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Everyone knows I like playing with villains. Sometimes, it's painful seeing the outfits villains are wearing in old comics and sometimes they're nearly perfect. This month I'm playing with one of those.
I first encounter Count Nefaria when he had been powered up to Superman levels and fought the Avengers. I know he goes back further than that, and I've read many of his earlier stories, now, but at that time, I hadn't even read his appearance in the early days of the "new" X-Men.
So, some of my first memories of him are with him picking up and throwing a city bus, and stopping Thor's hammer mid-stroke. As powerful as the Avengers but lacking the experience and confidence to really use his powers effectively.
Originally, Count Nefaria was part of Marvel's organized crime cartel called MAGGIA. MAGGIA is a MAFIA analogue that has broader notions of organized crime than the more prosaic real world group.
I used to hate Marvel's penchant for acronyms until I learned that MAFIA is really an acronym. Can you believe the things public schools fail to teach, these days?
Count Luchino Nefaria was part of the Italian aristocracy, who became an organized crime figure out of ambition and a desire to take his rightful place as one of the masters of the world. This being a comic book universe, he followed a more esoteric path in this, than his Mafia counterparts, funding exotic scientific research in the furtherance of his criminal enterprises.
After years of working through intermediaries, armed or empowered through his efforts, Nefaria decided to use some of that research to empower himself. By combining the powers of the so-called Lethal Legion, the original Power Man, Whirlwind and the Living Laser, magnified a hundred-fold, using the ionic energy processes developed by Baron Zemo to empower Wonder Man. His strength was nearly equal to Thor's, his resistance to injury, about the same. The process had one negative side-effect, it soon became apparent that he was aging rapidly.
Before too long, he had withered to a shadow of his former self, kept alive only in some kind of stasis booth which was crushed in one of Iron Man's battles. For several years, Nefaria was thought dead, but like Wonder Man before him, his apparent death was actually a metamorphic state from which he emerged, as strong as ever.
Nefaria makes a good villain. He's got the lust for power and the physical power to make him a real player. He's smart and cunning, but he also has that classic ego flaw that makes him beatable, in the long run. All he needs is good writers and, of course, a little work on the costume.
The shorts are out. Sorry, they're just a hold-over from Superman and it's time to retire them for most characters. I revised his boots and cape, too. The old off-one-shoulder cape is just too "swashbuckler" for a guy with such a regal self-image.
The walking stick is there because it was such an important part of Nefaria's earlier accoutrements. In this incarnation, it contains his flight apparatus, allowing him true flight, rather than simply making long jumps. He used to wear a monocle, too, but that's just goofy for a guy with his powers, even as an affectation.
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Copyright © 2008 Joe Singleton
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