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early life

the problems of hugo strange, and how to fix them.

some comic characters are undeservedly ignored, underrated or sidelined. a lot of the time, i actually… don’t think hugo is one of them. he is so frequently written to be one-dimensional, two-bit, and c-list, in spite of being one of the longest surviving batman rogues. let’s talk about the reasons why, and how writers can address them in future iterations.

problem 1: one-dimensionality, or usage as a plot device.

mainstream comic characters are more likely than others to be two-dimensional, and not just because they’re drawings. (groan at me if you want to, here.) ensemble casts are super common for fanservice and plot purposes, so there are usually just too many characters to flesh all of them out to the same degree.

however, hugo struggles at the hands of this because he is so frequently a plot device rather than a character of his own. he is the foil to whomever is the actual focus of the story - usually batman, or other batman rogues. he can serve lots of functions because he is lots of kinds of doctors. as a surgeon he can alter a character, give them new powers or bring them back to life. as an arkham psychiatrist he can ‘treat’ the other rogues or provide them an obstacle to break through before their breakout.

(sometimes his ‘doctor’-ness is incidental and he is more of a crime boss or consultant. this is interesting, but i don’t necessarily understand why it has to be hugo that does this, and not a better suited rogue, like carmine falcone. this is a problem to which we will repeatedly return.)

when he’s another character’s therapist, this is kind of clever and makes sense in the sense that a therapist is there to reflect their client. they’re not meant to have a personhood while they’re on the clock. it’s why it’s so jarring when a therapist launches into their own personal anecdotes and makes their client’s session about them. but… it’s also what makes him less remarkable, because he has an invisibility inherent to his purpose.

he has to take off the mask at some point. i enjoyed batman: the knight for this because while carrying out therapy he was flirting gently with pre-batman, college student bruce, and also embezzling money from his hypnotherapy clients. it wasn’t much ‘depth’, but it was very sexy, and we at least got a sense of his motivations beyond his profession.

i think every character deserves a star moment to reveal their inner life and sticky contradictions. a lot of batman villains have this, but i’m not fully convinced that hugo has had his, at least not to the fullest extent and not with his most modern version.

the fix

there are a few ways to add depth to hugo’s character. some will fail to fit the story, others will.

show him when he’s alone.

who or what is hugo when he’s alone? the reason batman: prey fucks so hard is because they actually took the time to show this. we find out he’s got a sleazy, extravagant late eighties bachelor pad, that he fucks a manikin that he gave batman’s cowl (perhaps precisely because he hates to be alone), that he’s a talented needleworker, that he likes to dress up as batman but writhes in his own inadequacy when he does (it’s an act of self harm more than anything else).

give him some sticky contradictions.

contradictions are the spice of life. most people don’t make complete sense; their sense of self is shaky.

hugo has some very easy contradictions which are unfortunately well played-out to be a little boring. like, oh, he’s a doctor/psychologist that means harm. there’s at least 6 other villains in the batman canon that are exactly that. probably more. or, oh, the madman is running the asylum. again, we’ve seen this a million times.

these are not the kinds of contradictions i’m talking about because they are based on archetypes, not on the character’s actual personality.

some contradictions i think work better for him and the basic factors of his personality are:

his obsession with control and cold analysis versus his uncontrollable desire to let loose and let his id take over.
his far-reaching desire for attention versus his fear of being discovered for the wrong reasons.
his consciousness of status and building a sterling reputation as an authority in his field versus his willingness to be bitchy and unpleasant to everyone he meets
the classic ‘frankenstein’ plot (again, well played out, but at least based in things he does and not simply what you expect of him): his willingness to torture his experimental subjects versus his paternal instincts and desire to foster an emotional connection with them.
his hatred and envy of batman versus an overwhelming desire to be overpowered (and fucked?) by him, to lose himself inside of batman. perhaps not a contradiction, but a trait i wish was more explicit :)
his desire to take advantage of and exploit his clients and patients versus the fact he is well schooled and genuinely very helpful (see, i just flipped one of the archetypical contradictions the other way round and it works much better - we expect him to be evil so let’s just add some crunchy morality)
his being closed-off and difficult to read versus the fact his entire scientific career has been a long fucking trauma dump.

problem 2: why does he have to be a batman villain?

hugo’s position in the batman canon is liminal. he is sometimes a genuinely helpful psychiatrist treating a hero, and sometimes a malicious one. (sometimes both!) he is sometimes the arbiter of ‘justice’ in arkham, but sometimes he’s a patient instead. and with his batman cosplay habit, he finds himself caught between the classic rogues gallery and the plainclothes antagonists.

without his obsession with batman, you might wonder why he has to be in batman at all. i mean, early day hugo was just frankenstein or a crime boss, and modern day hugo is just a fucked up psychiatrist who sometimes fakes his death. i have always felt that his ‘i want to be batman’ thing is a little bit tacked on. it’s the thing that makes him more of a batman villain than anything else, but i desperately want more than that. if you want a ‘villain is obsessed/infatuated with batman’ story, there are many flashier villains for that role.

the fix: emphasise gotham’s role.

hugo isn’t really a batman villain. he’s a villain to gotham itself. he’s a villain to everyone. what makes him so dangerous is the way that he can get under the skin of everyone involved in the story. hugo’s terror is more individualised than poisoning the water supply or dosing the whole city with joker gas. you get the sense that everyone he meets is another chess piece to move around the board. gotham has lots of character. it’s simultaneously gothic and noir. a corrupt and haunted place, rife with conspiracies, spilled blood, trauma. hugo is a part of that character; he is embedded in a city and a system that enables his evil.

he is negation, he is control, he is a power trip that threatens to engulf the whole city, but he will do it through a tight network of puppets and media outlets, not grand acts of terror. i have always maintained that hugo works the best when he is an example of all the worst parts of authority and institutions. gotham’s institutions are all corrupt and contradictory and hypocritical — and whether hugo is literally at the helm of arkham, or a smaller cog in the machine, he is well placed to be a psychological/psychiatric exemplar. he is the fear that we truly cannot trust the people who are meant to care for us and make us better. they have a vested interest in making us easier to control instead.

i’m in two minds about the main two kinds of gotham history. gotham is always gritty and fucked up, but has it always been cape caper weird? did the city create the preconditions for batman by already being weird and full of costumed creeps, or did it get significantly weirder because batman showed up?

i think hugo works better with the latter, but i don’t really mind either way. he works well as an early-game batman villain because he can be trying to drag the city back to normal, back to the pre-batman status quo - and failing, because everything is collapsing around him and he himself is falling victim to the allure of capes and theatricality. it’s an interesting conflict to have someone whose evil blended into the background until it didn’t because everything got weird around him and a keener eye was turned upon the seats of authority where he was hiding. seeing all this flagrant disinhibition… it can’t be good for such a repressed mind. hugo is gotham’s attempt at repression, at forceful rationalisation, but he’s also just fun in the sense he craves to be a part of the wild, spandex and leather landscape, and resents that he can’t be. he’s very cucked, as a character. i’d like to see more of that because his resentment makes him doubly violent.

or: don’t make him a villain at all.

i think something sorely missed in the comics is getting to see hugo do his job normally. of course, mediocre tenured professors and renowned therapists are a dime a dozen, but i’d like to see more stories where he is genuinely just a guy in gotham. a horrible guy, but a guy nonetheless.

i like him in harleen for this reason - he’s an asshole, but he is not the antagonist of the piece. he’s a little piece of gotham, keeping all the worst institutions ticking along.

problem 2a: making him the decoy villain.

many Hugo plots end with him prematurely dying or ending up out of the picture because he was really just a conduit for another, bigger villain.

i have numbered this as a symptom of problem 2, because it is related and the solution is basically the same. i think this problem occurs when the writer feels the plot doesn’t have enough stakes or doesn’t feel enough like a batman story, so their solution is to add more batman villains, rather than leaning into the kinds of batman stories to which hugo lends himself well.

problem 3: content restrictions.

i feel strongly that hugo is best placed in pessimistic stories that are able to tackle mature themes. his stories demonstrate the way that gotham and its justice system is rotten to the core and you can only take that to its most logical and fucked up conclusion if you are allowed to go to some fucked up places.

in a lot of media aimed at younger viewers he just ends up being an incredibly generic mad scientist and it’s underwhelming. like, gotham hugo was guilty of this problem too in the later seasons, but at least the older intended audience meant his motives could be more sexual and sadistic.

the fix: just… cast him in maturer stories.

there isn’t another solution to this (that keeps the spirit of hugo) except for that.

as a psychologist he is usually a psychoanalyst… so psychosexual shit is well-placed at the centre of his plots. not simply because i’m horny! you need this so you can savour the turmoil of someone so coldly analytical racked with passions he is incapable of controlling. the passions in question don’t need to be sexual, but they’re a lot of fun when they are!

problem 4: the writer condemns hugo’s ideas (or whatever ideology he is written to represent), only to perpetuate them quietly in the rest of the story.

hugo is a great vehicle for exploring the philosophical and ethical horrors of justice, incarceration, medical institutions. lots of writers have done cool stuff with this. a continual problem is that so many of his stories commit the very same crime of which they accuse him.

prey’s hugo is violently misogynistic and manipulating an already violent and corrupt justice system in his favour. yet by the end of it the ‘bad cops’ are ousted or clearly distinguished from the ‘good cops’ and the vast majority of the women in the comic are objectified (but hugo fucking a manikin is freakish, of course). happily ever after i guess.

it should be clear from my pornographic writings that i have no problem with finding sexual gratification in hugo’s fucked up motivations and philosophies. i just wish that they were interrogated more deeply in canon, because it makes so many of his stories thematically muddled. it’s the trouble with trying to do a deconstructive batman story, i guess - you have to decide how far you’re going to go in ripping holes in the status quo till eventually you have to ship of theseus it - with all the parts removed and/or replaced, is this still a batman story? likewise, i don’t think you can do a story about the cruelties behind arkham’s gates without having to unravel arkham’s existence. maybe that’s why hugo is so easy to fuck up.

gotham, the tv show, actually does this well - and is pre-batman in the timeline - because arkham was awful before hugo, and awful after him too. the environmental and political consequences of his experiments continue to impact upon gotham long after he has left his position.