Marvel Introduces New Ancient Team of Evil Villains
**Warning Spoilers for Avengers: No Road Home #2**
Marvel Comics introduced a brand new team of super villains in the pages of [easyazon_link identifier=”B07KKP5Z15″ locale=”US” tag=”boundingintocomics-20″]Avengers: No Road Home #2[/easyazon_link] written by Al Ewing, Jim Zub, and Mark Waid with art by Paco Medina and Juan Vilasco and letters by Jesus Aburtov.
The team is lead by an ancient force of nature, Nyx, who is the living embodiment of darkness. And she means business. In the first issue we saw her easily take down Scarlet Witch and we assumed she single-handedly took down the gods of Olympus. Well, that wasn’t the case. She had help from her own team.
Not only were they able to easily to take down the gods of Olympus, but they made quick work of Voyager’s new Avengers team which featured some of the most powerful Avengers in Hulk, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and Hercules.
Marvel refers to them as the Nyx Family. The family consists of Nyx (Night), the twins Apate (Deceit) and Dolos (Trickery), Hypnos (Sleep), and Dizys (Misery).
Not only did Marvel introduce the team in the comic and show just how devastating they are as they easily pick apart the gods of Olympus and the Avengers, but we also got some really good insight into just exactly who these characters in the back matter.
The characters were designed by Marvel TV’s creative director Joshua James Shaw and Marvel revealed the original descriptions of the characters that were sent to him by the writing team.
The Twins–Apate (Deceit) and Dolos (Trickery)
One is the deceiver and one is the believer–so one represents malevolent lies and one represents ignorant lies. Apate is a wiry woman with a piercing gaze who never smiles. She sees hate in everyone and bring it out of them. She has short hair and a red decorative marking beneath both her eyes. Her clothing is short and simple, so she can easily move and maneuver in combat. She has a dusky red half-cloak that covers her arms most of the time, and when her hands/arms do emerge from beneath, they’re almost always wielding a thin an deadly dagger. If she throws out both her hands at the same time from beneath the cloak, a dozen or more of these daggers may spray out in a torrent of death. If she can embed one of these daggers in a being’s back, she can drive them into furious anger and send them to attack targets of her choice.
Dolos is a wiry man, Apate’s twin. He has an equally piercing gaze but always with a wicked smile on his face. He’s constantly delighted with his own cleverness. He also has short hair, and beneath his eyes are blue decorative markings. His clothing is a mirror image of his sister’s in terms of style and cut, but his half-cloak (hanging off the opposite shoulder) is dusky blue. When his hands emerge from beneath he usually has a luminescent blue sand-like substance in his hands. This powder can be used to create clouds of shimmering blue fog that’s hard to see through or, when struck in the eyes with it, it can overwhelm a person’s senses so they can’t tell what’s real and what’s an illusion.
Nyx (Night)
The Mother of Night is almost vampiric in appearance, with albino, marble-like white skin set against a thick black hooded cloak that seems to meld with her impossibly black hair. Her nails, hands and forearms are black, speckled with stars (stars in the sky, not five-pointed icons of stars) that get more numerous and dense until the white skin resumes by the elbow. Nyx’s eyes are solid black glistening marbles, with no pupils.
Hypnos (Sleep)
Hypnos is noble, upstanding, a general-type. He’s also an ends-justify-the-means type–he’ll willingly follow his mother in whatever she wants to do and believe it’s right because she said it. He’s also the sleep of reason–the sleep people are in before they get “woke” to the reality of things. He knows he’s good, therefore what he does is good and his family is also good. He’s unquestioning. Hypnos appears to be a strong Greek warlord, but his armor is black sections rimmed with silver accents instead of the red and gold or earth tones we’d expect. His helm has an ornate cover over his eyes so we cannot see them (and we never will), making his mouth a bit more creepy. He wields a pair of classic Xiphos-style Grecian blades that not only cut their opponent but also sap their strength and clarity.
Oizys (Misery)
Just this horrible, oozing mind-creature, almost Cthulhu-esque, hard to look at. She’s the voice in the head–we all know it–the inner demon that wants you to suffer. She can infect people and take them over, leave them not in their right mind. In terms of physicality, she is scrawny, serprentine, alien figure that squats on Nyx’s shoulder or coils around the throats of the people she’s influencing. (When givern power by her moth, she gets bigger and meaner.) Extremely bony hands/fingers and a lower body that’s more wormlike than human. She has no eyes, just fleshy bumps where they should be and a huge mouth filled with tiny jagged, stained teeth. Her body and head are wrapped in shredded and soiled rags. Even in the midst of a pitched battle with a cacophony of noise, her psychic “whispers” can cut through the din and build up dread and doubt within her victims if they’re not on their guard.
What do you make of this new family of super villains? Do they sound interesting to you?
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