Lord of illusions! Master of deception! Special effects wizard! These are all titles Quentin Beck loves to call himself. Dissatisfied with Hollywood, he took to New York City for a life of crime. How does a special effects guy find himself wearing a fish bowl and fight a strong kid in tights? Let’s find out!
Quentin Beck grew up wanting to be a star, he would pursue this goal by becoming a special effects expert and top notch stuntman, a double threat. This wasn’t getting him the acclaim he wanted though, he would find that he didn’t have the charisma or looks to be a leading man and he didn’t have the patience to be a director. Frustrated, he would turn to crime, using his skills in film-making to help him. He would get a gig working for the Tinker pretending to be an alien to throw off suspicions as to who was stealing military work.
Still desiring that limelight, he would decide to masquerade as Spider-Man so he could commit crimes, then when the time was right, appear as his own hero to capture Spider-Man and finally become famous. Using his knowledge of special effects, he was able to replicate most of Spider-Man’s powers. When Spider-Man was finally confronted with this new “hero” he would be defeated because Quentin was able to counter most of his moves and abilities, he would have gotten away with it had he not boasted how he’d planned it all. Spidey had been recording him so it was used as evidence against Quentin to get himself freed.
Despite the failure of becoming a hero, it did draw the attention of other villains. Recruited into the Sinister Six, Quentin would begin a long on-again/off-again career with the team with an ever changing roster. Failure would become Quentin’s most familiar ally as his attempts to stop Spider-Man were numerous, with or without the rest of the Sinister Six to back him up.
Beck’s most successful criminal endeavor was starting a false ID and scamming a fortune out of old people. His greed got the better of him as he would believe rumors that one of his golden girls, May Parker, was living on top of a mob fortune that was hidden in her home before her time there. This being Spider-Man’s aunt, things didn’t go well for Quentin and he would have to bail out and try for other scams.
Years of his chemicals for gas effects would take its toll on Quentin, giving him cancer. It caused him to reevaluate what he was doing and decided he wanted to destroy a hero before his death. Knowing he could never kill Spider-Man, he set his sights on Daredevil, who he saw as a second stringer like himself. Setting out to break Daredevil’s mind by messing with him both in real life and with illusions, he would fail to break the devil, killing himself in disgust. His time in Hell would be brief because he would be summoned back to Earth, first as sort of a phantom and eventually fully back to life where he would claim his death was yet another of his tricks to build his reputation.
After so many crimes done, Quentin would eventually decided to retire from his life of crime and move to Las Vegas. His daughter would try to persuade him back to his villainous ways but he refused her. She would attempt to kill him as part of some magic ritual to grant herself power but in the struggle, he would accidentally kill her and be granted the power instead. Las Vegas being home to a different arachnid hero, Scarlet Spider, the two would tussle as Quentin now had real powers. He would lose them just as quick as he got them when his hand that was part of the ritual was chopped off, this spider is a bit more brutal that Quentin is used to. This brought him back to being Mysterio and he would begin his criminal ways once more.
There you have it! Mysterio is one of Spidey’s oldest villains and he’s been in plenty of cartoons and videos, he’ll soon be on the big screen in the MCU. He’s always been a villain to sort of laugh at because of his fish bowl helmet and his illusions gimmick. If you ever played the old Spider-Man 2 video game for Playstation 2, he has one of the silliest boss fights in any video game ever. Look it up. See you next time!
Suggested Reading
Amazing Spider-Man #2
Amazing Spider-Man #13
Guardian Devil
Scarlet Spider
Dr. Bustos
drbustos@comicattack.net
