With his dome helmet, purple cloak, and fishnet-covered green bodysuit, Mysterio's an instantly recognizable
supervillain.
But just because you can recognize him on sight doesn't mean you know everything about
the arachnid-hating trickster who's been one of Marvel's most tenacious villains.
Of everyone who's ever worn Mysterio's fishbowl helmet, Quentin Beck — created by Steve
Ditko and Stan Lee — is by far the most well-known.
“Here to save the world from the evils of technology corrupting the human spirit.”
“...Are we being punked?”
Originally a stuntman and makeup artist who turned to crime after getting frustrated with
the movie industry, Beck first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #13.
His first step in taking down Spider-Man was to impersonate the masked webhead by using
his technological prowess to mimic Spidey's powers and frame him for various crimes.
With Spider-Man's popularity at an all-time low, Mysterio could swoop in as a hero when
he took down Spider-Man along with keeping the money he'd stolen earlier.
As you'd expect, Spider-Man took down Mysterio and cleared his name, but Mysterio would continue
to pop up over the years, including a role as one of the original members of the Sinister
Six.
However, one of his most interesting roles came in 1980, when Beck was revealed as having
actually appeared way back in the second issue of Amazing Spider-Man, disguised as one of
a crew of aliens in a truly bizarre early story.
This helped to establish what is arguably Mysterio's greatest strength as a character:
he can make any story work with his mastery of illusions… no matter how weird it might
get.
Mysterio's focus is usually less about killing Spider-Man than trying to drive him insane,
a quirk that shows up very early in the character's identity.
In 1965's Amazing Spider-Man #24, Mysterio's dedication to the long con is truly demonstrated
when Dr. Ludwig Rinehart arrives at the Daily Bugle, making a compelling case that Spider-Man
is a hair's breadth away from complete insanity.
Spidey shrugs it off at first, but when he begins to see his arch-villains crawling out
of the walls to attack him before disappearing in smoke, he's a bit more convinced.
He pays Dr. Rinehart a visit to see if he can get some help, but the hallucinations
get so bad that Spider-Man gets one step away from revealing his secret identity.
Fortunately, Daily Bugle boss J. Jonah Jameson bursts in to accuse the not-so-good doctor
of being a fraud.
With his mind clear, Spidey quickly defeats Dr. Rinehart and discovers, as you might expect,
that it's actually Quentin Beck in disguise.
While Beck's plan wasn't successful, it established his modus operandi early on — Mysterio could
never beat Spider-Man in a fair fight, so he uses deception to drive the wall-crawler
to defeat himself.
Mysterio, master of existentialism
Another notable attempt at getting Spidey to crack came in 1992's Web of Spider-Man
#90.
In the issue, Spider-Man finds himself taking on the world-devouring Galactus, and wakes
up afterwards to discover that he's a card-carrying, A-list celebrity who's been enjoying the good
life ever since his brief stint in the wrestling ring against Crusher Hogan — an event that
happened way back in his very first appearance.
Something's amiss on the set of his newest feature film, when some of his toughest villains
attack.
After dispatching Hobgoblin and Venom, Spidey figures out what's really going on.
Mysterio hired Max Shiffman to help him construct an entire alternate life for Spider-Man to
get trapped in.
While the plot is classic Mysterio, the issue is notable for an additional wrinkle that
it provides to Mysterio's character.
While fighting Spider-Man, Mysterio, disguised as Venom, reveals that when his helmet was
cracked during their first fight, it exposed Quentin to the hallucinogenic mists that lets
him control illusions.
With his exposure to the mists, his own grasp on reality was shattered, leaving him unable
to tell illusion from reality.
It's an interesting idea, but it’s only occasionally been revisited since.
The Marvel Universe has always been connected.
The very first issue of Amazing Spider-Man has him dropping by to hassle the Fantastic
Four, and Spidey and Daredevil in particular have an especially long bad guy exchange program.
The Kingpin, Daredevil's greatest and most well-known arch-enemy, was originally a Spider-Man
villain, and The Owl, Electro, and, of course, Mysterio have all jumped back and forth between
the heroes.
In "Guardian Devil," a 1998 arc of Daredevil written by filmmaker Kevin Smith and drawn
by future Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, Daredevil wrestles with the responsibility
of taking care of a child that seems to be either the Messiah or the Anti-Christ.
However, after a quick consultation with Dr. Strange and Mephisto — the actual, literal
Devil in the Marvel Universe — he realizes that he's been drugged and that the baby is
just a baby.
Mysterio, newly diagnosed with lung cancer and an inoperable brain tumor from his years
of getting high off of his own hallucinogenic supply, had enacted a grand revenge scheme
against his second-most hated foe.
Once the trick was revealed, Mysterio was hopeful that Daredevil would kill him.
Once that failed, Mysterio took care of the matter himself, in a death that spelled the
end for Quentin Beck's run as Mysterio… for a while.
“I always did like a good cliffhanger.”
While there are other people who have worn the Mysterio mantle in the main Marvel Universe,
also known as Earth-616, there's another version worth mentioning: the Mysterio of the Ultimate
Universe.
While other characters would get a complete top-to-bottom reimagining for Marvel’s rebooted
Ultimate comics, the Ultimate version of Mysterio wasn't all that different from the 616 version.
He first showed up in Ultimate Spider-Man Annual #3, and his biggest difference from
his 616 counterpart was that he had a worse costume.
While some would find fault with a fishnet-covered green bodysuit and fishbowl helmet, you can't
argue that it isn't immediately recognizable.
The Ultimate version of Mysterio had none of his predecessor's flair, using only a boring
ghost-like effect over his face as a disguise.
As it turns out, though, there was a reason that the Ultimate Mysterio wasn't all that
different from the 616 version.
In a truly weird plot twist, it was eventually revealed that they weren't actually two characters
at all.
Instead, the Ultimate Mysterio was a ridiculously high-tech android piloted across universes
by the 616 Mysterio in order to… accomplish the same kinds of crimes that he got up to
in his home universe.
No, really.
It happened in Spider-Men, a series where the core universe’s Peter Parker traveled
across dimensions to mentor the Ultimate Universe’s new Spider-Man, Miles Morales.
If that's all sounding just a bit familiar, it's because the plot was loosely adapted
for 2018's Into the Spider-Verse motion picture, along with a couple of other cross-dimensional
Spider-Man stories.
Spider-Men ended with Mysterio in custody in the Ultimate Universe, leaving the role
of Mysterio to be filled by other, lesser criminal geniuses.
Quentin Beck is the original, but he’s not the only Mysterio.
In Amazing Spider-Man #141, Daniel Berkhart appears as a stuntman who took over for Beck,
who had faked his own death at the time.
While it's hard for any villainous replacement to surpass the original, Berkhart was less
notable than most, and never really had a unique spin on the Mysterio identity.
His most well-known stories involved him pretending to be a resurrected Quentin Beck in order
to torment Spider-Man.
When your best-known plot involves pretending to be a more beloved character and generally
succeeding, you're not really going to last long in a comic book universe.
Even when he got title billing in his own miniseries, Spider-Man: The Mysterio Manifesto,
he spent most of the story dressed as an entirely different second-string supervillain: Jack
O'Lantern.
Spooky!
Created by Rachel and Terry Dodson and Kevin Smith in Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That
Men Do, Francis Klum is arguably the worst Mysterio.
“Ah, Spider-Man my nemesis.
You won’t catch me this time!”
Unlike others, Klum actually has super-powers: he's a mutant with the ability to teleport,
along with some assorted telepathy and telekinesis.
In a complicated series of events, Klum ended up accidentally getting knocked off a bridge
by Spider-Man, which led to Klum losing part of his leg, and naturally, this led him to
embark on a crusade of vengeance against Spider-Man dressed as one of his old enemies.
His crusade of vengeance didn't last long, though — he was interrupted by both Beck
and Berkhart who were not happy about gimmick infringement.
Even worse for Klum, he was eventually stabbed in the chest by thousands of spiders wearing
the form of a school nurse that’s comics, baby!
While Berkhart and Klum popped up to cover for Beck while he was dead, who fought Spider-Man
while Beck was stuck in the Ultimate Universe after the events of Spider-Men?
A brand new character called Mysterion.
Created by David Lopez and Christopher Yost
in Avenging Spider-Man #22 - which was the 23rd issue because... you know what? just forget it.
Comics... am I right? Anyway... Mysterion was…
well, basically the same as previous Mysterios, except not quite as competent.
In the issue, he picks up the costume and gear from Hobgoblin before running afoul of
both the Punisher, who kills supervillains, and the Superior Spider-Man, a Spider-Man
with the soul of Doctor Octopus who also kills supervillains.
Somewhat surprisingly, he actually managed to survive the encounter and popped up a couple
more times in the Marvel Universe — most notably when he took on the unbeatable Squirrel
Girl and all of the Avengers with robot dinosaurs.
Unfortunately, without an actual name or defining features, we're unlikely to see much more
of Mysterion going forward.
Considering how closely his power set aligns with movie magic, you would have expected
Mysterio to make an appearance in a cinematic Spider-Man adaptation long before 2019's Spider-Man:
Far From Home.
As it turns out, he quite nearly did.
Jeffrey Henderson, a storyboard artist who worked with Sam Raimi on the original cinematic
Spider-Man trilogy, revealed that a planned Spider-Man 4 would have included Mysterio,
along with a handful of other Spider-Foes.
Apparently the idea was to run through lower-tier villains like the Shocker, the Prowler, Rhino,
Stilt-Man, and, of course, Mysterio, since they figured they would never be chosen as
the main antagonists of other films.
As for who would portray the master of illusions in the quick cameo, Henderson suggested that
Bruce Campbell, a longtime Sam Raimi collaborator who had made brief cameos in all of the previous
Spider-Man movies, could step beneath the bowl to play Quentin Beck.
It never happened, but it’s not hard not to be intrigued by what the scenery-chewing
Campbell could've done with one of Mysterio's many monologues.
“Ah, Romance!
I am French!” “...uh.”
It took him a long time to get his big-screen due, but Mysterio finally made the jump to
theaters courtesy of Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal in 2019's Spider-Man: Far from Home.
In some ways, his long journey to the big screen is a good thing.
With the huge advances in CGI and special effects technology made in the last couple
of decades, there's arguably no better time for a supervillain to harness the lifelike
illusions and movie magic trickery of Mysterio.
Plus, given Gyllenhaal's deeply upsetting portrayal of an amoral psychopath in 2014's
Nightcrawler, it's almost guaranteed that the villain will be just as creepy and unsettling
as his best stories make him out to be.
Here's hoping this latest incarnation of this enduring Marvel character ends up sticking
around for more than a single outing — and signals a future in which the MCU's villains
only get weirder and wilder.
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