Who will be the main villain in IDW?
 

So there have been discussions in other threads about who the main villain will be, how long they will keep certain characters around, and how long before others show up. Instead of having threads hijacked I thought I'd make this one about that topic.

There is a lot of speculation that Krang and Shredder will be the long term baddies. Now if they will work together or separately is still yet to be seen. However I'm not sold on those two being around long term. I mean if they are I'd like them to win sometimes.

Shredder and Krang will probably be the main villains for the majority of this series but they may not work together.

Other than that Baxter and Old Hob seem to be the big secondary villains and they'll likely be around for a long time.

Anyone else we see will be a Foot underling or a Rock Soldier which relates to the big two. Rat King and Leatherhead will likely appear and recur but I doubt we're going to see them as major villains.

I don't think there needs to be a "main baddy." This isn't some kind of syndicated cartoon for children with limited attention spans.

It would be nice to see a rogues gallery though as its something Mirage never really had.

See I'm of the same thinking of Andrew. I don't like a "big baddy". For me what made the Foot great in the Mirage is that they kept fighting the TMNT even after Shredder is gone. That Shredder "came back" a couple of times but was dispatched again, but they kept fighting the TMNT.

Yeah. It's not like any main stream comic books have key villains that span the franchise. I mean, you don't see Batman taking on the same clown all the time.

Wait...

It's weird to compare the TMNT to superheroes. They're not.

Though in any case, it's not like the Joker looms over everything in the Batman comics. Years can go by with no Joker. Is he Batman's arch-nemesis? Maybe. But seldom do his schemes ever eclipse those of, say, Ra's al Ghul or Bane.

They may not be superheroes, but they are comic book heroes, and if the series is going to run for any length of time, there has to be an interesting rogues gallery, and at times that means recurring "major" villains. Do I want the IDW comics to be like Fred Wolf and have Shredder and/or Krang be the villain every other issue? No. But, I do think Shredder and Krang may well be the IDW equivalent to the Joker or Ra's al Ghul.

BTW, the only reason I used Joker is because of the play on words... :P

For me it would be enough to have the Foot as the recurring threat, introduce Kari and other leaders of the Foot from around the globe. Saki doesn't have to be the only leader of the Foot.

This is slightly off topic, but I just wanted to say concerning Stockman that I hope Donnie develops a personal vendetta with him, and somehow Donatello is responsible for turning him into a mutant fly. I'm not huge on the OT influences, but I think Baxter as a mutant fly re-imagined would be a lot cooler than a cyborg Stockman. Having Donnie be responsible for such a mutation can create permanent bad blood between the two. I think it'd be interesting to touch upon this battle-of-the-brains rivalry more. Mirage did it...but not too in depth.

I think Stockman has some staying power in IDW as a recurring villain.

I guess the more I give it some thought the more I like the idea of villains being around but not always having to be present in stories. Kind of like Andrew said just cause they are around doesn't mean they have to be ever present. Like the Joker, sometimes you never knew where he was or what he was doing.

I guess the bottom line fore me is I want to see a bigger gallery of villains. I want to see the TMNT fight more then Shredder and Krang.

I think anyone expecting IDW to kill off Shredder or even Baxter or Old Hob anytime soon is kidding themselves. This series is written in a way that I imagine the villains will be around for a long time.

This isn't Mirage where most villains were one-shots, with maybe one return appearance at most.

This series seems to set-up long lasting antagonists for the Turtles similar to the cartoons.

Don't say that... Andrew might hear....

I understand that, but "main baddy" seems to imply some kind of central nemesis from which most/all stories will revolve around however minutely. IDW may or may not be doing that, but I don't think we've seen anything so far that would make us draw many conclusions.

Just one, really: with Oroku Saki/The Shredder (who is absolutely still in the present day... it's just a question of in what form), it's very, very personal.

We've seen a few villains so far, but something that bothers me is that all of them are related in some way or another. They may very well have different intentions, but still. Stockman is working for Krang, Old Hob is working for Stockman, we saw that Shredderesque shadow with Bebop, Rocksteady and Alopex in Raph's Micro, then in next issue's preview we see what seems to be Stockman and Krang talking about Alopex. It seems at times as if they're all in the same boat, and that can't be too good.

But once again, it may still be too early on to jump to any conclusions.

Well I don't see what you'd expect there.

Old Hob was mutated by Krang's mutagen, so logically he'd work for Baxter.

Likewise outside of Mirage they always have Baxter working for either Shredder or Krang for some reason. I think they feel Baxter as a stand alone character doesn't work? We only did see him once in Mirage all the way until Volume 2.

Bebop/Rocksteady and/or Alopex possibly working with the Foot and thus Shredder kind of makes sense too.

I really hope we're right and Shredder and Krang are enemies this time around. Would love to see a badass Foot Vs. Rock Soldier war.

I like the idea of a rogues gallery without an arch-nemesis. It's worked for heroes like Spider-Man.

Green Goblin/

So besides Shredder, Baxter, Krang, and Hob who do you think we might see in this series? I'd be up for seeing a new interpretation of Dragon Lord and Silver. I think both characters have potential to be reworked into something a lot better then what they were before. I mean if we are getting Bebop and Rocksteady again why not?

I'll give you 3 reasons why not:

1. Unlike Bebop and Rocksteady, there's not even anybody out there of sound mind with any kind of numb nostalgic attachment to Dragon Lord and Silver.

2. More freaks, with a whole backlog of mutants already on the horizon? And freaks with magic and alternate dimension hopping? Between these guys and Krang there would seem to be an overabundance of... "larger than life villains," to put it politely.

3. If Tom and IDW ever get so hard up that they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of existing TMNT villains for ones like Dragon Lord and Silver... why aren't they making original villains instead?