Meet the New Bad

Reading this week’s issue of Trinity, I wondered about something I’ve mused on before: How can a new villain catch a break?

I mean, here we have Konvikt, a nonverbal bruiser from another planet. (He’s joined by Graak, a little guy with the best line in the issue—“Konvikt missing big chance, but Graak cool, Graak cool...”—but that’s neither here nor there.) And in Trinity #3, he holds his own against the entire Justice League. Black Lightning, Flash, Hawkgirl, Black Canary, Green Lantern, Firestorm—no one can touch him. And then the Big Three show up (it’ll be a heck of a long time before I call Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman the Trinity; my Catholic don't go deep, but it goes at least that deep), and WHAM! Superman gets knocked out.

And I really want to call shenanigans.

I want to say, who IS this guy? He’s fought the JLA to a standstill and then knocks out Superman with a punch?

But that’s the point of the scene: Konvikt is extremely powerful. (A secondary point might be: If Konvikt can knock out Superman in one punch, how come the rest of the JLA is still standing?) But for some reason, I’m finding it hard to simply take writer Kurt Busiek’s word for it. I’ve spent over three decades of my life being told that Superman is extremely powerful, and I’ve just known Konvikt for two weeks. So try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that Konvikt is a first-level badass simply “because the writer said so.”

It’s not Busiek’s fault—I’ve been conditioned by a lifetime of reading comics. If Superman is being outpunched, I want an explanation. And since Konvikt is a figure of mystery, the explanation is still forthcoming. The two needs are in conflict—something's got to give.

I don’t think there’s any way to introduce a character like this out of the blue without prompting some level of disbelief among seasoned readers. To be honest, I think I felt the same thing about Doomsday, a character who was wildly successful for a time. The last “new” character that I can think of that I accepted immediately as fighting in Superman’s weight class was Mongul—and he was introduced in DC Comics Presents #26, published in 1980. I was 11.

There have been other characters lately that have made me wonder these same things—most recently Titus, Roger Stern & John Byrne’s “godlike” conqueror in JLA Classified, who had the added burden of the question, “If he’s so powerful and fought the League so long ago, why haven’t we heard of him before?” Of course, the answers to these questions are always very mundane in the real world. We’d never head of him before because no one’s ever written about him before. We don’t know why Konvikt can K.O. Superman—for now, we just have to accept that he can. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.

I actually admire Busiek’s restraint in writing the fight scene in Trinity #3. He didn’t have Konvikt wipe the floor with the JLA to show what a threat he was; he just fought them to a standstill. It might be the best way to handle a scene like that, in that it doesn’t devalue the League while it still establishes Konvikt as a threat. But somehow, I can’t quite accept Konvikt at face value without conscious effort. Those 30-odd years of Superman reading have made my disbelief too heavy to suspend for long.

At the base of this, I'm curious: Is it possible for a character introduction like this to work? Has the introduction of Konvikt worked for you so far? If not, do you expect it to become more plausible as more is revealed? Is there a way of introducing a character like Konvikt—mystery and all—that wouldn't cause disbelief? Or is that disbelief okay, considering it mirrors how everyone else feels when they see Superman get clobbered?

Rob