I'm into Week 7 of my attempt to weed things out of the comic collection. I've just about made it to the letter "T", though, so maybe soon I'll be through. It has given me the chance to go back through and reread a lot of things I hadn't in a few years, which can be good or bad, depending.
On the "bad" side of the ledger, I was going through James Robinson's Starman, and I got to issue #38, where the new Mist decides to prove her villain bonafides by killing a team of second-tier former Justice Leaguers that made their own French super-team. It's supposed to demonstrate her cruelty, her ruthlessness, her cunning (although I don't exactly buy she could successfully impersonate a member of the team for several days without them all being dumbasses.) It's supposed to be this big step in her taking over her father's villainous legacy and establishing herself as a force.
Except by the time Robinson gets to the Grand Guignol storyarc, when she finally returns to Opal City to confront Jack, she willingly becomes a lackey. Not to the Shade's foe Culp, but to her father. Just falls right in line with whatever daddy wants. Even when he says he's got a nuke and he's gonna destroy the whole city, including her, and the kid she produced by raping Jack Knight, she won't stand up to him. She lets him sweet talk her into handing over the gun, and she dies.
While probably a decent example of how abused children can continually fool themselves into believing their abusive parents actually do care about, it kind of undercuts the whole thing about her being any sort of a "master criminal". That, plus Jack pointing out she's the only one who ever refers to herself that way.
OK, so she's a pretender, a wannabe. What's that make the heroes who got completely bamboozled by her? If Robinson's going to build her rep on their corpses, only to turn around and show she was fooling herself all along, what was the point of killing the heroes in the first place? It possibly builds her up as a threat to Jack in the future, her trying to improve as a villain while he's finding his footing as a hero, but there's not much of a payoff to that. Jack has a longer battle with Culp, and then the real threat turns out to be Original Recipe Mist.
Just seems like a waste of time. There are plenty of other crimes she can commit to convince herself she's a real super-villain, that don't involve murder.
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