EP
Got a candidate primary from one of my fave comics today.
Who is the candidate
Xemnu, the Living Hulk, a weird Journey into Mystery villain and the first being in the marvel universe to use the name Hulk, brought back from obscurity by Al Ewing in The Immortal Hulk
What Has He Done?
Xemnu debuts in Journey into Mystery 62, as an alien who crashes his spaceship outside a small town. The badly injured Xemnu is discovered by a local electrician, Joe, who noticed Xemnu is both a cyborg and injured, and decides to rebuild him. When Xemnu revives, he reveals he was a criminal exiled to a Prison Planet who narrowly escaped. He hypnotises Joe, and declares his intent to enslave all hunamity to build a massive ship that will let him menace his homeworld once again— and will also be so large it it destroys Earth when it takes off. Xemnu hyponotises the rest of humanity, releasing Joe just so someone can listen to his Evil Gloating, and construction of the ship is begun. Joe sneaks off when the Hulk is distracted with star charts, and switches the wires in the control panel. When Xemnu tries to take off, the panel electrocutes him so hard his mechanical parts short circuit and render him comatose. Turning down the power to non-earth-exploding levels, Joe launches the ship into a stable orbit around the sun where it will remain forever. Xemnu returns in Journey into Mystery 66, but he doesn't do much. He bribes a town into building a construction that will let him recharge and hypnotise the whole world again, and menaces Joe before being lured into using his hypnotic powers on a mirror, which makes him fade into nothing for... some reason.
Xemnu returns as a foe in some 1970s Defenders issues. In Marvel Feature 3, he returns by possessing a couple of astronauts, having them sign a TV deal that gives them a wildly popular children's show, with Xemnu as host, who promises to take his fans back with him to his magic planet. At the show's promised finale, children begin walking towards the studio in a hypnotised trance, and before being defeated says he wants to turn the children into beings like him. He appears in an issue of the Defenders to do general menacing (Including trying to kill Dr Strange and Valkyrie with a [strike]forklift[/strike] Steamroller "Olé!") but his spaceship won't blow up the earth in this version and his plan is a very generic "enslave some humans". (His defeat is hilarious. The swears he'll return for his spaceship, so Hulk returns it it to him, by throwing it. Cue explosion). He later menaces the Hulk using robotic duplicates of some of his greatest foes, but that's nothing to write home about. He reappears in a Fantastic Four story, where he repeats the "repopulate my planet with a brainwashed audience" thing. He says he wants to repopulate his dying world, but it's literally not elaborated on in anything but one line so I don't know what to do with that.
Xemnu also appears in Sensational She-Hulk, but SSH is such a wild comedy comic I also don't know what to do with that. Like he threatens to turn She-Hulk into a being like himself as a Breeding Slave but he's also defeated by being sold to an alien teddy bear collector, She-Hulk teams up with Space Truckers, and partially-converted She-hulk makes a joke about needing a full body waxing for swimsuit season.
Now we reach the meat of the EP. In an arc of The Immortal Hulk, perennial thread near-miss Dario Agger decides to ruin the reputation of the Hulk (who has become a revolutionary symbols and a more proactive revolutionary hero). He decides he needs his own Hulk, and goes to Monster Island (where Xemnu lives and occasionally serves as a generic menace). Agger unleashes a bunch of gross Kaiju on Phoenix Arizona to lure out the Hulk. When the Hulk rips one open, it unleashes its Proportionately Ponderous Parasites all over a major highway, letting Xemnu descend to save everyone from Hulk's mistake. Xemnu weaponizes nostalgia, essentially broadcasting a wave that makes people fall back on simple childhood beliefs and avoid the truth in order to empower himself. Xemnu rewrites the memories of everyone on earth, creating a weaponized Mandela Effect where everyone remembers him as a superhero called the Incredible Hulk. This also makes people more passive, unwilling to act, and seeing any sort of radical action as insane and dangerous. In this world, everyone remembers Bruce Banner as a deranged, super-powered terrorist named Robert Banner, which even affects Bruce, making him go from someone who protects protestors and engages in non-lethal strikes against Roxxon infrastructure to someone who talks about striking against "soft targets". While this goes on, Xemnu is demanding regular meals from Dario Agger, which Agger provides from his own staff. The thing is, Xemnu can't affect the "savage Hulk" (The Hulk system's alter who is the traditional, child-like Hulk Speak Hulk) who represents Banner's real childhood. Savage Hulk and the Hulk squad burst into Roxxon's HQ, finding that Xemnu's feeding twists people into twisted, mindless parodies of himself, and Xemnu eats Agger when it looks like he might be losing. The conversion process doesn't work on Agger, leaving him a vaguely minotaur-shaped pile of gore, and Savage Hulk beats Xemnu into scrap, freeing humanity.
Heinous Standard
Xemnu sets it in every notable story. Journey into Mystery was disconnected from regular Marvel continuity at the time, and he also comes pretty close to blowing up the entire earth in it so i think he could compete with Marvel's heavy hitters. In Immortal Hulk, he's an Arc Villain who serves as Dario's heavy hitter for the entire arc and then out-evils Dario when it looks like he's failing. The only villains he really has to compete with are the one below all (literal anti-god) and the Leader (Hulk's arch-nemesis and given a whole new weird spate of Gamma psychic powers). Xemnu manages to brainwash the whole world including the protagonists, and his conversion process appears on screen as something disgusting and visceral, so he's perfectly acceptable for his tier. My only concern is how we count his more Monster of the Week-y appearances, where things like "trying to kidnap the whole child popuation of the earth" are treated with all the weight of a generic supervillain plot. Can we use Depending on the Writer for things like that, or for his appearances as a generic Mook in monster island stories?
Mitigating Factors
None. Xemnu is just a tyrant and manipulator, whose whole thing about returning to/repopulating his world is either generic or wanting to rule. He spares his rescuer in his debut to have someone to gloat to and being "spared" by Xemnu is just a different type of slavery. She-Hulk speculates he might be lonely, but Xemnu never presents himself as being genuinely lonely, and in Immortal Hulk he's given up on repopulation in favour of Earth being Xemnu's Magic Planet, so I think that's a Depending on the Writer thing but that's worth discussion.
Verdict
[tup] from me, and thanks to Scraggle/Starkrafty/Gabe for passing me this EP.
