Crime Lords Month: Armies of Darkness
April 23, 2008
After Speedy92286’s Red Skull article, my mind was left a-pondering about the expanding concept of what exactly fits into the Crime Lords team affiliation.
With their original release the Crime Lords represented those opposed to Marvel’s street-level heroes. Nothing on a cosmic scale, pretty much limited to organised crime - mafia, yakuza, that sort of thing, represented by the Kingpin’s goons and the Hand.
Then MTU gave us a Red Skull proudly bearing the Crime Lords affiliation.
Now, colour me skeptical, but I have difficulty seeing the Red Skull as the head of an organised crime syndicate. His operations are definitely more on a national or global scale.
This then brings up the question of what exactly one would associate with the Crime Lords, that justifies that sort of presence. Clearly, we’re going to have to think outside of the traditional Crime Lords box, and since Red Skull’s the primary evidence of a broader paradigm here, the answer is simple… and green.
Alright, I admit Hydra’s a no-brainer. Even if we hadn’t seen a listing of most of the teams represented in Marvel Universe, we’ve seen previews with the SHIELD affiliation, and SHIELD without Hydra is like pasta without sauce. It just doesn’t have the same flavour.
So it’s really not unfeasible to expect a horde of green-jumpsuited gun-wielding twits to throw at your opponents at an alarmingly spammy rate. This would make me a happy geek considering their (albeit short-lived) significance in the opening story arc of the Immortal Iron Fist series (Highly recommend it, btw, an excellent read), not to mention their prominence in the whole Enemy of the State story arc in Wolverine.
But if we accept that Hydra’s on the books, what other possible army-sized villainous organisations might be around the corner?
Can we expect M.O.D.O.K. and the forces of A.I.M.?
Colour me an odd shade of taupe, but I’m thinkin’ a deck built around Advanced Idea Mechanics would be pretty neat… not to mention that if I can’t have Mandarin as an Iron Man villain in a set where Iron Man’s given legend status, I’d accept M.O.D.O.K. as an alternative…
… and yes, I freely admit this post was pretty much just a roundabout way to justify that last pic. What use is having dominion over the Lost Hemisphere if I don’t abuse my power every once in a while to post something that made me giggle? 
If we get Red Skull we might get Mandarin, there is still hope!
And yes, M.O.D.O.K. in VS. would be the greatest thing ever.
“Now, colour me skeptical, but I have difficulty seeing the Red Skull as the head of an organized crime syndicate. His operations are definitely more on a national or global scale.”
The thing is, organized crime syndicates and things on a national/global scale are not mutually exclusive - in the real world, there is organized, large scale, international crime.
I’m not referring to organized terrorism, I’m referring to organized, international crime with profit as the primary motivation.
I’m thinking more in terms of how the Crime Lords have been portrayed to date, Mr Attorney At Law. Marvel’s Crime Lords affiliation has been pretty much limited to the New York based crime syndicates, with the Hand lightly splashed in. There’s been no significant link yet (with the exception of the Red Skull from MTU) with organisations with interests outside of New York other than the Hand.