Times where the hero creates their own villain in Comic Books.
- Any number of All Your Powers Combined supervillains could qualify, as they wouldn't have been able to copy the heroes' powers if the heroes didn't exist in the first place. Amazo, Paragon, the Composite Superman, the Super-Adaptoid, etc.
- Astro City: Aubrey Jason would have been content to remain a normal human member of Pyramid, but was pushed into acquiring superhuman power to protect himself from the relentless pursuit of the Williams brothers and their Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- The Avengers:
- Hank Pym, the Avenger alternately known as Ant-Man, Giant Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket, Dr. Pym, and the Wasp, built the robot Ultron, which went on to become one of the Avengers' most powerful, persistent, and deadly foes.
- Inverted by Ultron himself, who has created AIs on several separate occasions, every single one of whom turned on him. The Vision, Jocasta, and Victor Mancha all became heroes and joined the Avengers. Also played straight with Alkhema, the second wife Ultron created (this one from Mockingbird's brain patterns). Rather than wanting to wipe out humanity all in one go, she wanted to kill them all slowly and painfully, and individually if she could. She quickly betrayed Ultron to the Avengers. Pym may get a lot of flack for building Ultron, but at least he's managed to build robots that didn't turn on him.
- Batman:
- The Joker. Many details of Joker's origin vary wildly, but it's widely accepted that the Bat was somehow responsible for the Joker's fall into the vat of chemicals that turned him into the psychopathic clown. This gets deconstructed in The Bat-Man of Gotham, where Bruce finds himself in an alternate universe where he never became Batman and therefore the Joker doesn't exist. When the Red Mask, who "should" have been the Joker and who has become consumed with the feeling he's missing out, taunts Batman with creating his own nemesis, he retorts that, on the contrary, the Red Mask's actions prove that he was always like that, encounter with Batman and acid bath or not.
- It's often suggested that while Batman isn't directly involved their origin, the tendency of his Rogues Gallery to have garish costumes and gimmicks are a reaction to Batman's own. Batman's greatest triumph was to break the mob's hold on Gotham, and his greatest failure was attracting a bunch of psychopathic weirdos to take their place.
- This was subverted in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Trial" mentioned below. He was put on trial by the Arkham inmates, with the Joker as judge, for the 'crime' of creating them all. In the end, the jury, made entirely of Batman's enemies, couldn't find him guilty of that... they admitted that the trappings or gimmicks might have been different without him, but they were what they were before he even showed up.
- One really dark storyline in Gotham Central featured a reporter who killed a bunch of teenage boys and dressed up their bodies to look like Robin solely because he wanted to become a Batman villain.
- Clayface V is an example, although the creation was a result of Jean-Paul Valley's actions as Batman, rather than Bruce Wayne's. Valley defeated both of Cassius Clay Payne's parents (Clayface III and Lady Clayface), causing him to become a ward of the State. He knew that putting an already special-needs metahuman child in such a situation would almost certainly create a supervillain...he just didn't care.
- An incredibly rare Evil Versus Evil example of this is Poison Ivy creating the monstrous Plant Person Harvest; originally a Man-Eating Plant she engineered for her own amusement, after a year of feeding it with any human she felt like (citing victims as including "tiresome lovers, incompetent henchmen and people who returned [my] smile"), the sheer number of human brains dissolving in its system affected it; the plant mutated into a monster possessed by the fragmented psyches/souls of all its former meals, driving it to hunt and attempt to kill its own creator.
- Ironically inverted with Batman himself: it was the mob and the Court of Owls' rule over Gotham, and the death of the Waynes in particular, that drove Bruce Wayne to become Batman.
- In Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a psychiatrist argues that Batman has this effect on Gotham as a whole, due to his sheer charisma and force of presence causing others to mold themselves to fit, essentially claiming that Batman has a mental illness that spreads via Memetic Mutation. What's even more interesting, is that the comic at least implies that this is actually the case, with The Joker coming out of a decade-long catatonia in response to Batman's return.
- The Boys:
- Billy Butcher became a cape buster because a superhero raped his wife, and the resulting infant tore its way out of her body. From the audience's point of view he's an Anti-Hero, but in-universe from the supers' perspective he's a villain.
- Wee Hughie was a regular socially awkward everyman until his first love interest was smashed into a red paste by a superhero.
- Black Canary: Black Canary acquired one in Green Arrow/Black Canary. A concert violinist she accidentally deafened through an injudicious use of her canary cry has returned as the sound based supervillain Discord. Oddly, a Silver Age Justice League story had musician Anton Allegro become a villain because he'd been accidentally deafened by Green Arrow.
- Cable: Cable inadvertently created Apocalypse during his attempt to prevent his transformation into a world conqueror. It involved time travel, of course.
- Captain America: The insane Captain America from the 1950s started out as a fanatical admirer of then-missing Steve Rogers, driven insane by a faulty attempt to replicate Steve's Super Serum.
- Fantastic Four:
- Victor von Doom was Reed Richards' college roommate. Richards corrected one of Doom's experiments; Doom, furious, switched it back to the way it was, then it exploded, scarring Doom's handsome face. Naturally, Doom blamed Richards. However, Doom is actually a subversion of this trope. Reed's actions actually didn't make him a villain, Doom just refuses to take responsibility for his own mistakes. In fact, Reed could have probably prevented Doom from becoming a villain if Reed's warnings hadn't been ignored.
- Though one retcon claims that due to Doom's poor treatment of Reed, Ben Grimm sabotaged his machine on purpose to teach him a lesson.
- The one-shot all-humor issue The Fantastic Four Roast ("When Titans Chuckle!") rewrites this for a laugh. As Fred Hembeck's script tells it, Victor was upset because he wasn't invited to go on a panty raid with Reed and his college buddies.Dr. Doom: If I had been in on that panty raid, the Dr. Doom you see before you would not exist! I could have been a fun guy!!
- The Mad Thinker's Awesome Android and Modulus are both the result of (mis)applications of Reed Richards' research.
- Femforce: Colt caused the creation of Rip-Jaw as a supervillain by shooting off his jaw (although he was already a criminal before this happened).
- The Flash: The Silver Age Reverse-Flash, Eobard Thawne, gained access to the secrets of super speed in the future because Barry Allen placed one of his Flash costumes in a time capsule. More recent continuities have Eobard starting as an insane fan of Barry's or, more recently, deriving all of his powers directly from Barry's mere existence, as Barry is now the source of all super speed. The Modern Age Reverse-Flash, Hunter Zolomon, became who he is because of Wally West not helping him. Hunter was crippled by Gorilla Grodd and asked Wally to use time travel to prevent the incident. Wally refuses, since this would damage the time stream, and Hunter screws with Wally's Cosmic Treadmill, and poof, a new Evil Counterpart was born.
- Invincible:
- Invincible accidentally caused genius multiverse-walker Angstrom Levy's attempt to fuse with all of his alternate selves to backfire, and Levy has become one of Invincible's most determined foes as a result. To make things worse, said backfire was actually the result of Levy saving Invicible from the Mauler Twins (who he'd hired to steal the machinery he needed, but didn't want them to kill anybody), and thus disrupting the fusion. Levy refuses to believe this, because he became so twisted with hatred that he can't comprehend that he used to not hate Invincible.
- Likewise, Powerplex only became a supervillain to avenge himself on Invincible for the death of his sister during one of Invincible's brawls (specifically, Invincible was punched through a building she was inside of, causing it to collapse). Powerplex then killed his wife and infant son by accident while fighting the Nigh-Invulnerable hero, fueling further revenge.
- Iron Man:
- The villains the Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man got their start because the Dirty Communists decided they needed their own counterparts to Tony Stark's "bodyguard." Later armored entities such as the Iron Monger and Firepower were created at the behest of Stark's corrupt business rivals, Obadiah Stane and Edwin Cord, respectively. Stane and Cord would both see this trope inverted right back on them, however, as their actions directly led to the birth of a "new" Iron Man each time. In Stane's case, it was his desire to see Iron Man destroyed, and Stark completely crushed, even though at the time Stark was willing to let Stane be and start anew. Kidnapping Stark's past associates, attacking Iron Man with his "Circuits Breaker" weapon, and then having Stark's new company bombed, killing Morley Erwin in the process, drove Stark to don his newly-completed Silver Centurion armor and fly out to Long Island to confront Stane, forcing the latter to don his still-untested Iron Monger prototype. It didn't end well for Stane, who killed himself rather than see Stark gloat over him.
- In the wake of Iron Man's rogue actions during the Armor Wars storyline, the Pentagon commissioned Cord to create Firepower to destroy the renegade Avenger. However, once this was done, Cord refused to turn his new toy over to the Feds (threatening to blackmail them with a press release about Firepower — a heavily-armored suit with a tactical nuke — being designed for riot control), and turned Firepower loose on Stark Enterprises' assets instead. Stark, who'd been willing to leave Iron Man "dead", created a "new" Iron Man that promptly tore Firepower apart.
- Les Légendaires: Zig-zagged, as the protagonist Razzia, who was initially an innocent pacifist kid, became a vengeful barbarian villain as well as The Dragon to Darkhell after his village was seemingly destroyed by the heroic 1000 Wolves Army for no reason. Later however, his dying sister Sheyla reveals to him that it was Darkhell who destroyed the village and blamed the 1000 Wolves for it. Enraged by the betrayal, Razzia turnes against Darkhell and joins the Legendaries, becoming one of the sorcerer's worst enemies.
- Paper Girls: It turns out that the leader of forces chasing the girls through time is actually a grown-up baby they saved from death in prehistoric times.
- Power Pack: The Power Pack's Arch-Enemy, Douglas Carmody (aka the Bogeyman) is a pretty good example of this. While he's pretty villainous when you first see him, he soon tries to hunt down and murder the kids outright, later joining up with the anti-mutant group The Right in hopes of going after them. The reason? The Power Pack blew up the power plant that he thought was going to make him a billion dollars and make him a household name. Okay, so he had no idea that it would blow up the Earth instead...
- PS238: The series plays this more directly than most examples — Toby's first supervillain turns out to be a person he accidentally brainwashed into robbing a bank
. He was empowered by an angel of Order and a demon of Chaos working together, and as a result he can't use his powers for anything but flying without something random like that happening too. - Rick and Morty (Oni): Rick does this a lot, seen most notably with some of the members of the Rick Revenge Squad:
- A literal one in the case of "Mr. Sick"; he's a Meeseeks whom Rick originally creates to be a drug mule in a trafficking ring he's running. When he abandons this ring and frames Peacock Jones for running it to get him arrested, the Meeseeks is also arrested before he can fulfill his purpose, leaving him unable to die and living for years when he was meant to just live for minutes, turning him into Mr. Sick and giving him the desire to murder his creator so he can disappear.
- It turns out that, years ago, Krombopulous Michael heeded Rick's advice and fell in love and got married. When his wife, Krombopulous Amy, is informed of his death in Issue 34, all she's told is that Rick had something to do with it (even though, as we know from "Mortynight Run" and as Rick later tells Amy himself, Morty was the one who was actually (inadvertently) responsible). Unfortunately, she turns out to be a master assassin as well.
- Downplayed with Peacock Jones, who, even before meeting Rick, is already a sleazy Casanova Wannabe who expects and demands sex from his female traveling companions and is willing to rape them if they refuse. However, once Rick frames him for his own drug trafficking ring and gets him thrown in jail in retribution for Jones planning to rape Summer, Jones becomes more and more obsessed with getting revenge on Rick, first by joining the Rick Revenge Squad and later by working with the IllumiRicki and targeting Morty.
- Sin City: While The Yellow Bastard was already a bad guy, John Hartigan's attacks led to the Yellow Bastard turning into a disfigured freak, became just a little more unhinged, and it made him take revenge later in life.
- Sonic the Comic: The story arc loosely based on Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix had Sonic going back in time and deliberately causing the accident that turned kindly Dr. Kintobor into Dr. Robotnik. In the altered timeline where the accident never occurred, the Brotherhood of Metallix conquered Mobius and couldn't be stopped — in the real timeline, Robotnik worked on the Metallixes, too, and thought to give them a mass-self-destruct function.
- Spider-Man:
- Eddie Brock's hatred of both Peter Parker and Spider-Man for ruining his life (some people just like to blame someone else) and a chance encounter with the alien symbiote (which had just been "dumped" by Pete and was bitter about it) resulted in the creation of Venom, who would clash with Spidey for decades. Brock's Heel–Face Turn came from finally admitting it was his own fault and not Peter's.
- The Venom symbiote itself is often portrayed as having been consumed with resentment (and abandonment issues) after Peter rejected it, going on to influence several hosts into lives of villainy and Spider-Man harassment.
- Roderick Kingsley, alias, the original Hobgoblin is an indirect example: he got his start when he was tipped to the location of the Green Goblin's old gear when a minor criminal that Spider-Man allowed to get away stumbled across the stuff. Before that, the Hobgoblin was a Corrupt Corporate Executive who Spider-Man saved from a supervillain that was trying to get revenge on Kingsley. Kingsley was determined not to be so vulnerable again, which made him look for ways to increase his power and meet the criminal who found the Green Goblin's equipment.
- Green Goblin II/Harry Osborn also counts, as he became a villain to avenge his dad (although one could easily argue that it was his father's actions that truly created the second Green Goblin).
- Morris Bench was working as a crewman on a ship when Spider-Man accidentally knocked him into the ocean where an experimental generator was being tested. The combination of unknown radiation and immersion in the water transformed him into Hydro-Man.
- J. Jonah Jameson's vendetta against Spider-Man has lead to him creating a few villains:
- Jameson hired Spencer Smythe to create a series of robots called the Spider-Slayers for the purpose of capturing and unmasking Spider-Man. Ultimately, Smythe ended up poisoned by the radioactive materials used in the manufacturing of the robots. Blaming both Jameson and Spider-Man for his impending demise, he tried to kill them using an explosive device. Fortunately, Spider-Man's technical expertise allowed him and Jameson to escape and Smythe died without getting his revenge.
- Jameson convinced a private investigator named Mac Gargan to undergo a science experiment conducted by Dr. Harley Stillwell. Gargan was transformed into the Scorpion and Jameson ordered him to capture and unmask Spider-Man. While the Scorpion proved to be more than a match for Spider-Man, the experiments drove him mad and he turned on Jameson requiring Spider-Man to intervene and save the editor's life.
- An escaped prisoner named Richard Deacon overheard Jameson asking Harlan Stillwell, the younger brother of the aforementioned Harley Stillwell to make a new superhero. Deacon ordered Harlan to transform him into the Human Fly at gunpoint and then killed the doctor after he was done. The Human Fly then kidnapped Jameson requiring Spider-Man to once again save Jameson from a mess he'd made.
- In X-Factor (2006) Issues #216-219, it is revealed that Jameson, along with his friend General Sam Ryan and Dr Young Soo Pock, founded SCARs, a secret military program in which three women were transformed into Cyborg Super Soldiers for black ops missions. Unfortunately, the cybernetics drove two of the women mad, requiring them to be mindwiped. After regaining their memories they planned to assassinate Jameson but were foiled by the Black Cat and X-Factor Investigations. Unlike the above examples, this one had nothing to do with Jameson trying to defeat Spider-Man and was actually done before the Wall-Crawler became a superhero.
- Star Wars: In Legacy, Obi-Wan Kenobi is inadvertently responsible for A'Sharad Hett's transformation into Darth Krayt. Nice going, Ben. You'd think training Vader would have been enough.
- Superman:
- In Pre-Crisis, story How Luthor Met Superboy Lex Luthor was a fan of Superboy, then went on to hate his guts after an accident made Luthor lose his precious... hair, as well as a protoplasmic lifeform he had created, and his laboratory. Luthor believed that it was done out of jealousy for Luthor's genius and vowed to prove he was better than Supes. While this seems like Disproportionate Retribution, that same story had Luthor create multiple grandiose engineering projects for Smallville to show Superboy up, only to have all of them go disastrously wrong and force Clark to intervene. Thus Luthor's hate grew due to his warped perception that Superboy was out to publicly humiliate him despite the fact that Superboy had no choice in the matter. Later, in Action Comics #544: Luthor Unleashed!, Luthor gained a more legitimate reason: He blamed Supes for the death of his wife and son. Nowadays he's often still technically self-created, but it's not exactly Superman's fault: he turned to villainy over jealousy of Superman's achievements.
- The jealousy factors into his Silver Age origin as well. The experiment Superboy interrupted was one of a series of increasingly over the top acts of science Luthor was engaging in to win respect and admiration that kept getting overshadowed by the Boy of Steel.
- The villain Gog gets his start when Superman shatters his illusions about Superman being some messiah, thus causing Gog to see him as the Antichrist.
- Bizarro, naturally, since he's an imperfect copy of Superman. Parasite would arguably be less dangerous without Superman to drain for power, and Metallo would at least be much more limited in his activities since Kryptonite is by far the best power source for his robot body.
- Post-Crisis, Metallo is created by Professor Vale, who believes Superman is an alien invader, and creates Metallo to defend humanity. In the comics continuity post-Flashpoint, John Corben decides to become Metallo after seeing Superman easily fight his way out of a high security military base.Vale: Are you sure you want to go through with this, John?
John Corben: You saw what happened earlier. We need Steel Soldier more than ever, Professor Vale. Someone has to stop Superman... We're going to do what we have to. - Supes also brought the Eradicator to Earth (it was a supercomputer from Krypton, he just didn't realize its purpose would be malevolent.) He threw the Eradicator into the sun, causing the Eradicator to come back as an energy being, then the energy being created a new body for itself based on Superman.
- Cyborg-Superman. Superman believed that energy being Hank Henshaw could not master Kryptonian technology, so he trapped Henshaw in his birthing matrix. Result: Henshaw used the technology and traces of Superman's DNA to return as a Kryptonian cyborg with a grudge.
- The New 52 incarnation of Kryptonite Man, Clay Ramsay, was an ordinary man who joined a Super-Soldier program after Superman tossed him out of his apartment for beating his wife.
- The New 52 version of Magog was a young boy whose family and friends were killed during Darkseid's invasion of Earth. He blames Superman and Wonder Woman for failing to save them, and becomes a supervillain to take his revenge.
- The Transformers (IDW):
- Megatron credits Whirl, the Autobots' resident Nominal Hero who once tried to murder him in his cell, with teaching him the value of violence in political reform, leading to three million years of war, the near-extinction of the Cybertronian species, and a startling number of genocides. Later, it turns out that a time-travelling Whirl actually ensured Megatron's existence, and imbued him with a superpowered spark in the process, in order to make sure that Megatron would be around to kill the Functionist Council and stop them from taking control of Cybertron — meaning that Whirl created his own villain deliberately, in full knowledge of what he would do, because he hated the Functionists more.
- Shockwave was both on the receiving end of this, as Proteus stripped him of his emotions is led to Shockwave becoming the villain he is, and the delivering end, as Unicron, the Final Disc Boss of the universe, is a Doomsday Weapon created because of Shockwave's actions.
- Transmetropolitan: The arc "Freeze Me with Your Kiss" features a revenge scheme involving several people wronged in the past by Anti-Hero Spider Jerusalem. Also, part of why the Smiler is elected president is that Spider initially supported him over his similarly corrupt opponent as seemingly the lesser of two evils.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- The Ultimates: The Ultimates fight the War on Terror in several countries in Asia, so those countries react by creating The Liberators, a group of The Psycho Rangers to the Ultimates. This team invades the United States in a swift surprise attack.
- Ultimate Spider-Man: Peter gets in contact with Eddie Brock Junior and after stealing their parents' work, clues Eddie in that it can do a little more than cure cancer. Angry at Peter for being Spider-Man and resentful at his insistence that the Suit needs to be destroyed, Eddie grabs the second sample, and becomes Venom.
- Ultimate X Men: Xavier's neglect of his family caused his son David to snap (ironically triggering his X-Gene for the first time), building a hatred towards his father that boiled over when he escaped confinement in the "World Tour" story arc.
- Wonder Woman Vol. 1: From Priscilla Rich's very self serving perspective Wonder Woman is responsible for her becoming the costumed supervillain the Cheetah, because she got all the attention at a charity benefit they were performing at without the audience seeming to care at all about Pris and then survived Pris' ensuing attempt to murder her.
