Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #523: Hue Vile

Not for the first time, I find a somewhat recent character introduced to a comic series that probably won’t be coming back but got a fairly decent first appearance but will probably never appear again.

This time, it’s the weird Batman villain Hue Vile.

Hue Vile, real name Hue Vile, first appeared in Detective Comics #1034 from March of 2021.  He was a mild-mannered assistant for the newly elected Mayor Nakano, a former beat cop elected on an anti-vigilante platform.  Granted, that was under the previous creative team, and this first issue was the start of a run from writer Mariko Tamaki with artwork on Dan Mora, a guy who seems to be drawing a whole lot more stuff these days.  Anyway, if you’re thinking that’s an obvious supervillain name, during the course of this storyline, Huntress and Barbara Gordon, here in the role of Oracle, say as much to each other because Hue Vile is a supervillain after all.

However, Hue had some superpowers, and that is what makes him dangerous.  See, as a child, Hue got infected with some kind of weird parasite.  Doctors attempting to remove it found such a move could kill the boy, but he seemed to be healthy enough.  Sure, he was hungry no matter how much he ate, but that was temporary when he learned he had to use a new way to feed.  See, the parasite needed to be fed, and it fed off anger and violence.  Hue could spit a chunk of it off into someone else, making the person angry enough to commit an act of violence, usually murder.  That’s how Hue fed now, and he started off by infecting his mother to kill his brother, and it went from there.

Hue, no dummy, realized the best place for someone like him was to get involved in Gotham City, preferably in a government job that might get him close to Batman, a guy who had a lot of anger and violence in his wake.  To that end, he moved to Keystone City and got a low-level city government job, and then made sure he only infected people whose sudden rage would be something people wouldn’t notice too much.  His victims tended not to live very long, but he didn’t care.  He then worked his way up the civic ladder to different cities until he got his “dream job” in Gotham as the mayor’s new assistant.

Then one of his victims killed a woman whose father was one Roland Worth, one of the richest men in Gotham, a solid slab of muscle that looked to be about eight feet tall and dressed like a mobster from the Roaring 20s or something.

Circumstantial evidence suggested Bruce Wayne, one of the dead woman’s neighbors, might have been responsible, and it didn’t help that the lone witness to the crime was Lady Clayface, and she was seen taking the dead woman’s form while experiencing extreme amnesia and stumbling towards Bruce Wayne.

Oh, yes, Bruce had lost Wayne Manor and a good chunk of his personal fortune around the time this story started.

Anyway, Worth wasn’t exactly the reasonable type, but this is about Hue Vile, a guy who didn’t need to invent a supervillain sobriquet.  Hue was just infecting people while Worth was tearing the city apart trying to take out either Bruce Wayne or Batman, since he figured Batman was protecting Bruce.  The Huntress entered the case when a woman she had befriended also died at the hands of one of Hue’s infected victims, and she was infected herself, but it turned out the parasite could be killed for anyone other than Hue with UV light and some common antibiotics.  Or antifungals.  Antisomething.

But then another infected person attacked one of the Penguin’s goons, giving the Penguin some knowledge of what was going on, and teaming up with Worth (who had money on both the legal and illegal side of things), used a captured Vile to infect Batman.  Batman had just enough willpower to hold himself somewhat in check, and when Huntress found Vile, he spit out the parasite, allowing her to shoot it with her crossbow, an act that cured all the infected but killed Hue.

Hue’s autopsy showed his body was a mess, with the coroner describing his brain as being like Swiss cheese and weird eggs just falling out of the corpse and rolling away.  So, will Hue Vile be back?

Um, he’s dead, so probably not.

So, will I cover Roland Worth next?

Nah.  I pretty much said everything there was about the guy here.  He was just a one note angry guy who wanted to kill Bruce Wayne.

Who will I cover next?

I’ll figure that out next week.