Mordax et al

The thing about the NYC villain scene in the 70s and 80s, the biggest thing about it is that it was basically intertwined with every other underground subculture active at the time. It was massively queer, it was leather, it was goth, it hugely punk, anarchist, communist, whatever the fuck else you could name. 

If you were sticking it to the man in the 70s/80s underground you were rubbing shoulders with the supervillain scene, from the lackeys to the heavy hitters. Like obviously there were private rooms/more exclusive clubs and shit, but  for the most part we all visited the same dives.There were a couple of punk bands working the circuit that were also low level gangs beefing with Spider-Man, Daredevil, etc. Wrote songs about whatever shit was going on at the time. Shit like ‘Ironman is a Fascist’ or hyping up big names they admired or just wanted to suck up to. At some point there was an entire band of Green Goblins. I think they broke up because of what I am going to call a ‘trademark dispute’. AKA somebody threatened to rip their fucking heads off.

Fashion was big because branding was big. I should talk about it some time but like, it was just a THING to have a name and costume you were known by, otherwise you were a nobody. Every purse snatcher with big dreams had a ‘work suit’ and a name, and it was typical to show up to the clubs wearing your suit. They were all custom made by tailors and armorers in the community, mostly who started out as non-professionals and ended up making bank that way (if they were good enough.) And of course there was a level of pissing contest about who had the fanciest costume and the fanciest gear from the biggest name guys in the job. This is where a lot of the crossover with the leather scene etc was around.

And yeah remember how I was sayin the whole scene was queer and leather as fuck? Yeah, *especially* in the bigger name villain circles everybody dated everybody. Whole fucking villain teams broke up over ex drama. Kinda sad, kinda hilarious. What was real funny was when somebody was hanging around looking for a date and ended up gettin recruited for a job, or vice versa. Lotta small fry got into it because they were dating somebody who worked for a crew, too. Not to mention the constant gossip and backbiting going on.

Which leads me right into the violence. Cause yeah, there was a lot of brawling. A lot of it friendly a lot of it not. The bigger places kept fuckers tough enough to deal with fights around, and sent anybody who started shit on premises to the hospital or a body bag.Places like that, you’d have to take your shit outside. The smaller places not so much; so they could be pretty dangerous.

Lotta drugs being casually thrown around on the scene, obviously. Mundane ones– cocaine was big in the 80s of course, but also weird science shit and stuff from other realms. You really wanted to be sure what you were taking before it sent you right to literal fucking fairyland. 

It was the HIV and Legacy virus shit that really ended up changing the scene in the late 80s early 90s. Not only did it get in the way of the sex and drugs (and there had been so much sex and drugs) but the whole fucking mutants vs non-mutants shit got really bad during that era. Things really crumbled for a while. Crime got really corporate. Golden age was over. Not that I noticed so much because that was exactly around the time I completely lost my fucking mind and got locked in Xavier’s basement, but yeah, in retrospect, end of an era.