Hugo Strange
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- This is an article on the Batman villain Dr. Hugo Strange. For the Marvel Comics hero, see Dr. Strange.
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Hugo Strange is a fictional character in DC Comics and a nemesis of Batman.
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[edit] Fictional character biography
[edit] Pre-Crisis history
Hugo Strange first appeared in Detective Comics #36 (February, 1940) and is considered one of the first recurring villains Batman ever faced. He preceded The Joker and Catwoman by a couple of months.
He appeared during the Golden Age as a scientist who turned homeless test subjects into hulking zombies by administering a powerful artificial growth hormone (that acted on the pituitary gland); a side effect caused the victim to become almost mindless and brute - as if from the strain of the unnatural growth. Strange administered it to The Batman, but he saved himself by creating a drug that prevented any abnormal secretions from the pituitary gland (the Earth-Two Batman had biochemical training equal to a Ph. D). Like the Joker, he appeared to die several times before a punch from Batman sent him tumbling off of a cliff, and he was seen falling to his supposed death in Detective Comics #46.
He returned in the 1970s (on Earth-One, although the two different Stranges must have had identical origins) during the "Strange Apparations" arc. Having survived his earlier "death," Strange was running a private hospital for Gotham's wealthy where he held them hostage for ransom. When Bruce Wayne checked into the hospital to recover discreetly from radiation burns he received as Batman, Strange discovered Batman's dual identity and attempted to auction the knowledge off to Gotham's top villains. Mob boss Rupert Thorne tried to torture the information out of him, but apparently ended up killing Strange (who'd actually survived) before he could learn that Wayne was Batman.
Strange's "ghost" haunted Thorne until he turned himself in to authorities.
The Earth-Two version of Strange also survived the fall he himself experienced; however, he was paralyzed. After years of physical therapy, he regained enough movement to write out the surgical techniques needed to repair the damage to his body - and bribe a surgeon to perform the operation. However, the surgeon lacked Strange's skill, leaving him physically deformed (the surgeon died for his failure). Frustrated at his inability to take revenge on the long-dead Batman, he used one of his devices to capture Starman's cosmic rod, to use it's power to attack The Batmans friends and items, trophies, etc. During the storm he generated in Gotham to obtain the device (simultaneously, another electrical storm was raging on Earth-One, al la Star Trek's Mirror Universe Story), he created a dimensional doorway to Earth-One, which brought that universe's Batman (mysteriously, the rift opened right in front of the original Batman's tombstone) over to Earth-Two and allowed him and that world's Robin to join with the original Batwoman in defeating Strange, overcoming his attempts to defeat them with their own Bat-gadgets. Batman caused Strange to realize he wasn't angry at Batman - he was angry at his own wasted life and deformed body. Strange then used the Cosmic Rod to commit suicide.
Batman's time among them allowed the Earth-Two Robin (his old partner) and Batwoman (who had loved him for years) to come to terms with their Batman's death. Starman sent the Batman of Earth-One home; he was grateful to have met Batwoman (the Batwoman of Earth-One died several years earlier - he had forgotten how much he liked her). After he left, the remaining heroes wondered what force had drawn Batman to an empty graveyard in the middle of the night during an electrical storm...
[edit] Post-Crisis history
Post-Crisis, Strange was reintroduced in the "Prey" arc as a psychologist that was hired to use his skills to help bring in Batman. He eventually figured out Batman's secret identity, but instead of revealing it to the public, he kept it secret.
His first meeting with Batman was later retouched in Matt Wagner's Batman and the Monster Men. The character was introduced in the middle of a grueling workout, considering his lot in life:
| “ | "I am a product of this city. My early childhood scarred by trauma and grief. The experience has honed and directed me. I now seek to make the most of my ordeals for the benefit of others. I work tirelessly for what I see as the betterment of all mankind. To that end, I have rigorously trained my body. Attained its absolute peak of physical perfection. Unfortunately... there are certain genetic limitations to what I might achieve."
From Batman & The Monster Men #1, by Matt Wagner |
” |
As he exercised, the Professor's features were obscured, leaving the reader to conclude that Batman himself was the speaker. Strange was then revealed to be the true speaker as he lamented the genetic hurdles that prevented him from reaching perfection. The theme of Strange being a dark counterpart to Batman recurred throughout the work. Short, bowlegged, near-sighted, and bald, Strange was acutely aware of the genetic limitations that no amount of hard work could overcome, and singularly driven to find a way to improve humanity at a genetic level. According to Commissioner Gordon, Strange was "abandoned as a child, grew up in state homes. A bright kid, but he apparently had a hell of a temper. Nobody knows how he put himself through college and medical school." (Batman and the Mad Monk) He was raised in an orphanage on the lower East Side of Gotham, not far from the infamous "Crime Alley", in the heart of a part of Gotham known as "Hell's Crucible". Strange became professor of Psychiatry at Gotham State University, but had his tenure suspended due to his increasingly bizarre theories in genetic engineering. At some point, he was approached by the gigantic and multi-talented Sanjay, an orphaned native of India who sought Strange's aid in curing his sick brother. Strange agreed to help, and Sanjay worked loyally by his side from that point onward. Borrowing money from Sal Maroni, who was in the employ of Gotham's criminal kingpin Carmine Falcone, Strange set up a lab, and by bribing a corrupt orderly was able to find test subjects from Arkham Asylum - people that had been institutionalized so long that they would not be missed.
Far from yielding the genetically superior men he had hoped for, Strange's experiments had literally monstrous results, with his test subjects turning into gigantic superstrong "Monster Men", possessing almost no human intelligence and cannibalistic instincts. Strange began to use these Monster Men in order to raise the money he needed to pay back his mafia connections. Batman became involved after discovering some of the gruesome remains of the Monster's Men's cannibalistic rampages. When Strange set his creations free at an illegal poker game, helping himself to the victim's money after the slaughter, his mafia connections began to grow suspicious. Batman tracked Strange down, confronting the mad scientist (who Batman immediately noted was far stronger than he pretended to be), but was captured by Sanjay and thrown to the Monster Men as an intended meal. To Strange's astonishment and delight, Batman was able to not only hold off the creatures, but use them in part of an inventive escape. Strange was enthralled and thrilled by Batman, believing that he had found a genetically perfect man. He created one final Monster Man using a drop of Batman's blood, and while his creation still had many of the flaws of its "brothers", including the lack of intelligence and cannibalistic instincts, it seemed physically far superior, lacking most of the grotesque disfigurements that had plagued Strange's earlier work. However, Strange was forced to destroy his lab in order to evade capture. Soon after, he turned the Monster Men loose, including Sanjay's brother (who had been mutated in a failed attempt to cure him), at the estate of Carmine Falcone, where Strange's mafia connections were staying. Strange wanted a fresh start, and realized that the mafia was still a link to his experiments. In the battle that followed, all of the Monster Men were killed, along with a large number of Mafia and Sanjay (who was attempting to avenge his fallen brother). Strange escaped in the chaos, only to brazenly appear on TV shortly afterwards. He had succeeded in eradicating all links between himself and the Monster Men experiments, and was so sure that he could not be linked to them that he began to appear on TV as a psychological expert on the mysterious "Batman" the city was increasingly curious about.
His greatest desire is to become Batman. To that end, he has tried several times to kill Batman in elaborate or peculiar ways, and then take his place, but all have met with failure. At one point in his career, he was shot twice and dumped into a river; it was then assumed he had died. However, in Doug Moench's storyline "Terror" he mysteriously came back. He decided to work with another of Batman's enemies, the Scarecrow, and use him as a tool to help him capture Batman. Scarecrow turned on Strange, however, impaling him on a weathervane and throwing him in the cellar of his own mansion. The Scarecrow then made a plan of his own to use against Batman, and subsequently trapped him, injected him with his fear toxin and placed him in Strange's abandoned mansion, where he would have to get past a series of deadly traps in order to escape.
Finally, Batman was caught in one of Scarecrow's traps and fell into the cellar, but he grabbed Scarecrow and dragged him down with him. Scarecrow's trap was rigged to have the cellar slowly flooded, and now, as the water level rose, Scarecrow furiously tried to kill Batman. Strange, who had mysteriously returned to life, stopped him. Suddenly, the water pressure caused the cellar walls to crack, and the three of them were swept into a nearby river. In the ensuing chaos, Batman caught Scarecrow, but lost sight of Strange.
Both "Prey" and "Terror" were set during Batman's early years. In the modern timeline, he returned in a five part arc that ran through Gotham Knights #8-12. He was posing as a psychiatrist doing standard stress evaluations at Wayne Enterprises. While Bruce Wayne was on his couch, Strange drugged him with a powerful hallucinogen in order to coax Wayne into admitting that he was Batman. Batman escaped and triggered a post-hypnotic suggestion in himself, forcing him to completely repress the Batman aspect of his mind until Robin and Nightwing could thwart Strange and take him to Arkham Asylum.
Following that, Strange reappeared as the head of a gang of super-criminals attempting to take control of Gotham's East Side, then controlled by Catwoman. Catwoman joined Strange's gang, then allowed its members to "find out" that she was intending to betray them, faking her death when they attempted to eliminate her for her betrayal. Although she was able to defeat and imprison most of the gang, and even convinced Strange to give up and leave the East Side alone, the Professor still mocked her by pointing out that he had faked his own death far more often than she had.
[edit] Other media
[edit] Batman: The Animated Series
- See also: The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne
In Batman: The Animated Series, he ran a rest hospital that he used to blackmail Gotham's elite with secrets he found out with a machine that read minds. Bruce Wayne went to the hospital and went under the "treatment," which allowed Strange to discover his secret identity. He auctioned off this information to a trio of Gotham's villains: The Joker, The Penguin, and Two-Face. Two-Face had personally known Bruce Wayne, and later accused Strange of fraud when Batman switched the tape with one he had created that portrayed Strange as fabricating the secret identity. Strange tried to save his skin by simply telling the villains that Bruce Wayne was Batman, but they simply scoffed at the idea, thinking he was lying. The trio then tried to kill him by throwing him out of an airplane. Batman saved him at the last minute, however, and had Robin show up at the crime scene disguised as Bruce Wayne to discredit Strange's claims of knowing the Dark Knight's secret identity. Strange was voiced by Ray Buktenica.
[edit] Justice League Unlimited
In Justice League Unlimited, Strange returned as a member of Project Cadmus. His appearance was excessively brief, however: seated at the Cadmus table in "The Doomsday Sanction" with no lines. Producer/writer Dwayne McDuffie confirmed that Strange's appearance was intended to set up a later use of the character, presumably in "Question Authority", where a torture scene serves to have Cadmus need to pull information from the Question's mind (a process that Strange is undoubtedly familiar with). However, due to the Bat-Embargo, Strange became unavailable, and his place in Cadmus was taken by Dr. Moon. It can be inferred that Cadmus learned Batman's secret identity from Strange.
[edit] The Batman
Hugo Strange appears in The Batman series voiced by Frank Gorshin (who played The Riddler in the 1960s Batman TV show) and later by Richard Green. In this series, Strange - a psychologist at Arkham Asylum - appears fat and with hair in the episode Strange Minds with the Joker in his first primary role, though he had appeared previously in the "Meltdown" episode. He is portrayed as being far more fascinated with the deranged criminals at Arkham and how their minds work than actually finding a cure for their madness, on more than one occasion provoking them to cause more mayhem, and is a master chemist, programmer, and at robotics. While at first not technically a true antagonist, he is sly and cunning in his efforts to study the rogues gallery (no matter how many lives are put at risk, as demonstrated in his debut, when he, instead of probing Joker's mind to find Detective Yin, starts asking various factions of the madman's psyche about their past and origin as Joker, thus leaving Yin to die. Also, in Fistful of Felt, wherein Strange manages to cure Arnold Wesker, the Ventriloquist, from his problem, only to turn him again into a criminal when he studied Scarface and returned him to Wesker's apartment). In a later episode, he does in fact design a robotic villain called D.A.V.E. to believe it is a criminal itself and hunt down Batman, as Strange has an obvious obsession with him (the Batman's own determination to hunt the criminals down being just as fascinating to the criminal psychoanalyst as the criminals themselves). In that final episode of the third season of the series, he pulls a gun out at Batman, thus sealing his reputation as a villain. He's currently incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, having been ironically dubbed insane by his colleagues after the D.A.V.E. incident.
In the fourth season episode "Strange New World", Hugo Strange, from his cell in Arkham, infects Batman and Robin with a toxin, claiming it to be an antidote against said toxin. This makes Batman and Robin see everything around them as zombies; Strange claimed to them that he had distributed a chemical throughout town, making everyone into zombies loyal to him. This was a blatant lie Strange made to mess with Batman's head, and in order to trick him into spreading the real chemical that would plague Gotham's population with hellish visions of monsters (this chemical had been confiscated by the police). Robin was cured about halfway through the episode (although in Batman's eyes, he had been infected and turned into a zombie). Batman eventually realized the truth at the last moment, and allowed Batgirl to cure him. The zombie scheme may have been a nod to Strange's m.o. from the Golden Age.
Even later in the same season, Strange appeared as one of the many supervillains held hostage by the demented vigilante Rumor. As Rumor moved to the machine he would use to execute all criminals at once, Strange, always fueled by the need to know about the reason behind every act, asked him the reason of his behaviour and the motives behind the imprisonment of all the villains. When Rumor gave him the answer(that he was killing all of them in retaliation for the attack that crippled his boss) Strange laughed, and gave him the real reason, with his immense psychological skill and knowledge: he felt guilty about his inability to save his boss, and the guilt for his failure consumed him and drove him to kill all sources of guilt: the supervillains themselves. Later, Strange is one of the few supervillains not seen in any fight scene, along with Catwoman. This hints at the possibility he might have very well escaped-yet again.
