Now You See Him, Now You Don't

Can YOU

Name This Marvel Villain??

Our featured villain is a little hard to pin down, but that's par for the course when you go by the name of Mirage, who makes his debut on the wedding day of Peter Parker's friends, Ned Leeds and Betty Brant. The happy couple have booked their nuptial at the fashionable (and fictional) Morgan's of Malverne in New York, along with a number of other wedding parties--which makes it the ideal day for Mirage and his little band of hoods to clean up on all the loot that's arrived with the brides, the grooms, their families, and guests.

And while we may discount these guys as dangerous criminals because they look like they just arrived from a pajama party, we have to give them credit for the efficient manner in which they crash all of the weddings in progress, including what would turn out to be their last stop: the Cupid Room, where Betty and Ned are exchanging vows and, most likely, their jewelry and wallets afterward.

Obviously these aren't the brightest thieves around, if they're willing to accept personal checks--but then, they seem to have gotten pretty far in hooking up with Mirage. At any rate, since Peter is here, all it takes is a discrete strand of webbing to flip the light switch on the wall to allow him to bring his wall-crawling alter ego into play--and while Mirage's associates pose no problem for him, he might find a surprise or two when dealing with the strange power that Mirage appears to command.

After receiving his fair share of bruises from his foe, Spidey finally spots the method by which Mirage deploys his power, and resorts to literally bringing down the house on his astonished opponent. To readers, it will seem almost absurd that Spider-Man's spider-sense can't distinguish between a real person and a hologram (writer Len Wein's insistence otherwise notwithstanding)--but it's still a notch in the "win" column for Spidey, and a nice stay in the hoosegow in store for Mirage and his boys.

Mirage would meet his end when he's mowed down (along with a roomful of other villains) at the Bar With No Name, by its bartender--another disguise of the Scourge of the Underworld. But Mirage and a few of the other unfortunate victims were given a new lease on life (a very brief lease) when Arnim Zola took DNA samples from a few of the corpses (in addition to other deceased characters) and applied them to "proto-husks" which became identical to the original persons--after which they became servants to assist in financing his experiments. Informally dubbed the "Corpse Corps," the duplicates were soon terminated by Deadpool; but Mirage would be resurrected by others over time, probably getting more visibility than he ever did when he was alive.