Mister Mind
13 years ago - Mister Mind, still dormant, lodges himself into the brain cavity of Magnificus Sivana as he returns to Earth.
5 years ago - Mister Mind comes out of his dormancy inside the body of Magnificus Sivana. He takes control of Magnificus, feigning interest in his father Thaddeus Sivana's research, releasing the various monsters of his labs as a distraction and using Sivana's science to grow to giant size and attack the city before he is stopped by Billy Batson using Sivana's experiments. He's trapped inside the Rock of Eternity.
Casual comic fans often have a pretty familiar type of superhero story that they consider 'correct', but the tone and style of these stories can actually shift wildly, especially as you read comics from different publication eras. Sometimes some characters just make way more sense at the time they were created, and perhaps no character is a better reminder of that than Mister Mind. In the era of Captain Marvel comics he comes from, the best explanation I can give is to say that, while there was an inherent power fantasy in the concept of Captain Marvel, the comics themselves weren't really attempting to tell a power fantasy story; it was written as a humor comic for children. They read incredibly weirdly to a modern audience, but they remain this weird cultural artifact.
Somehow, this weird comical 40's cartoon character has been filtered through 80's and 90's sci-fi body-horror concepts to make a new, modern, actually kind of cool alien menace in modern comics, but It's at least worth it to remember where this bizarre comic creation came from.
Somehow, this weird comical 40's cartoon character has been filtered through 80's and 90's sci-fi body-horror concepts to make a new, modern, actually kind of cool alien menace in modern comics, but It's at least worth it to remember where this bizarre comic creation came from.
Mister Mind's Comic HistoryMister Mind appeared for the first time in 1943, in issue #22 of the series Captain Marvel Adventures, an anthology series by Captain Marvel creators CC Beck & Otto Binder. While each book contained a variety of shorter stories featuring the usual assortment of harmless superhero antics, childish cartoon versions of Hitler and wildly offensive racial stereotypes, issue #22 marked the first issue of an ongoing serial story featuring the "Monster Society of Evil", a team-up of all of Captain Marvel's greatest villains, all being led by "Mister Mind", a disembodied voice claiming that "Space is my home! I am the most evil being ever to live!", which is a bold claim in an issue that literally also included cartoon Hitler.
The first several issues of the serial featured Marvel fighting different enemies around the world in an effort to thwart the efforts of the mysterious Mister Mind, eventually chasing him to his headquarters in space, fighting different monsterous creatures, each time thinking he'd at last found the true form of the villain. Also, at one point he brushes a tiny worm off his shoulder. |
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Once the fact that Mister Mind's true form as a tiny talking worm in glasses was discovered by Billy Batson's blackface assistant Steamboat (again, i cannot stress enough how offensive these comics could be), the serial essentially became another cat-and-mouse series of cartoon antics between Billy and Mister Mind. If you've seen old cartoons from the 40's, you kind of know the sense of humor on display here. It continued until issue 44, after which the comic's production was diminished thanks to wartime paperdrives.
For his part, Mister Mind has continued to be a regular part of all the various retellings of Captain Marvel's story; becoming less silly and more of an insidious alien menace in his post-crisis re-imagining. He played a strange part in the climax of the series 52, taking on a new post-larval form and eating whole realities. He even appeared in the post-credit stinger of the Shazam movie. |
Our Mister Mind StoryWe absolutely don't need a lot of Mister Mind. He's a fun nugget of comic book silliness, and the fact that he's managed to successfully become a part of the mainstream mythology of comic book lore is pretty entertaining all by itself. We certainly want SOME of him, but he doesn't need to be a regularly recurring baddie. We're going to use him as a catalyst for a few specific adventures just to secure his place in our timeline; First, the Sivana's going to Venus is an established part of their lore, and Mister Mind has regularly been referring to in continuity as being either the last surviving Venusian, or at least having been in suspended animation on Venus. It makes perfect sense to use that as an explanation for Mr Mind's existence in the first place.
After that, we just want one solid story arc that brings in everything that makes Mr Mind a memorable villain. Afterward, we went ahead and imprisoned him inside the Rock of Eternity. Now, this doesn't mean we're not going to use him again at some point. He's actually a pretty cool villain for us to bring back down the line at some point, but for now he's best used just being the weird artifact of comic book storytelling that he is, giving us one good story. |
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