The Maze Runners: Five Supervillains Who Use Mazes

If you’re unfamiliar with The Maze Runner trilogy of books, the series features a group of teenagers put through a series of tests by WCKD, a mysterious and vaguely sinister group with unknown goals.Unlike WCKD, who claim they’re working for the good of humanity, most mazes in comic books are complicated traps laid out by supervillains specifically to kill or disable superheroes. While it’s fun seeing superheroes dodge unexpected traps and use their wits to escape mazes, they’re rarely effective, which means that only a few supervillains ever use mazes more than once or twice in their career.

Here’s a look of five of our favorite supervillain maze architects in comics:

Mirror Master

  

Given that the best kinds of mazes are mirror mazes, it’s not surprising that the Flash rogue Mirror Master has used a maze to trap his Scarlet Speedster nemesis. Mirror Master has used fun houses and mirror rooms several times in the comics to fight the Flash, including his first appearance in The Flash #105, which featured the Flash battling a minotaur and a giant mosquito as he fought his way through a house filled with mirrors.  In the cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Mirror Master teamed up with fellow Rogue Abra Kadabra to trap the Flash in a mirror maze and used his mirror manipulation powers to create distorted duplicates of himself for the Flash to fight. 

Arcade

  

A maniacal freelance assassin, Arcade ran a murderous underground amusement park dubbed Murderworld.  For a token fee of $1 million, Arcade would kidnap targets (usually superheroes) and trap them in Murderworld, pitting them against killer pinball machines, roller coasters, bumper carts and other bizarre rooms of horror.  In his most recent appearance in Avengers Arena, Arcade turned a remote island into a new Murderworld and filled it with a group of young superheroes, pitting them against one another in a Battle Royale inspired free for all.  While most adult superheroes escaped Murderworld alive, many of the teen heroes weren’t so lucky, with at least seven teens dying over the course of the series.

The Riddler

  

With a gimmick based around riddles and puzzles, the Riddler has utilized mazes several times in his ongoing battle of wits against Batman.  In his first appearance in Detective Comics #140, the Riddler lured Batman into a glass maze with a bomb at its center.  Although Batman finds the exit to the mirror, the Riddler barricaded the exit, proving that he’s not above cheating to get his way. The Riddler also used a maze in his first appearance in Batman: The Animated Series and frustrated players of the Batman: Arkham video game series with plenty of mini-mazes and encounters.

The Court of Owls

  

The Court of Owls are one of Batman’s newest threats, a group of wealthy Gotham socialites who control Gotham from the shadows.  After Batman learned of their existence, he learned that one of his ancestors, Alan Wayne, had a paranoid fear of owls in his final days, a hint he may have known more about the Court of Owls than he let on.  While investigating where Alan Wayne had died, the Court of Owls ambushed Batman and trapped him in an underground maze used by generations of the Court to torture and kill their enemies.  Although Batman nearly died in the maze from hunger, hallucinations and an attack by one of the Court’s undead Talon assassins, Batman escaped by blowing up part of the maze using filament plates from an antique camera and diving into the Gotham River below. After Batman escapes the maze, the Court of Owl decides to unleash their entire army of Talons against Gotham City, leading to the “Night of the Owls” crossover event. 

Sligguth

  

One of my favorite Marvel monsters, Sligguth is a Lovecraftian snake demon worshipped by the townspeople of a New England town.  Sligguth’s followers lured Dr. Strange to their town, hoping to preemptively remove him as a threat as Sligguth attempted to revive his master Shuma-Gorath, a Cthulhu-like Elder God who once ruled the world.  After escaping the monster’s followers, Dr. Strange followed Sligguth into his booby trapped labyrinth lair.  Strange summoned aid from the Vishanti and his mentor the Ancient One to diffuse many of Sligguth’s traps and defeated the monster in combat, beating it with a cross and suffocating it to death by trampling on its neck gills.