At his essence, Dr. Strange is a reactive hero. There is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes comic writers get tired of “reactive” and want to write heroes who proactively take on super-evil and what have you, and it can work for a little while if you set it up properly (Abnett and Lanning are doing a good job with the premise in Guardians of the Galaxy by having the heroes’ “proactiveness” actually be an extended mission in disguise). But reactivity is generally to the good because our system of justice is ultimately reactive as well. Reactively, we maintain order. Strange preserves order in this sense.
Dr. Strange’s major villains, though, aren’t really opposite forces of order, not in that sense. Dormammu and Nightmare want to conquer, but they would remove our system of order and replace it with their own version (which might not be nice, but it’s still generally orderly). Mephisto wants to use our system to feed his own ends. Baron Mordo just wanted to become powerful and important. All of these guys fundamentally weren’t villains who were trying to tear things down.
Which brings me to Nyarlathotep1 and his opposition to Strange. Nyarlathotep isn’t like Dormmamu or Nightmare; he doesn’t want to conquer. (He might occasionally conquer a place, but he doesn’t really care.) He’s not like Mephisto; he doesn’t want greater power. (He has plenty.) Nyarlathotep is just a sadist, pure and simple: he gets his pleasure from driving people mad and causing pain and suffering (preferably emotional pain and suffering). He’s a psychopathic god who doesn’t get cocky and make mistakes, except when he wants to make mistakes. After all, what fun is it if you can’t at least offer Strange the opportunity to stop you?
Nyarlathotep is much like a gambler in this respect; he gets his kicks from the thrill ride, from the chance that maybe his schemes won’t work. (It’s no fun going fishing if the fish just jump into the boat, after all. You want them to fight you on the line.) And the Sorcerers Supreme of Earth have very frequently proven tough enough opposition that Nyarlathotep has been forced to up his game significantly, which means he just has to go out and do the psychopathic god-equivalent of buying a really good fishing pole. He plans his schemes out years in advance now, and when it’s about to drop everything into the crapper, that’s when he knocks on Stephen Strange’s door, grins his youthful grin that any unknowing onlooker would call “full of zest for life,” and sits back to watch.
Of course, Nyarlathotep’s downfall is that he has a bit of an ego. He never really considers that the Sorcerers Supreme started predicting his manipulations centuries ago, or that they’ve gotten better at doing it over time. And he’s never really considered that just maybe, one of their long-term projects has been figuring out how to destroy him…
Top comment: That looks exactly like my high school yearbook photo.
Creepy. — Rian Fike
- Yes, he’s public domain. [↩]
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Richard D. James is Nyarlathotep? That explains SO MUCH.
I want to read this. Soooooo badly.
That’s a pretty damn cool idea. Have any of the Lovecraftian gods appeared in the Marvel U before, or would this be a first?
Will you do the whole “crawling chaos, thousand forms, many driving the man-on-the-street to insanity” thing?
Lovecraftian horrors appeared or were named with reasonable frequency in the old Conan comics I’ve read; and those are connected with the Marvel Universe via characters like Kulan Gath and Shuma Gorath.
I’d imagine if you looked through enough Roy Thomas written comics you’d find something a little more direct.
Disco Stu: There’s an equivalent to Cthulhu in the MU called Cthon (or something close to that spelling). And I’ve read an issue of Uncanny X-Men which references the Great Old Ones. So they exist, it’s just that the individual members of the pantheon go by different names there. I was actually wondering last night if Cthulhu is trademarked by someone since Marvel never (to my knowledge) called him by that name (hence the use to Cthon).
A few other observations: 1)Looking kind of fem in that pic Nyral.
2)Nice Rob Zombie, and by extension JLU, reference there.
3)For some reason your description of Nyral kept reminding me of Doom. Even though Doom is much more like Dormammu then Nyral. Though a battle of egos between these two would be epic.
4)I LOVE these types of characters. Pure, unbridled, unadulterated evil. A man who does what he does for the pure pleasure of it. No real plan, no real purpose, just trying to get in his lolz. A character sick enough that I want to see him lose, but who I get so swept up with that I don’t want to see him go.
OH HAI! I CAN HAZ DIE-A-BALL-ICKLE EVL?
See, now I need to get an example of what sort of fucked up games Nyarlathotep would even play before I can imagine what would stab him in the back.
Does he shuffle some stellar objects around in order to trigger a series of massive meteor impacts designed to take out an entire world’s population? Does he start a bunch of rival cults all intent on releasing opposing Lovecraftian horrors that would ripe reality apart in some cosmic war? Or is he the kind of guy that just shows up, waves his hands, and causes Australia to sink into the sea?
Zifnab: The internet provides.
Lister Sage, I don’t really think Chthon is the same as Cthulhu, as Chthon is more of a demonic magical entity and Cthulhu is more of a chaotic non-euclidean Alien type of flavor. Chthon seems more like a Hastur The King in Yellow kind of character, to me.
The important thing is someone can ask him how he and his fellow Old Ones feel about being adorable plushies that are oh so huggable…
I love Nyarlathotep as a villain because it can all at once be a bastard street-pimp, a consciousness-devouring computer program, a grotesque seductress, a godzilla-sized city-wrecker, and a science-minded chessmaster, ALL AT ONCE, and it never cramps its style. Wherever humans are fun to step on, wherever smacking hoes is the best part of the job, wherever the screams of a fragmented mind are the most perfect music, and wherever watching an entire civilization commit suicide is a laugh riot — Nyarlathotep is there, passing the popcorn.
Oh, HP Lovecraft and your failure to properly copyright your materials! Has humanity ever been better served by copy-protection failure?
…Well, maybe by Night of the Living Dead.
I wouldn’t mind Nyarlathotep being behind the main events in the Marvel U the past few years. Talk about causing chaos…
(And do you really think Mephisto has enough juice to power all the retcon in “One More Day”? Honestly.) 🙂
Man, I really want a room in the Sanctum Sanctorum that was passed down from Sorceror Supreme to Sorceror Supreme. In it is all the accumulated knowledge and research with regards to getting rid of Nyarlathotep. And it will be such a sight to see.
The flowcharts!
The mystical flowcharts!
5 Step Plan to the Removal of Evil Eternal!
… I need to stop imagining defeating Nyarlathotep as the results of an office meeting.
But Mephisto IS a pussy. No self-respecting demonic overlord moonlights as a divorce lawyer.
(Er, no offense to MGK on the lawyer crack)
malakim2099: Changing Mephisto to Nyralathotep as the power behind the breakup would be the best. Retcon. Ever!
Beacon: It makes more sense to me if Nightmare had been the one to pop up and offer that deal. Seems more like Nighty’s style. Have Peter live a constant nightmare by denying him the woman he loves. Shit, it would have made just as much sense if Thanos had shown up. Given that with taking Peter and MJ’s marriage would give him that which he can’t have with Death. Annihilation might have put a kibosh on that idea, but it would have made more sense.
sounds like when joker had mr. mxy’s powers
Nyarlathotep is the best plushie of all! And quite huggable.
I do believe that Shuma Gorath is the Marvel analogue of Cthulhu.
Oh, HP Lovecraft and your failure to properly copyright your materials! Has humanity ever been better served by copy-protection failure?
All the better to spread the meme of their existence.
Strange I have always envisioned Nyralathotep a being who perceives itself as a beneficial prophet or charismatic harbinger who seeks to reconcile all of 616-kind to the unreality of Unimaginable Chaos. But humanity is not built to accept the unreality any more than a spanner can accept C++ syntax (and then the spanner implodes into several dimensions that did not exist and undergoes sensory overload that it was never meant to experience. You don’t want to become the spanner that does survive because then you won’t be a spanner any more). Of course it doesn’t intend the the complete and utter destruction of this reality as the end goal, its just the first step in creating a new universe so that all may know the joy of the Old Gods that lie behind the unmaking of this world.
To those nameless beings our reality is something they both crave but do not comprehend,their powers though limitless unable to affect without mortal aid. Therefore Nyralathotep was recruited/created/empowered for three reasons
1. It cares about all beings,
2. It sincerely believes in its mission,
3. It alone among all the beings of Chaos can relate to both worlds, maybe not all of this ordered universe , but just enough.
However that doesn’t mean it knows the best way to go about doing so.
Evil for evil’s sake is always entertaining but ultimately devolves into a good excuse for unleashing all manner of justified ass whooping, but a driven, righteous crusade to unmake the universe is fundamentally disturbing.
I love the HELL out of this one.
Best one yet. I will fund this immediately.
I’m guessing the reason why Marvel and DC make knock-offs of Lovecraft’s ideas is so they can be trademarked (thereby not “repeating Lovecraft’s mistake” which rather misses the point of why C’thulhu and Co. are cool).
Nice idea, and fitting both a gap in Strange’s RG and Gnarly’s MO. Not keen on the visual, though.
… Isn’t that Rob Schneider?
So, he’s like, Dr Strange’s Joker?
Pedro: I got more of a Mxyzptlk vibe off of him…a really nasty Mxyzptlk, mind you…the one he becomes at the end of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow
With the Riddler’s ego.
I always thought Mephisto was a sadist as well and that the reason people in his realm suffered was because he liked seeing it. Of course, the only stories I’ve read with the character in them have been “One More Day,” a “Thunderbolts” annual, and the occasional “What If?” So I don’t claim to understand him other than he’s really evil in a way that makes me want him destroyed rather than returning over and over again to cause trouble for Strange or the Silver Surfer or whoever.
Does suffering give Mephisto power? Is it a means to an end rather than an end in itself?
@ FifthSurprise : Oh, there is a room like that, but unfortunately it’s full of the Ancient One’s socks and Radical Steve’s old skateboards.
Oh, and I hope that Shuma Gorath gets some action in this. I put forward my own pet theory: The Ghost Rider villain The Orb was subliminally inspired by Gorath. There’s actually a whole cult out there of dude with just a giant eyeball for a head. I mean, seriously, this look is going to waste right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orb_(comics)
I think what you’re looking for is your own Randall Flagg: a badass manipulator who looks good in Wrangler jeans.
PaulW: One can make a good case for RF being an avatar of the Crawling Chaos…
Nyarlathotep’s appearance in Persona 2 was a delight as well. I’ll take the ineffable crawling chaos as my final boss over some git with a trench coat any day.
“There’s actually a whole cult out there of dude with just a giant eyeball for a head.”
Residents fans?
Nyarlathotep’s appearance in Persona 2 was a delight as well. I’ll take the ineffable crawling chaos as my final boss over some git with a trench coat any day.
If you played the Japanese-only Persona 2: Innocent Sin (different from Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, which was the one released here), you got to fight Hitler. And his army of giant robots and Nazi soldiers with chainsaws.
Of course, Nyarlathotep turned out to be behind the whole thing in that one, too.
I’m with RealKivlov: Nyarlathotep is enigmatic, Nyarlathotep is incomprehensible, and the Nyarlathotep whose motivations can be explained is not the true Nyarlathotep and all that. But this in no way prevents MGK’s ideas from working: Nyarlathotep can be indistinguishable from a species-destroying sadist in one plotline, then change his apparent personality and motivations completely. Why? Every face of Nyarlathotep has its own explanation, and most of them require concepts that the likes of Strange know better than to spread.
Personally, I see Nyarlathotep as a scientist, and civilizations as the particles in his collider. He could obliterate humanity as we know it in a weekend just by explaining the right four precepts to the right fourteen people. But he won’t, because he’s already done that to another civilization. He needs us to break in a way he hasn’t seen before. A million cosmic cycles from now, when his research is finally complete, the accumulated stress-fractures of a trillion trillion dead species will tell him the answer to a question that only he can pose.
Of course, if we really piss him off, he might go back to plan A.
I can’t help but think that defeating the emissary of the Old Ones would be a bad idea. They’d make another one, plus they’d be paying attention to you. Which they aren’t really in Lovecraft. Why would N keep messing with the SSs though? Maybe “he’s” playing a double game? After all, the OO aren’t the worst Things Out There…
They wouldn’t even really make another one. He’s the soul and messenger of the Other Gods, the idiot daemon-sultan Azathoth and his mad dancing court. They don’t have minds, so they wouldn’t really decide to make another one, it’s just that their soul and messenger is simply something that can’t be destroyed, not forever.
Whatever you did to him, eventually Nyarlathotep would show up again. Possibly pissed. Possibly not. It’s really sort of hard to even ascribe such human emotions to him. And is “he” really one single entity, a god-like being with a thousand forms? Or are his 1001 masks some sort of hive mind that can appear wherever they want and transpose themselves at will? Or is it some sort of combination? Or something else entirely? Nyarlathotep is a being whose existence and motivations are simply beyond human comprehension.
Sure, at times he seems sadistic, or satanic, or scientific, but those are simply the metaphors with use to try and understand this thing, this being that could destroy us in any of a million unstoppable ways if it had a reason to. No matter how human in action and motivation the mask you’re facing may seem, the most important thing to remember is that it’s not. It was around long before humanity existed, before the earth had even began to form out of the swirling dust of the previous super-nova, and will be here until every universe and every dimension experiences its final heat-death, leaving nothing but Azathoth and his court of the Other Gods, endlessly dancing to their horrible pipers well past the end of eternity.
I agree with Caduceus; if anything what we see of Nyarlathotep could be but the merest tip of the iceberg in terms of his power and consciousness. Doubtless if some of those ancient wards and eldritch barriers established in the ancient past by the first Sorcerer Supreme ever broke down Nyarl could destroy reality, but he’s having far too much fun to care about that sort of thing. If anything, what Strange would see of him would be to human beings as a player character is to us when we sit down to play a video game. He’s there, but that doesn’t mean we see the far larger being pulling the strings behind him.
This is some amazing stuff MGK, please keep it coming.
That looks exactly like my high school yearbook photo.
Creepy.
“Changing Mephisto to Nyralathotep as the power behind the breakup would be the best. Retcon. Ever!”
Nyarlathotep would cut the deal with Peter, but leave him married to Aunt May (and in a society where that’s ok), with full memory of what the world was before the retcon.
The horror… the horror.
@lister sage: then dude i suggest you to read carnage mind bomb or carnage its a wonderful life or why i consider carnage to be the total rejection of spiderman’s ideology (responsibility vs responsibility?WTF is that?)
@ MGK: Now man this is …not good,IT’S FUCKING AWESOME srsly you must write the script to the story Nyarlathotep seems to be the mix between Neron(who makes mephisto his bitch),Carnage (yeah i know but there’s more than what meets the eye with good old cletus,he’s not only about murder nooo….he’s also about corrupting people to his chaotic mindset so that society may live in utopic murderous Hedonism) and Mxyzptlk (especially in twin forms screw alan moore’s depiction it was too anti-climactic)
May i suggest the form of a cute little kid as his default form (gender is up for you to choose & of course he changes forms as it suits him) it was done in Spawn with God & Satan & boy was it fucked up & nightmarish
about OMD Mephisto is suing joe quesada ‘ass for tarnishing his devilish name,i mean for hell sake he’s the consumer of cosmic souls not your fucking lawyer.now look any other cosmic being will mock him for this shitty story,House of M ruined the X-men (after Morrison shot their kneecaps),Disassembled ruined the scarlet witch (fuck you bendis)
civil war raped the rest of mainstream marvel(no it s not ballsy its just retarded,millar is a fucking hack)
so i beg you Mgk dont refer to these drecks in your stories & i swear your dr Strange run will feel better.
Btw when will you give a mark to Tunisia’s anthem?
To quote X-Men’s The Apocalypse: “I am as far beyond mutants as they are beyond you.” That, in essence, describes the extent of the Power of The Crawling Chaos. Nyarlathotep holds all the gods of all humanity captive, only allowing them to answer the prayers of their followers at his whim. In fact, the gods’ very existence is subject to that whim. While Mephisto and many other Marvel villains were very powerful, their might pales in comparison to Nyarlathotep, who could only be called entropy personified if you wanted to flatter him immediately prior to the incineration of your soul (assuming the didn’t take that coil to the Idiot-God as a plaything).