Welcome back to another villainous edition of Demanded Characters. This week we will take a look at one of the most heinous members of the injustice gang, but who is nevertheless on the top of my list as one of the DCU heavy hitters. Though for years he was a joke, in the last year Arthur Light has returned to being top dog on the food chain in the underworld.
Last week the Rogues battled it out to see who was your Number Two bad guy. With 30% of the vote Mirror Master took the top slot, but Captain Boomerang was not far behind with 21% of the vote. I’m sure we will see all the rogues during the run of this line.
Who is Dr. Arthur Light- a genius? A super villain? A rapist? He is all that and more. What makes Dr. Light so dangerous is he is more of a real-world villain. We don’t have someone dressed as a clown killing their victims with laughing gas, or a mad gorilla running around trying to take hold of peoples’ minds, but we are familiar with hate crimes such as rape. This makes Dr. Light a more dangerous and complex villain.
For a long time it was thought that Dr. Light was only a B-level villain who could not even beat the young heroes of the DCU. But in the last few years we found out why this was the case. The Good Doctor was not always the bumbling idiot we have come to know him as in comics. Arthur Light was a genius, working with a partner and experimenting with light. They built a suit which would allow them to control light in many ways. While his partner wanted to use it for good, the evil nature inside Arthur wanted to use it to benefit himself. This led to the murder of Arthur’s partner.
Arthur then took the suit and the name Dr. Light. Not exactly imaginative with his name, or his niche, Arthur became a gimmick villain. Taking on the JLA early in his career, there was a sudden, unexplained shift in his behavior. Suddenly he went from fighting Wonder Woman and Batman to Wonder Girl and Robin, and he could not come out on top. Every villain has, at some point, tasted victory over the heroes; but no matter what he tried Arthur could not win. He was the laughing stock of the villains and faded away, until Identity Crisis. This is when we learn the true reasons that Dr. Light became the idiot of the supervillian world.
Arthur was not only a super genius but he was a villain who had no boundaries. Before the shift in his personality, he not only killed a child but also raped Sue Dibney, wife of the JLA’s Elongated Man. This final act of villainy led the League to make the first of many other well-intentioned actions which would come back to haunt them later. After a vote it was decided that Dr. Light should have his personality changed to stop this type of thing from happening in the future. Batman interrupted the wiping done by Zatanna, and it led to his own memory altering. The Heroes would go on altering the personality and memory of villains, until the death of Sue, when all this came out. Today Dr. Light enjoys membership in the Injustice Gang and is currently a member of the prison planet.
Dr. Light has not had any radical change over the years but we have some choices:
The one piece belt
The separate chest star
Dr. Light is on fire
The light bulb from the Teen Titans cartoon
Let’s not forget the hero, the female Dr. Light
I think he is a must have for this line, both as the super evil JLA villain and to fit in with Deathstroke and the Titans. So DCU fans: which one do you want to see the Four Horsemen take a spin with?
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