ABSTRACT
Dystopia has Judeo-Christian resonance in terms of the apocalypse – the final conflict in which the forces of good overcome evil. This chapter examines the threats, the features and fears that attend dystopic worlds, and their operational role in the comic books. Indeed, without such negatives there would be no positives. It also examines the types of villains and supervillains and delves into their relevance for superhero stories. After decades of debate about the morality of horror comic books, representations of foreign forces of supernatural darkness or exogenous evil such as Dracula and pathologised Egyptian mummies began to emerge in Indian popular culture in the 1980s. The superhero can catalyse the sublime potentials of the profane state. Readers' intrigue with evil compels us to revisit concepts of the sublime. Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is a shapeless object without boundaries, an earthquake, a cataclysm, a cliff-hanger precipice that portends mortality and death.
