Episode 214 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Justice Comics #695

Our first appearance for us of Mr Hideous

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Would that I could be as excited about birthdays as Christopher and especially Adam.

Okay, but Same Age Day 2024 is going to be really rough. Everyone being 40 at the same time? Get ready for unexplainable back pain!

So Mr. Hideous is the Joker from Tim Burton’s Batman?

Drinking food and eating beverages sounds like exactly the kind of catering you’d get at an avant-garde art show.

What an absolutely bizarre story. Betcha that art critic comes back as a one-off villain later.

Night Hunter like… Ansel G. Moreau’s breakthrough movie role?

“I asked a yes or no question.” The regret is palpable. :smiley: Hell of a post-credits blooper, too.

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“So Mr. Hideous is the Joker from Tim Burton’s Batman?”

Haven’t listened yet, but my first thought was of Batman Forever, since this looks exactly like a symmetrical Twommy-Face Lee Jones, with maybe the tailoring service from the Animated Series version of Riddler.

IIRC, Hideous’s deal is something about wanting to proclaim that all beauty is ugly and all ugliness is beautiful. If that’s true, there’s a certain irony in him looking just like Twommy, only with more symmetrical features, since facial symmetry is one of the most generally agreed upon standards for what constitutes beauty in humans.

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Wait, I thought Mr. Hideous was more of a Scarecrow style villain? Am I thinking of someone else?

From the original notes we have on him from episode 115:

Mr. Hideous was a guy in a spooky ghost mask who used poisonous gas to confront people with their greatest fears, etc. He got revamped quite a bit in the ’80s as a victim of his own crimes - overexposure to his own gas left him horribly scarred, so he stopped wearing the mask (his own face being pretty bad on its own now) and and started wearing tacky suits. His gimmick went from being “I will terrify you” to “I will show you how terrible I am”

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