Part two of our week-long Legendary Focus top five takes a look at yet another singular world-threat villain who can take on entire teams on his own. Despite his great power, Graviton still manages to be a constant underdog because he’s never quite lived up to his potential. But he’s come close a couple of times.
Graviton is, to me, one of the most frightening villains. For starter’s, he’s quite mad, but that’s a prerequisite for being a supervillain in the Marvel Universe. Worse than the state of his sanity, Graviton cares little for anybody but himself and controls the very thing that keeps us rooted to this planet. With a thought, this maniacal deviant can send anybody he chooses shuttling off into space. You look at him wrong and bang zoom — he’s pulling a Ralph Kramden and sending you to the moon for real. That’s an absolutely terrifying villain to have to go up against.
I called Graviton an underdog despite his power, and that’s true. The most interesting thing about bad guys is that all the great villains of the MU end up defeating themselves more often than not due to their inherent character flaws. There are would be world-conquerors on every street, but each of them is usually wrecked by ego, insecurity, lack of imagination, lack of talent, or lack of a real goal. Graviton has been beset by each of these roadblocks in his career. One of his most noteworthy stories involved Moonstone (during her Meteorite years in the Thunderbolts) basically playing life-coach to Graviton. He truly lived up to the threat implied by his name as he crafted an island in the sky and took every Thunderbolt, Avenger, and random hero prisoner. Dude had it all, but he ended up losing yet again because he’s just not a stable puppy.
Story of his life.
Graviton has popped up fairly frequently in the Marvel Universe and was a key player in one of my personal favorite mini-series from the ’80s, the initial West Coast Avengers mini that preceded the Regular series. Despite his long standing in the MU, he has yet to achieve plastic recognition. Hopefully this grievous oversight will not last much longer.
Graviton is a fairly normal-sized guy, so I’d be perfectly fine with him coming on the blank Black Panther body. I wouldn’t really have a problem with him being on the Grim Reaper body if he had to be on that, but I don’t see him as that large. I think it could lean either way, but as long as he’s not tossed on the Hyperion body, I’m fine either way. He’s got gloves but no boot cuffs, something else we already have, and his cape is a fairly simple collared deal if they went pure classic. A couple people wear a cape like that with a collar, so there’s some reuse potential there as well.
Graviton has made multiple non-comic media appearances, in both cartoon and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (more or less), so there’s some of that cross-market appeal that seems to synergize and whatnot. That kind of thing is meaningless to me but I’m sure it factors into name recognition. But then so does Google, so whaddaIknow.
As far as costume, he’s had a handful of looks throughout the comics, most with that upraised billowing cape look, and more often than not some kind of circle/dot/oval pattern on the front. I’d prefer the straight classic look, of course. It’s iconic and memorable, but I really don’t want the cartoon look like they did with that thing they called the Beetle. Seriously. That was not the Beetle. Bad, Hasbro. Bad.
Graviton is vastly overdue for a figure. He regularly comes up in conversations of “never made villains” and has one of the most intriguing and comic-booky power sets around. If I could get Count Nefaria and Graviton on the shelf by this time next year, I’d be a happy man.