Villain Profile: Vandal Savage

What would you do with eternity? Sure, at first immortality does sound pretty awesome. Never aging, getting to see humanity grow and develop, being able to amass millions with interest, spending a lot of time with family and friends, and of course reading many books and seeing many movies. But then, the trouble sets in. Everyone else grows old, dies, leaving you alone. Sure, you can make new friends and see new family members, but they too will one day bite the dust, returning you to loneliness. In the end it would probably leave the kindest human feeling bitter, cold, and alone. Now, imagine having done that since before there were humans as we know them. Then you’ll get what Vandal Savage has gone through.

He probably remembers when each of those weapons
became a thing!

Roughly fifty thousand years ago there was a Cro-Magnon chieftain by the name Vandar Adg. Vandar’s tribe, the Blood Tribe, was about as violent as the name would suggest. Things were good, and simple for Vandar until a meteor crashed in his territory. The night was cold, and the meteor gave off a great deal of warmth. Vandar, being a simple but smart caveman, slept next to the meteor. The strange alien rock bathed Vandar in radiation, mutating the Cro-Magnon into something…new. The radiation greatly increased Vandar’s intelligence, strength, speed, and so on. He lead his tribe to dominion over the Cro-Magnon world. Thus began the eternal story of Vandal Savage.

He cut a bloody swath across human history. Vandal has claimed to be some of the most famous conquerors the world has ever known. Vlad the Impaler, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, an unnamed Pharaoh in Egypt, and Genghis Khan, to name a few. He was also one of the leaders of the Spanish Armada, Blackbeard, an advisor to Napoleon, and spent time in London as Jack the Ripper. Of course, I'd probably pick a few aliases too if I was around for as long as Savage, but seriously guy, not once did you try to be a nice guy? Try new things Savage! His first truly supervillain act was when he and his followers, precursors to the Illuminati, attempted to destroy Atlantis. They were stopped by Aquaman, but after Savage got a taste of villainy, he couldn't quit. He’s battled many different heroes of the DC Universe. He was an enemy of the Justice Society of America, and every incarnation of the Justice League of America. He sees himself as the pinnacle of human evolution, and the perfect leader for the human race. A smug SOB, ain’t he?

Do I look at the scars or not?
I'll do whatever doesn't get me stabbed.

Vandal Savage is functionally immortal. He has not aged a day since the night he slept next to the meteor. His body doesn’t age, but it’s suggested that if you stab him through the heart or set him on fire he’ll die just like any other man. He has the financial power, intellect, martial and tactical skill befitting a man that has been alive for all of human history. The one downside to his “condition” is that his body is filled with cancer cells. They cause him immense pain, and he can’t have such tissue removed. It’ll just regrow over time. Recently, exposure to other forms of cosmic radiation has weakened his immortality. Apparently his innards now age, while the shell that is his body remains eternal. Too bad he isn't a mummy. His way to get around that is harvesting the organs of his various descendants to keep his body moving. 50,000 years, odds are a very large percentage of humanity probably is related to him. He’s believed to be the first cannibal in human history, and his blood thirsty nature seems to back that up.

Vandal Savage has appeared in a number of DC’s franchises, and most of them stick more or less to the source material. He’s arguably the most dangerous “human” adversary of the JL and does his best to keep that title.

His face just screams "I'm a Dick."

He appeared in the Justice League series, portrayed by voice actor Phil Morris. He is introduced in The Savage Time three part story where somehow Vandal Savage sent a laptop to himself from the future. With the technology and historical information within it, Vandal was able to take over the Nazis Party in Germany and fundamentally change the end of WWII. Nazis Win. The JL are able to stop him and correct history, but Savage had left his mark on the group. His last and most important story was in Hearafter. In that story, Superman is supposedly killed. A short time later, Savage used a gravity control device to kill the Justice League. Unfortunately, the machine malfunctioned destabilizing gravity in our solar system killing off humanity. And throwing the planets around. So it looks cool, but just Savage. BORING! Savage spent, oh, 30,000 years alone on Earth. He somehow kept from going insane and actually learned from his hubris. Rather than using a rocket to try to find intelligent life among the stars he accepted his exile out of shame. When Superman returns from a strange time lock, Savage used a time machine to send him back to his present to stop his younger self. Savage faded from existence as the timeline corrected itself, whispering “thank you, my friend,” before vanishing. He didn’t use the machine himself because apparently he couldn’t use it to return to a point in time when he already existed. I can imagine not wanting to do the whole 50,000 years, again.

It takes a man much braver than I to look Darksied in the eye.

He also appeared in Young Justice, this time voiced by Miguel Ferrer. This version is the leader and founder of the Light, a group of the most intelligent and powerful villains of the DC verse. He has three scars across his face, revealed to be from a cave bear centuries ago. He’s a man of few words and big ambition. He used the Justice League, various villains, and the alien group known as the Reach, as part of a scheme to make Humans the masters of the Milky Way galaxy. Making him, by extension, the king of the known universe. Ambitious son of b, isn’t he?

It takes a special kind of crazy to replace Hitler.
Just saying.

Savage also appeared in the animated movie Justice League: Doom with Morris reprising his role. In it, he uses the villain Mirror Master to break into the Batcave and steal Batman’s contingency plans for if the JL members went psycho. He modified the non-lethal Batman created, and gives them to his Legion of Doom to destroy their respective nemesis. The villain Cheetah infected Wonder Woman with nano-bots that made her see every human as Cheetah. The plan was to make WW fight until she died of exhaustion. Metallo shot Superman with a Krytponite bullet, letting the combination of the radioactive element and Superman’s own largely impervious body to kill him. Mirror Master snapped a bomb onto The Flash’s wrist, which would go off if Flash tried to remove it, do nothing or slow down. Star Sapphire, villain and former lover of Hal Jordan, used the murder of robotic doubles and a fear inducing chemical in the air to strip the Green Lantern of his will and by extension his powers. Ma’alefa’ak, the Martian Manhunter’s evil brother, tricked the Martian in to ingesting magnesium sulfite and then set him on fire. The chemical kept J’onn from maintain his human form, forced him to sweat out the highly flammable chemical, and thus made a fire so intense that even water couldn’t put it out. Bane threw Batman into his father’s coffin and buried him alive. Batman, instead of being demoralized by his father’s corpse like Savage planned, rallies, escapes, and get’s Cyborg to help him save the League. The story was intense.

Savage is an interesting villain. He is by far the oldest character that I’ve ever heard of, being ten times as old as Marvel’s Apocalypse. Like Apocalypse, Savage is obsessed with the Survival of the Fittest mentality. It’s this ideology that puts him at odds with the League, apparently he thinks Superhumans and aliens helping lesser mortals slows the process of evolution and screws us over in the end. He is credited with the most brutal regimes in human history, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He’s the eternal, the merciless, the vile, Vandal Savage. Next time, just in time for Hanukkah, Magneto, the most powerful Jewish man in comics. 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandal_Savage

 http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Vandal_Savage_%28Earth-16%29

 http://newmarvel.wikia.com/wiki/Vandal_Savage_%28JLI%29

http://youngjustice.wikia.com/wiki/Vandal_Savage
http://dcanimated.wikia.com/wiki/The_Savage_Time