It's been almost exactly three months since the first of these looks at Terry McGinnis' recurring enemies and what they reflect about him. I started with Spellbinder, and as promised, we're moving to Mad Stan today.
Stan might be a bit of a cheat, honestly. He's rarely the main villain. In one case, Spellbinder uses him as part of a plan to turn the police against Batman by making it appear Terry killed Mad Stan. In another, he's really just the excuse the plot requires for Terry to miss a date with Dana, so she can be approached by a mutated guy that lives in the sewers.
And that's because Stan's not a particularly varied character. He's always out to tear down the government or elements of bureaucracy, and he always takes the same approach: Blow it up. He reminds me of the Evil Midnight Bomber, What Bombs at Midnight from The Tick, although I think Stan is slightly more focused. Only slightly, as he was prepared to blow up a Department of Health building because they were going to raise the fee for licensing pets. Although I'm surprised Mad Stan would risk his chihuahua, Boom-Boom, being logged in "the system."
Stan doesn't have much of a backstory. He never got an origin episode or issue of the comics, so we don't know what, exactly, made him hate and decry governmental systems and their effect on people, or why he decided the best solution was high explosives. Maybe there's a tragedy, Maybe he read a book that really spoke to him. Maybe he just enjoys it.
Like Terry before he became Batman, Stan's anger is unfocused. Terry would lash out at Jokerz, his father, school bullies, whoever. Stan ostensibly targets "the government", doesn't there's no real plan behind it. No, "take this out first, to cripple response when I target this other thing." Across his appearances he tries destroying a library because there's too much information for people to process, then targets a re-election fundraiser for the district attorney, and the aforementioned attack on the Department of Health over pet licenses.
Stan is the adolescent who can see that there are things wrong with society around him, but can't see how to fix them. So he decides the proper response is to just destroy them instead. Maybe Stan has some big plan to build things back up properly after, but more likely he's not given it any thought. Or he hasn't since he decided tearing everything down was the best first step.
That's possibly the path Terry was on before his father died. Going through life angry for reasons he couldn't really explain, picking fights to give an outlet to that anger. Now he. . . gets to put on a strength-augmenting costume and beat people up. Typical caveats about vigilantism aside, Terry is generally trying to protect people from those intending direct harm. Stan probably thinks he's helping people by attacking the structures he believes are strangling their lives, but he doesn't seem terribly concerned if any of the people he intended to help get blown up in the process of him helping them.
At the end of the day, Stan decided to just indulge his anger to its full extent. His dog is safe, but anyone and everything else is shit outta luck if he decides to blow something up while they're nearby.
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