Here's a strange thing about comics: in struggles between brains and brawn, brawn usually wins.

Take some of the classic brains vs. brawn stories; David and Goliath. David is physically no match for the mighty Goliath, so he uses his superior intellect to fashion a weapon which can bring down his mighty foe. The cunning Jack the Giant Killer repeatedly outwits foes who are more than a match for him in terms of brute strength. Doctor Sivana, on the other had is about a zillion times smarter than his arch rival, Captian Marvel, and still loses.

Now, Marvel's not stupid; he has "the Wisdom of Solomon" as one of his powers. But Doctor Sivana's smarter still. He has the usual array of death-rays and spaceships and so on. In addition, he knows Captain Marvel's true identity, that of young Billy Batson. And yet over the last sixty years, "that big red cheese" Captain Marvel has trounced Sivana again and again.

Ah, well. Sivana keeps right on trying. Over the decades he's used a fantastic array of evil devices. My personal favourite was his space ship, which vanished when Captain Marvel tried to attack it because the wiley Sivana had fitted it with an onboard time-machine. Amongst the ship's other factory extras was a hypno-ray. This ray apparantly works just as well on tigers as it does on people, as Sivana was able to use it on Mr. Tawney the talking tiger... Yeah, that's right. Talking tiger. Do you have a problem with that? No? Then let's continue...

Sivana is an unusual Mad Scientist in a few ways. Firstly, the sheer scale of his ambition- other Mad Scientists may want to create life or conquer the world, but Sivana's goal was nothing less that to rule the entire universe. Second, he seems to have been married at some point, and has a grand total of four children, two sons and two daughters. Of these, his son Magnificus and daughter Beautia look nothing like Sivana; in fact they look pretty much like their names suggest. These two are not evil, but are occasionally manipulated by their evil father. Sivana's other children, Sivana, Jr. and Georgia Sivana look and act like their old man, and frequently assist him in his evil schemes. Thus does the "Sivana Family"- Dr. Sivana, Georgia Sivana and Sivana Jr- correspond with the "Marvel Family"- Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr.

Another interesting feature of Sivana is that he is entirely and unrepeantantly aware of his own evil nature. Now, there are quite a few evil Mad Scientists who are similarly disposed, but few take it to Sivana's extremes. The prime example of this is his vault, where he stored anything that he should happen to invent which might be used to improve people's lives. He really is a little stinker.