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Heroes & Villains · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Heroes & Villains puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Character #1 Trained from childhood in a program that was never really about heroism, she spent years undoing the damage of her own graduation before anyone on the team fully trusted her. Her ledger, by her own count, was not close to balanced when she finally decided it was.
- Character #2 A psychiatrist who was assigned to the worst patient in the building and came out the other side in motley, swinging an oversized mallet. Later stories are largely about her leaving him.
- Character #3 Not quite Superman, but the resemblance is the entire point: the strongest man on Earth, an alien sent as a child, a human wife and a son inheriting the powers. The swerve is that he was never sent to protect anybody, and the story turns on the moment he stops pretending.
- Character #1 He was the first person anyone ever trained for the job, which means every partner who came after him is being compared to how he did it. He eventually decided the job needed doing his own way, in his own city, under a different name he borrowed from a bedtime story about a doomed planet.
- Character #2 A monarch, a sorcerer and an engineer at once, ruling a small European country that grants him diplomatic immunity - which is why he is so hard to simply arrest. The armour hides a face scarred by his own experiment, and he blames a former classmate for it.
- Character #3 A mask of shifting black blots on white, a journal nobody was supposed to read, and an absolute refusal to compromise that the story frames as both heroic and deeply unwell. He is the narrator, and he is not a reliable one.
- Character #1 A prosecutor who won his cases honestly until half of him stopped believing in the process, and who now hands every decision - including whether you live - to a scarred silver dollar. Only one side of that coin is defaced, so the odds really are even, and he considers that the last genuinely fair thing left in the city.
- Character #2 He can watch you fight once and then fight exactly like you, which is why he earns far more training other people's henchmen than he ever did robbing anything himself. The cost the comics eventually invented for that gift is brutal: every style he absorbs writes over something personal, and he has lost almost all memory of his own wife.
- Character #3 An accident in a test chamber took him apart at the atomic level, and what walked back out months later was blue, effectively omnipotent, and steadily less interested in being a person at all. He lives his whole life at once - birth, marriage and death all happening now - which is the story's actual reason for why he cannot be made to care.