Day Sixty-Six: Marvel's Biggest Jerks #1 - The Running Man
You knew it. Admit it, as soon as you thought "Hmm, the biggest jerks in all of Marveldom, eh?" the very next thought that entered your head was "I wonder whether Quicksilver will be top of the chart." Well, of course he is. Not that it was a done deal - there was a long-list from which this top five was drawn, which also featured Professor X, Flash Thomson, Northstar, Henry Peter Gyrich and Ultimate Nick Fury, and any of those guys could easily have placed within the upper echelons of jerkinocity. When it comes to real, hardcore, refined and matured jerkery, though, only Magneto's kid Pietro Maximoff can stand proud and proclaim himself to be the best, which I'm sure he would not hesitate to do just before he sprinted off at a hundred miles an hour with a sneer on his face.
Quicksilver's another of these Marvel heroes who started out his comics career as a villain, in this case forming part of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who at least have nothing to fear from Trading Standards. He and his sister, the Scarlet Witch (a dead cert for a high placing if I ever do "Marvel's Biggest Lunatics"), were a little more reticent than most of the rest of the Brotherhood about the methods which they were employing to gain the upper hand in the struggle for acceptance from humankind. This was understandable, as these methods broadly equate to terrorism, and given that Magneto's plans involved things like kidnapping members of the X-Men and conquering tiny South American countries, they were also obviously barking mad methods too. Of course, his doubts may have come from the fact that he was dressed like an ice-dancing Christmas elf in his early appearances, but even his lack of faith in his dad's crazy crusade can't excuse the fact that he's also completely insufferable.
Eventually, Quicksilver joined the Avengers, at the same time as the Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye did. What a fun team that must have been to serve on, eh, readers? Two industrial grade irritants and a woman with a higher fruit loop quotient than even the most artificially-coloured American breakfast cereal, gathered together to wear Captain America down into a gibbering ball of tears. Quicksilver was the worst of them, his insufferable superiority complex and deeply-ingrained snobbery being off-putting to all around him. Nonetheless, he served with the Avengers for many years, eventually marrying Crystal of the Inhumans, with whom he had a daughter. Obviously driven past the annoyance boiling point by her husband's bad attitude and mass of personality defects, Crystal ended up having an affair, and when Quicksilver found out, the couple became estranged. This, of course, didn't stop Quicksilver from effectively stalking his wife for a bit, as via the unfortunate machinations of bored writers going through the motions of generic plots over the years the two kept turning up in the same place at the same time.
After leaving the Avengers, he eventually joined the second version of the X-Factor team, and it was during his tenure with them that the readers learned that Quicksilver's super-speedster powers mean that to him, every moment of every day feels like he's stuck at an ATM queue behind someone who doesn't know how to work the machine. Suddenly his impatience and snappish nature make more sense, and fans gained a measure of sympathy for him. His world wasn't like ours, it was a deeply frustrating one where everything was as irritating to him as he is to others. His attitude became much more understandable.
It's okay though, because we can still hate Quicksilver. The events of the House of M crossover, it transpires, were all orchestrated by him, and since he lost his powers at the end of that story, he's officially turned evil! Hooray! He's stolen the Terrigen Mists (the substance administered to Inhumans when they come of age which gives them their powers) and is going round restoring powers to those who were depowered as he was on M-Day. Only problem is that a lot of these people then go crazy or even die, but it transpires that Quicksilver doesn't care about that, and has even gone so far as to expose his six-year-old daughter to the mists and leave her in a condition whereby she is effectively addicted to them. Following this, he naturally returned her to Crystal, because who wants to deal with a drug-addicted kid? Not Quicksilver! Having gotten his daughter hooked on alien drugs (the obtaining of which involved the deaths of other Inhumans and an attempt on his own father's life), Quicksilver has now relocated to New York, where he spends his days bestowing the curse of the mists on ex-mutants and acting as official evil nemesis to X-Factor's Layla Miller.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marvel's biggest jerk - for all I said earlier about it being a hard choice, that wasn't actually the case; as always with Quicksilver, it was never a close-run thing.
Tomorrow: indie comics, I promise.
