The Vicious Circle is a criminal organization of mutants, cyborgs, monsters, assassins, and magicians that serves as the primary opponents for the superheroes in Erik Larsen's comic-book titles, primarily the Dragon.
Overview The group has a varying line-up, sometimes consisting of five-to-six members and sometimes having a staggeringly huge membership. Originally the Vicious Circle was led by the Overlord, an armored mastermind who ruled all of Chicago's underworld. Later, it would be ruled by the technology controlling Cyberface. Once the Savage Dragon started policing the streets of Chicago, the Vicious Circle began to falter and its members started winding up in prison, the hospital or just plain dead. The Vicious Circle remains a consistent thorn in the Savage Dragon's side, and frequently faces off with the SuperPatriot and others, including Raphael of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who in issues 10 and 11 of the series run with Image took on the entire Vicious Circle himself in a bar fight.
The Circle desires to utterly control Chicago. Members have attacked the Dragon time and time again, willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. Occasionally, they use subtler methods.
A power vacuum causes an inter-faction war, ending with the sex-changed Johnny Redbeard in charge."Savage Dragon" #24 (December 1995)
Using insiders, they have Dragon fired and replaced with a more buffoonish superpowered hero, She-Dragon. However, this plan fails as She-Dragon is carefully trained by other police officers and becomes a credible threat.
The Circle is briefly part of the superhero/gang war that erupts in New York City, as mentioned in Wildcats #28.
Circle members are part of the heroic resistance when Martians attack Earth, though they try to claim power and territory once the Dragon kills all the aliens.
After the alien invasion, the Dragon shrunk much of their group with a Martian device, sucked them up in a vacuum cleaner and tossed them out the window. The shrunken members were then used to free other members from jail.
Presumably, the Vicious Circle, along with most of Earth, are dead after a cosmic entity named Universo attacks the planet. Some people of this Earth survived to travel to another, but it is not known whether any Circle members did.
Leaders
Overlord
Overlord first appeared in Larsen's Savage Dragon series, serving as that title's first principal villain and the archenemy of the Dragon. Like many of Larsen's characters, Overlord was based on a character that Larsen had created during his childhood. First conceived as "Bronzeman", a sort of criminal counterpart to Iron Man, Larsen later found he disliked the name and changed it to Overlord. The character's costume also went through multiple revisions before Larsen was satisfied.
Fictional character biography Overlord is a Chicago-based crime lord named Antonio Seghetti with extensive ties to the Mafia and the European pocket nation of Lieberheim. As a child, he kills his sister's rapist during the act itself. Though noble, he starts a downward spiral into thuggery. He soon is involved in all sorts of crime, including rape itself.
In the 1990s, the superhuman population of the world skyrockets, resulting in Seghetti's illegal operations being threatened. In response, Saghetti has Sebastian Kahn (a cybernetics genius) design and construct for him a powerful battlesuit to wear. Donning the armor, Saghetti dubs himself Overlord and recruits countless superhuman thugs into his criminal empire, calling the group the Vicious Circle. With superhuman agents, he breaks away from his Mafia connections and Overlord soon has the city of Chicago at his mercy. The Overlord's luck changes when the Savage Dragon becomes a police officer. The Dragon began to dismantle his empire piece by piece. Later the Overlord also has to contend with Kahn, who had been technologically augmented and is now called CyberFace. CyberFace leads a team of superhumans called the Annihilators against the Vicious Circle, but is arrested. After negotiating with the police, CyberFace plans to testify against Overlord and reveal his identity. Overlord panics and dispatched several assassins. Cyberface ended up dead in his cell, having been poisoned through his food. He is soon revived through artificial means.
Dragon's first confrontration with Overlord ends with being thrown off a roof and impaled on a church spire. Later, the Dragon returns with a S.W.A.T. team. The other police officers are killed almost instantly. The Dragon takes apart Overlord's armor and shoots him in the mouth, one of his few vulnerable spots. Overlord falls off the roof, breaking a spire and slamming into the sidewalk.
Armor On Other forces conspire to send Dragon to hell, though Dragon does not believe it is real. Nevertheless, he viciously torments Antonio when they meet. Antonio has his armor recreated by mystical means. The Dragon bites off Antonio's finger and spits it through the man's head.
Since then, Overlord's armor has been used by others who have tried to gain power in the Chicago underworld. Some, such as Brainiape, must deal with literally not being able to fit into the armor. Then there was Victor Nixon, Chicago Police officer. He had developed an attraction to the married Rita Meadermade. His use of the armor to spy on her corrupts Nixon, mixing his thought patterns with Antonio's remnants. Nixon ends up killing Rita's other stalker, her homicidal brother-in-law. He also seemingly kills Dragon's wife, but Jennifer had been replaced by a double."Savage Dragon" #62 (June 1999) Nixon then gathers a force of villains to go after Dragon. This fails and in a one-on-one confrontation with the Dragon, Nixon is beaten to death. His identity is only discovered after the fact.
Under careful supervision, the armor is destroyed in a fire.
In an alternate dimension, the armor is used by a mysterious figure to keep the Vicious Circle in line with the mutation-granting blood of Dragon. Overlord claims to be trying to turn the Circle 'straight', to become a mutated-beings rights group. As part of this goal, he works unofficially with the police.The Savage Dragon #159 (June 2010) These stated goals suffer a setback after the Dragon, overcome by his previous persona of evil Emperor Kurr, kills many of the Circle's powered forced.The Savage Dragon #162 (September 2010)
In other media Overlord is the main villain in the short lived Savage Dragon animated series, voiced by Tony Jay.
Cyberface
Cyberface (Sebastian Khan) is a supervillain and enemy of the Dragon in the Image Universe. He first appears in Savage Dragon (vol. 2) #5 and was created by Erik Larsen.
Fictional history The city of Chicago has long been renowned for its organized crime, most famously during the infamous reign of Al Capone. The mobs and gangsters managed to retain power for decades but the growing superhuman population threatened their rule by the early 1990s. A Mafia crime lord, Antonio Seghetti, saw this growing menace and acted on it. He had his second-in-command, Sebastian Khan, exercise his technological expertise to try and come up with an answer to the freaks.
The mob had a healthy relationship with the small country of Lieberheim and it's ruthless dictator, Dread Knight, was given a prototype suit of armour to increase his influence of power, as well as constructing him a legion of android soldiers, the Dreadheads.
With the success of the original armour, Khan improved upon his own designs and created the nigh-invulnerable armour that would allow Seghetti to assume the role of OverLord. In this new role, the crime lord was forced to remain within his suit or face certain death from the freaks he has subdued and recruited into his new organisation, the Vicious Circle.
OverLord soon spent less and less time with his Mafia associates while maintaining his new persona twenty-four hours a day. Khan was abandoned and left the mob to pursue other plans. At some unknown point, Khan gained superhuman powers to manipulate all technology and he took on the guise of CyberFace. Gathering a number of other superpowered criminals, CyberFace formed the Annihilators and prepared them to seize control of the Vicious Circle. Unfortunately for him, the Chicago Police Department's Freak Force program interfered and apprehended him, as well as trapping the Annihilators in a dimensional limbo.
While in police custody, CyberFace was poisoned on the orders of OverLord and was presumed dead. Desperate to get CyberFace back so that he can testify against OverLord, as he is the only man able to identify the armoured crime lord in his human guise, the Dragon takes the dead man's carcass to the government's Project: Born Again program. The villain was partially resurrected before the facility was destroyed, and CyberFace wandered back to Chicago and was manipulated by Octopus, planning to use him to conquer the Vicious Circle.
Octopus was later apprehended and CyberFace was cleared of any charges after giving evidence against OverLord so that a warrant for his arrest could be made. Shortly after, Horde took possession of CyberFace and used his might to become the new leader of the Vicious Circle after the Dragon had killed OverLord.
Due to the incomplete resurrection, CyberFace slowly began to degenerate and was saved from death by Abner Cadaver, who infused him with the life essences of some of the Undead. This lifeforce was very unstable, and when CyberFace attempted to conquer Chicago in light of the Martian invasion, he was destroyed by a single punch from the Dragon.
Octopus, OpenFace and PowerHouse revived CyberFace in the gorilla body of BrainiApe, and he stole the OverLord armour from the government as part of a bid to reclaim the Vicious Circle, now under the leadership of Horde. In a mass battle which killed Horde, the remains of CyberFace were finally destroyed by BrainiApe.
Savage World
CyberFace formed the Annihilators and took them to seize control of the Vicious Circle. CyberFace managed to successfully claim leadership away from OverLord, who he then killed. From this point on, Khan's sphere of influence continued to expand and the Vicious Circle soon became a serious force to be reckoned with.
When the Cosmic Cops invaded Earth in 1994, they managed to decimate much of New York City and looked set to expand their precincts to contain much of the planet. No heroes were able to get close enough to accomplish anything and numerous teams were being monitored and threatened with death if they acted. It was only when CyberFace entered the fray that the aliens were defeated.
CyberFace used the Cosmic Cops' technology to defeat the invaders and convert them into cybernetic entities. CyberFace then took control of New York City after Chicago, expanding his control. CyberFace was difficult to oppose due to his acquisition of the Cosmic Cops' technology.
Three years later when the Martians launched their mammoth invasion of Earth and destroyed much of the planet, CyberFace again came to humanity's rescue, albeit to serve his own selfish gains. CyberFace defeated these latest aggressors and added their technology to his growing cache of equipment was able to seize complete control of Earth and became the King of the World.
Only one person tried to oppose CyberFace, and that was Dragon. He carried out a failed assassination attempt which led to his being named as public enemy number one with a huge bounty on his head. In May 1999, Dragon's mind took control of his alternate timeline's body and he began his own quest to depose CyberFace from power.
Over the next few years, Dragon proceeded to gather together a resistance movement that consisted of abandoned Vicious Circle members, the Underground Freaks and other freedom fighters. Dragon led an assault upon the White House which prompted CyberFace to flee up to the starship of Vanguard's but was unable to hide from his arch-enemy.