About Giganta; I remember in the cartoon (in some flashback episode) that Apache Chief got his powers as part of some ritual but, unbeknownst to him Giganta witnessed the event and coveted his power. She stole it. However, when I looked this stuff up today, it turns out that she is a traditional nemesis of Wonder Woman (starting way back in 1944), which is why I ended up reversing the causal relationship.

My point, before I talked myself out of it, was to bag on the balance of powers: everybody paired up. Then after looking at the collection, it became clear that only some groups were paired up and that, in reality, most of those bad guys are enemies of the same few individuals (Superman, Batman, and the Flash), which is probably owed to the long history of each of those comics. But, then I noticed that the bad guys were just generically smarter than the good guys, and that it was their greed, not being dumb, that got in the way of their victories.

By this point I had ceased to have a point altogether. What? A guy can’t just talk about something?

Solomon Grundy, by the way, is a nemesis of Green Lantern. Alan Scott Green lantern, which makes sense because of the most absurd weakness in comic history (note the hyperbole): wood (Grundy, having been reanimated after floating in a swamp for 50 years was made up, in large part, of wood).

I have decided, by the way, that almost every single comic character sounds way the hell cooler when you give their life history as a 3 paragraph synopsis. Check out “Super Friends” on wikipedia, the only characters that sound dumb are the ones created by Hanna-Barbara (Black Vulcan, Apache Chief, Samurai. note: none of the villains seem to have been created for the show).

Apache Chief and Giganta were, to my recollection, made expressly for the cartoon. And I recall Grant Morrison writing to pretty hilarious effect that he could have taken the easy way out with his vegetarian Animal Man character in the 90’s by having him battle some sort of carnivore (a cop-out he avoided).

But most of these characters were simply imported from the comics. A “negative” image of a protagonist is always a pretty standard storytelling device, from Darth Vader (who is almost literally the evil Luke Skywalker) to Captain America’s Nazi enemy the Red Skull.