreaking story of an average, well-meaning man driven to crime out of desperate financial woes, when it turns out to be mainly the story of a gargantuan, cartoonish asshole finally finding an excuse to cut loose and go on an ego trip at the expense of everyone around him? Or Death Note and that whole joke that goes around in this site, about how Light Yagami saw the slippery slope and decided to grab a sled? That’s Mysterio. He’s the greatest example of a genuine, bonafide Saturday morning cartoon villain in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, and often times this doesn’t at all mitigate the threat he poses, even when Spider-Man is actively aware that he’s dealing with Mysterio’s Scooby-Doo bullshit again.

If there’s a single thing that asshole’s honest about, is the why he’s doing this, and frankly I tend to like that in a villain, especially because all the other Spider-Man villains tend to be largely tragic victims, fully monstrous and irredeemable murderers, or funny assholes who are meant to be slightly sympathetic and pathetic also. In a world where the biggest villains tend to be self-deluded monsters and scumbags doing wretched things under a pretense of nobility or excused (sometimes by the narrative even) by personal tragedy, like Magneto or Dr Doom or the X-Men in the Krakoa era or MCU Thanos, I find Mysterio refreshing. Nobody’s gonna ask me to debate the morality of the mass murders and war crimes committed by Mysterio (and it helps that he’s not interested in doing those, he really just gets his kicks out of putting on a show and fucking with Spider-Man) and we’re all generally on the same page that he’s a total dipshit and kind of a joke but he’s also very cool and genuinely scary at points, and he’s generally not bad enough to the point it ruins how fun he is to watch as a cartoon villain (again, minus stories like Guardian Devil, at least for me). Nobody’s gonna come up to me in real life and argue with me that “he’s got a point” that I should consider debating over. 

Mysterio is a creature of spectacle through and through. It’s the spectacle that makes superhero comics what they are, and the true power of Mysterio as a character comes not in the ways he poses a personal threat to Peter Parker (which he does, having gone through painstakingly cruel lengths to gaslight and torment Parker’s mind in ways that other villains with direct mind-control powers couldn’t conceive doing), or a major-scale menace to the city. It’s not in the ways he poses a dark mirror to Spider-Man or a symbolic attack on his persona, that’s what you go to characters like Venom or Doc Ock or Kraven for. What makes Mysterio interesting to me, on a deeper level, is that his power lies in the spectacle that we inherently sign up for when we go to superhero stories. He may not break or acknowledge the 4th wall directly, but on some level, Mysterio displays awareness that he lives in a world of story, that he is a player on a stage like all the others around him, and that he must entertain. His very gimmick as a villain is to tell stories within stories, to insidiously take control, even if only briefly and only in the little world he lives in, of people’s lives and puppeteer them along.

Speaking more personally, Mysterio’s always been a concept deeply appealing to me personally, a grandiose theatrical supervillain who specialized in using movie special effects and film concepts to pick fights with superheroes. I’ve wanted to become a filmmaker since I was 13 and it’s a dream I latched onto strongly my whole life no matter what, one I’ve only been able to begun achieving recently. I’ve always loved telling stories, learning about stories, taking facts and events and spinning stories out of them and getting people invested in them, I’ve been doing it even before I knew what it was, and one of the big reasons why I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker is because film affords you more tools to work with when creating a story, and I’ve always wanted to learn more about what those tools were and how to use them. Learn the “magic”, as it were. 

And sometimes it feels weird or wrong to call it “magic”, when it’s stuff that you know how to do so mechanically, when it’s stuff you have to do for a living, when you have to do it when you don’t want to, when you got bills to pay and so parts of the “magic” become a job like any other and suddenly you have to come to terms with the idea that maybe you ended up choking your childhood dream by chasing it and it’s hard to muster up the love and excitement you need to in order to go after those dreams you’ve been putting in the backburner forever now and-

..Allright, you know what, I take it back, maybe Mysterio did have a point. A worker in the film industry, ESPECIALLY in the special effects and stunts department, choosing to become a supervillain, feels like something that doesn’t need much justification. Mysterio’s real arch-enemy wouldn’t be Spider-Man, it’d be CGI. 

Or Sony.

(Fingers crossed that, with all the Raimi love in NWH, someday we’ll FINALLY get some justice in this world and get Bruce Campbell as Mysterio for real.)

Jokes aside though, part of the reason I always found Mysterio cool, even when I had read or watched very few stories with him in it, is the same reason so many people quote first and foremost when asked to describe why they like Batman: the ability to kick ass without superpowers. I’ve always liked to watch Mysterio fight Spider-Man for similar reasons people like to watch Batman fight Superman.

I’ve never, ever, liked the idea of Mysterio using actual magic, it runs very much contrary to his appeal as a tremendous illusionist without any magical abilities, using purely advanced technology and his own brilliant mind to run circles around superheroes (and sometimes even supervillains, even those who are actual magic users, who can’t figure out and counter what he’s doing). I didn’t want to get into film because of Mysterio, but the idea of Mysterio made filmmaking and special effects look cool to me the same way Popeye made spinach look cool or Batman makes being a detective look cool. Yeah, spinach doesn’t turn you into a fighting god (to my bitter dissappointment when I first tried it) and by all means Batman would be a pretty terrible detective, but that’s what fiction is for, and fiction is Mysterio’s power.

Fiction is what allows Mysterio, a no-name scumbag with no superpowers, to pose a regular challenge to a superhero who leaps through buildings and juggles cars. Fiction is what allows Batman to beat up Superman, and it’s specifically the fact that it’s Mysterio’s background in film, in special effects and stunt work and acting and etc, that allows him to do all of this, that always made it really, really cool for me. One of the great things about film for me is that learning how the magic is done doesn’t destroy it, quite the opposite. Is Jurassic Park spoiled for anyone when they find out that, no, they didn’t have an actual T-Rex on set, so they built TWO GIANT ROBOTS made to look impeccably like artistic renditions of Tyrannosaurus and whole teams had to operate those under extremely precise conditions just to get seconds of footage? Of course not, that only makes it better! We all know that the Muppets are not “real”, and that doesn’t stop anyone from treating Kermit like he’s a real dude, just a little smaller and a little more green than other dudes, to the point crew members regularly describe completely forgetting that the Muppets are not actually fellow actors. You know it’s fake, and you still think of it as real anyway. Spider-Man knows everything Mysterio does is an illusion, and he still has trouble fighting him. 

Mysterio is a creature of the story who weaponizes stories, weaponizes the art, the scenery, the actions, the reactions, the character arcs, the medium itself, against the protagonist, on paper for his own benefit, but really, for our own (because Mysterio is nothing if not a performer, and a performer is nothing without an audience). His power is his ability to give us a show. Not Spider-Man. Us. Who guarantees that, beneath that fish bowl of his that betrays no line of sight, he isn’t always looking at the reader to gauge your interest and is just good at pretending otherwise, like he does with everything else? 

Mysterio may be a gimmick villain, but it’s a gimmick that makes him an extremely versatile, interesting villain nonetheless because his gimmick is that he’s a storyteller. He weaves lies, frauds, deceptions, tricks, cons, all in spectacular packages and villainous plots, fueled and sustained by magic. Not the hokey bullshit used by that goober Dr Strange to save the world, the real stuff, that which has magically influenced you to spend time, if not money also, to read or watch a story with a guy who has a fish bowl for a head fighting a guy in spider pajamas. Used and designed by a criminal whose endgoals are often as basic and unremarkable as Quentin Beck himself is when you strip away his costume, when he’s nothing but a scumbag with dirty tricks, but Mysterio? Mysterio is magic, and he’s here for us. 

Or so he would claim. He is a professional liar above all else. But he prefers the more pompous name for that, it’s called “artist”.