Context Is All

These are the oligarchs who seek to rule every aspect of our lives, and the current US regime is doing everything possible to facilitate that because it is owned by them. https://t.co/worHjFkOaR

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 16, 2026

The super villains in the comic books are scarier because they are all trying to take over the world (and sometimes succeed). And in the context of the comic book world, that’s a real threat, the kind of ultimate threat that readers are supposed to take seriously. 

I still remember a “Fantastic Four” from my childhood that ended with our heroes thwarting Dr. Doom’s latest attempt to take over the world. As he fled defeat to fight another day, Reed Richard’s noted they had to let him go because trying to take over the world wasn’t, after all, a crime. (Huh?) And the other running conceit was that Doom was the head of a sovereign nation (the fictional kingdom of Latveria), so he had diplomatic immunity (which, by the way, doesn’t protect Putin from arrest in certain countries, which is why he almost never travels outside Russia).

There’s a reason live action comic book movies don’t track the comic books religiously. You can put real people in costumes and silly scenarios, but you expose how ludicrous comic books are if you try to make real people act like that.

Alex Karp is a comic book character who escaped to the real world.  He thinks money gives him great power. That’s where he fails, fundamentally.

He’s also kind of a dimwit who, like most of his ilk, thinks the old jibe “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich,” is commutative and so reversible: “If you’re so rich, you must be smart.”

Funny how nobody ever notices the smartest people in human history were seldom rich in the monetary sense.