Cut Lex Luthor a Check in Comic Books.
The following have their own pages:
Other Comic Books
Gaining more money legitimately
- Upheld with the main character from the 1950s horror comic "The Man Who Tricked The Devil", a rich, and famous lawyer. He wants to use his legal expertise to flaunt that he can cheat the devil out of $10 billion with a very carefully worded contract
. Unfortunately, he forgot that he had to sign the contract with his own blood. And because he filled the contract with so many clauses and prohibitions to make sure the devil wouldn't try to twist the wish in anyway, he had to sign it so many times as well, causing him to bleed out and die. - In a Tom Strong storyline showing the alternate reality of Tom Stone, Tom (Stone) manages to convince would-be science villain Paul Saveen to use his genius for good by pointing out that while his plan to hold the city for ransom with his recent discovery phlogisten could get him thousands, selling phlogisten as a cheap heating source would make him a millionaire.
- Earlier in the same conversation, Saveen all but directly stated that he was turning to villainy because his inventions up to now had gone ignored; for instance, there's no market for his flying car in Millennium City because they can't safely navigate the city's system of cable cars.
- Upheld in Demon #0 (Garth Ennis series, 1993-1995), where the human host, Jason Blood, as an unscrupulous World War I arms merchant, wishes to use the titular character to bring about an earlier Allied victory. However, the Demon likes all the bloodshed, and human depravity brought on by the war, and goes against Mr. Blood's plans.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Mammoth Mogul decided to pull this. He took over Robotnik's old Casino Night Zone, renamed it the Casino Night Club, hired most of Robotnik's old Badniks, including Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts and decided to park his keister there. Of course, this was less about turning legit and more about letting time defeat Sonic as Mogul's immortal.
- In the Cosmic Retcon universe, this role goes to Breezie the Hedgehog, who becomes a multimedia icon in a Rags to Riches-like story, owning Casino Palace and her own TV company. She even engineers a tournament for a Chaos Emerald for the sole purpose of more money and fame. And wins.
- The Disney Mouse and Duck Comics have various examples:
- In the story "My Little Town", the villain is an alien who is using a Shrink Ray to shrink Earth's cities, then sell them as "highly accurate miniatures" in order to earn enough money to repair his spaceship. Mickey forces the alien to re-enlarge each city, then points out that there's a faster and more honest way the alien can make money with his ray—by buying a cheap, tiny diamond and enlarging it to a colossal size.
- Pete could easily find himself a honest job and even become rich through his organizational skills and the other skills he gained as a criminal... But he remembers the time he was one of Mouseton's most dangerous criminals and respected as such, so he refuses unless not doing so would mean starvation or he's forced by the law (he was even sentenced to work as a street cop on two separate occasions).
- One excellent example is when his common law wife Trudy found some honest friends and convinced him to make at least one attempt at getting a honest job without trying to get himself fired with poor performance: Pete went to work for a security agency as a consultant and showed them all their weaknesses and how to eliminate them, at which point they had to fire him because they didn't need a consultant anymore... Just As Planned.
- The Beagle Boys have gained immense technical skills in their continuous attacks on the Money Bin (that is, a fortress filled with technologically advanced defenses and artillery), and could easily become rich by attacking other targets or turning said skills to honest jobs... But after years attacking the Money Bin their stubbornness kicked in and they just don't want to get rich any other way. At most they occasionally steal some money to finance their attacks on the Money Bin.
- Subverted with Magica De Spell: while it seems she could put her magic and other skills to work to become rich the honest way, it's often shown she already does that as a day job and is rather affluent (enough to pay for some of her most expensive assaults on the Bin), and her assaults for the Number One Dime happen when she has both a few days of free time (needing to fly across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Continental United States and then back) and enough money set aside for the temporary vacation. Italian stories even turn her demands to be called a sorceress and not a witch into demanding to be called a fattucchiera out of professional pride, as anyone using magic can be a witch but a fattucchiera is a professional that makes money through their magic.
- Scooby-Doo! Team-Up: In "Enter the Dragons - Exit Scooby Doo", the villain behind the robot dragons is Bernie, a robotics scientist who, needing funds to pay for his research, used the dragons to scare everyone away from Chinatown so he could steal the stores' money and use it to pay for his work. Shaggy suggests Bernie could have sold the robots in Hollywood. Bernie likes the idea.
- In PS238, this is combined with Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome. Zodon is a super-intelligent child who spends most of his free time trying to be a supervillain and/or show up Victor, only to get foiled by the school's staff or his fellow students. In an alternate universe without metahumans, his counterpart just makes meme-tastic websites and sells them for millions of dollars.
- The Revenant has managed to "convince" a number of villains that it is better for them to find a more practical way to use their abilities. For example, Mr. Godwin, visually a Captain Ersatz of Red Skull, now steals money from willing people through his casino.
- Michel Vaillant features Big Bad The Leader, who holds a villainous monologue in which he explains in great detail how winning the Le Mans road race will help him humiliate all other car manufacturers. This will put him in a position to sell his cars all over the world and he will stop at nothing to achieve this goal. Nothing, except just opening a dealership and putting his cars up for sale. Nobody denies the quality of his vehicles or objects to him selling the cars through normal means. If he'd stopped scheming and cheating he'd have been far more successful.
- Mandrake the Magician recurring villain The Mole had invented a heat ray capable of vaporising practically anything, up to and including sold stone; it was light enough to mount on his head, used an equally small power supply, and worked so fast and efficiently that combining it with a jetpack allowed him to essentially fly through the ground faster than a speeding car. So naturally he used it all to... break into banks and jewelry stores.
- Gaston Lagaffe is an odd non-villain example. Some of his gadgets are dangerous disasters, but others are just used at the wrong time. But when Gaston demonstrates his new invention can turn printed paper into blank paper and functional ink, even if Gaston just erased important contracts, De Mesmaeker should realize this device is worth billions more than whatever the contracts are.
- Astro City touches on this trope fairly often:
- Deconstructed in "The Tarnished Angel". Steeljack points out that all of the villains he knows (including himself) made millions at one point or another, but he finds all of their widows living in run-down apartments. They all put their fortunes into preparing for their next job, expensive gear, or paying off debts, telling themselves that the next heist would be big enough to retire on. To a degree, this corresponds to real-life criminal psychology. This is even specifically pointed out when he interviews the Chain's boyfriend, who mentions that he kept pushing the Chain to sell his invention (which allows him to transfer his mind into a metal body) for space or deep sea exploration, making millions in a perfectly legit way. The Chain would always shoot down the suggestions and insist he didn't understand.
- It is also deconstructed in the Eisner Award winning "Show 'Em All". It shows that while supervillains COULD get rich from their creations or even by being more clever with their crimes, that's not why they do it, it's mostly the result of a desperate need for validation. Everyone HAS to know how clever and powerful the villain committing the crime is, they'd rather lose outright than get away with no one knowing who did it.
- Indirectly addressed in the story "On the Sidelines", a story about superpowered folks who use their abilities for regular jobs such as special effects, construction, and glassblowing.
- Averted by the villainess Cutlass, who saved enough money from her supervillain heists to start a real estate business near Phoenix, AZ.
Possibility of gaining more money legitimately
In theory, any supervillain who uses expensive, fantastic technology for theft could subvert this: provided the technology is a one-time expense, they would eventually make back the money and start profiting if they manage to steal enough, meaning they can do it for the money and For the Evulz. The problem is, in a world where superheroes are everywhere thwarting your every move, this isn't likely to happen.- Lampshaded by the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird when Baxter Stockman, already very wealthy from his legitimate technology company, begins using his Mouser robots for crime. When April asks him why he'd do it when he's already rich, Stockman, who is already mentally unhinged to begin with, simply claims that it's fun!
- Inferior Five: Hilariously subverted in the short-lived DC parody comic book. The would-be superteam's first nemesis was Dr. Gregory Gruesome, a brilliant, evil Mad Scientist who was so poor he lived in a dilapidated wooden hut in the middle of a junkyard and his sole henchman was a dim-witted vagabond. Despite lamenting about his inability to "turn out multi-million-dollar missiles like they were paper planes" like this trope's namesake, he actually created some remarkably effective machines by cobbling together garbage, scrap, and various other odds and ends.
- One of the Bananaman comics in The Dandy had this with a villain (well, his villainy was trying to scare the hero), running a fancy fake haunted house with holographic ghosts and what not. It subverted the trope because at the end, the villain DID do a Heel–Face Turn and use his abilities to run a theme park Haunted House ride.
- The Adventures of Tintin has a double subversion in Flight 714. Dr. Krollspell has developed a working, if unperfected, truth serum. Now, you might reasonably assume that every intelligence or security agency in the world would pay a king's ransom for it. However, instead of marketing it, Dr. Krollspell takes a job from Rastapopoulos to use it on millionaire Laszlo Carreidas to get a bank account number. This trope could even conceivably apply to Rastapopoulos too. He could have bankrolled the distribution of a massive invention... except that the truth serum doesn't work, as Carreidas ends up babbling on about everything except the bank account number. Rastapopoulos could have injected Carreidas with Rajaijah Juice and gotten the same result. The serum does work, but Carreidas says the truth about everything but what Rastapopoulos wants him to speak about.
- Happens rather often in Diabolik:
- The title character is the best thief in the world thanks to his abilities as acrobat, martial artist, chemist, engineer, detective and pilot. He could make a legitimate fortune with any of those professions, or simply patent his perfect masks and enjoy the royalties (the request for these is actually a plot point, as nobody but him can make masks that don't break down and melt after a few hours), but he doesn't care. It went to the point that one of his heists involved him creating two Diabolik-proof safes (once Ginko found and removed the devices that read the combination (thus allowing the heist), the safes were impregnable even to Diabolik. Too bad he found out after the caper...).
- Eva Kant, Diabolik's lover and accomplice, is almost as good as him as an acrobat, martial artist, detective and pilot, and is also decent as a mechanic and a very good singer (in fact she did work as a singer for a while), but she steals because she's in love with Diabolik and wants to help him.
- Justified with Suanda: he did try and become legitimately rich with his first inventions, but he was black and white colleagues stole the credit, hence why he became a criminal and joined King's organization.
- Two other members of King's organization, Wolf and Prof, did become rich using the skills that once made them so valuable for King... But the former was obsessed by Diabolik's masks (it was his project originally) and the latter was greedy as hell, hence why they continued committing crimes on the side.
- Walter Dorian and others are/were legitimately skilled businessmen-who steal, scam, and generally commit crimes because of greed.
- Giorgio Corbett tried to become rich with his invention, a device that could detect Diabolik's masks, but first he had the bad luck of getting arrested for industrial espionage before he could tell his employer that he had discovered one of the elements of Diabolik's masks (what could allow the creation of the device), and when, after serving his sentence, he did try to use the device to become rich he choose to sell his invention to a rich private detective who wanted the police's trust instead of selling it directly to the police, leading to Diabolik escaping and murdering him.
- Giorgio's nephew Giacomo later found the blueprints, but simply gave the device to the police: he wanted to clear his uncle's name, not money. A good thing, given that the blueprints were a fake planted by Diabolik for one of his capers.
- The villains of the Disney Ducks Comic Universe and Mickey Mouse Comic Universe regularly menace the world using invisibility cloaks, cloning machines, mind-control rays etc., but you shouldn't expect anyone to point out that their inventions are a revolutionary miracle of science that, by all logic, should have changed civilization as we know it years ago.
- Invincible once ran into a guy who'd invented a "gravity gun" in his basement and used it to rob a bank. He had considered selling his invention, but he needed the money now and that sounded like a long and complicated process. He is really bad at being a supervillain, and Mark lets him go (and returns the money back to the bank) with the advice that he should just sell the technology. In next issue it turns out that he sold the gun... to a bank robber. He didn't know who to see or call about this stuff. After capturing the second robber, Mark takes the guy to Cecil, the head of a super-secret government agency responsible for handling superheroes and supervillains, who gives him a very high-paying job to invent new weapons.
- The Astro City villain Infidel is an Evil Sorcerer Mad Scientist who can rewrite reality, and could easily live a long and comfortable life of unimaginable fame and luxury without effort. But he's obsessed with conquering everyone everywhere, and is relegated to a pocket dimension instead.
