Enfant Terrible / Comic Books

---

• Numerous characters from British Humour Comics fit this trope, examples include Ivy the Terrible and Bea from The Beano Cuddles and Dimples from The Dandy and Sweeny Toddler from Shiver And Shake, Whoopee! and Whizzer and Chips.
• Annihilators: Earthfall: The Magus, having been killed during The Thanos Imperative, comes back to life in the form of a child. He is just as cruel and monstrously evil as ever in this form.
• The Avengers: Ultron was one of these, trying to kill his creator Hank Pym within seconds of being turned on, while still calling him "dada", though this lasted only a matter of seconds.
• Arkas has a few such characters, but Junior from Flying Starts stands out. He is very disrespectful to his father, hates everyone and everyone hates him, has kidnapped a baby, has set fire to a nest, is a pervert, has a potty mouth and is very full of himself.
• Batman: James Gordon Jr. showed signs of psychopathy at a very early age, something which his father was able to see and sent him away to try to get help. Unfortunately, it only got worse.
• Batgirl Cassandra Cain was raised from birth to be the world's best assassin, to the point where her father never spoke to her so that she'd only be able to understand body language, and actually shot at her. But, after her first kill, she read the body language of someone dying and realised how horrible it is, and thus ran away from home, drifting until she found herself in Gotham City.
• Similar to Cass, Batman's son Damian Wayne. Raised to be an assassin by his mom Talia, he has a major case of Raised by Wolves.
• B.P.R.D. 1946 has a demon that stayed on Earth in the guise of a little Russian girl.
• Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes fits most of the requirements, but he doesn't get away with it.
• Jenifer, a teenage girl from a Creepy story by Bruce Jones (and drawn by Berni Wrightson). Though grotesquely deformed and mute, she's got some sort of preternatural power that she uses to seduce men and rob them of their logic, driving all their friends and family away and then raping them repeatedly, before forcing them to take her out in the woods and poise to kill her, paralyzing them just as another man comes along to save her and start the process all over. (Try YouTubing the TV version◊, as well — there's some pretty sick stuff there.)
  • Though said TV version plays her somewhat more morally ambiguous. Rather like a wild animal actually.
• Malice Vundabarr of Darkseid's Female Furies in The DCU.
• A 1990 Dick Tracy storyline has Tracy trying to figure out who is buying land in the Florida Everglades. It turns out to not be the CEO of a major corporation but his daughter, a child prodigy who is barely ten but already a genius who's a high-ranking VP. It turns out the girl is convinced that Global Warming is inevitably going to raise ocean levels and buying up this land will give her company an edge when it happens. She explains to her stunned father that by her calculations, by the time she's 30, she'll be able to use the bought lands to her advantage and increase the company's bottom line. She smugly adds that there's nothing Tracy can do as she's technically broken no laws. Tracy says she's right...and then turns to her father who promptly removes the girl from his company, vows to cut her out of the will and "oh, yes, you're grounded until you're 20."
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Donald's nephews were this in their first appearance, with Della sending them to live with their uncle because they had blown up the chair their father was sitting on, but eventually grew out of this thanks to Donald raising them right. This is referenced in a story where the nephews had been kidnapped by two alien Galactic Conqueror wannabes that brainwashed them into becoming their heirs: after beating the crap out of the kidnappers, Donald went to rescue his nephews, got threatened by Huey... And immediately declared if he had already educated them out of that attitude once he could do it again. Two panels later he has spanked the brainwashing out of them.
• In Earth X, the new Red Skull is a 12-year-old blond boy named Benny Beckley with mind control powers. Aside from attempted world conquest, his crimes include killing Doc Samson (by forcing him to tear himself apart), his aunt, Norman Osborn, and others.
  • By the time he actually starts taking over the planet, he seems to be about 16 or 17, at least. Killing him still nearly gives Captain America a Heroic BSoD.
• In the EC Comics Shock SuspenStories #7 story "The Small Assassin" by Ray Bradbury, a woman is convinced her four month old child is trying to kill her. Her husband assumes it's stress only to find her dead after she tripped on a toy on the stairs. Her husband, remembering various odd noises at night, is convinced that, somehow, their child has been born with adult intelligence and a twisted monster out to kill his parents. The family doctor, naturally, assume he's having a breakdown and sedates him. When he comes by the next morning, the doctor finds the father dead in a room filled with gas. What looks like a suicide or accident doesn't make sense given the man was fast asleep. The doctor then goes to the nurse to find the baby missing from the crib and the door shut by a wind. He realizes the man was right all along and the story ends with the doctor armed with a scalpel and the seemingly innocent baby facing off in a hallway...
• The Fantastic Four actually fought a villain named Enfant Terrible. Turns out it was just a misunderstood alien child. It almost destroyed Earth by pulling the sun closer to it simply because it found this glowing ball in the sky fascinating, for one.
• Ashley in Hack/Slash. Beat his own brother to death with a toy truck for playing with it, and was smothered to death by his outraged mother with a teddy bear. Survived as a vengeful ghost murdering other children in their dreams. Then ended up possessing the teddy bear...
• I Luv Halloween — Moochie, oh my dear motherf* cking god, Moochie!! She takes enfant terrible and ups it up to eleven (probably twelve)! She kills an obnoxious teenage couple and a young boy by bashing their heads in with a bra-slingshot, mutilates an unfortunate doctor (by applying him with electric shocks and stabbing scalpels into his thighs), pulls out teeth from dead and living alike (she was dressed as the tooth fairy), and her mile-wide pet cemetery implies no animal ever lasts more than five minutes in her care. She's also accompanied in her murderous hijinks by Spike, who is more of a creepy child than enfante terrible. All of this is for comedy.
  • The main cast is nearly made of enfante terrible. In one volume, after being taken in by a Christian couple, whose fear for Finch and Mr. Kitty's safety is misguidedly justified due to being in the midst of a zombie apocalypse (the kids themselves don't care what's going on as long as there's candy), they set fire to the husband's wife before escaping.
  • Finch (who happens to be the leader of the loosely-knit tricker-treaters) does it again when an old woman gives him an apple for candy, which he sees as unforgivable. If he doesn't get any treats, then the old woman gets "tricked", when Finch and his gang give an apple stuffed with razor blades to a town cop, whose death prompts the woman to get arrested. [1]
• Oliver AKA Kid Omni-Man from Invincible — imagine an evil, ten-year-old Superman with super-intelligence slowly going more and more insane while everyone around him ignores all the obvious signs.
  • And that's not signs like lurking creepily in rooms or asking "Don't you want to play with me, Mother? We can play such wonderful games". It's signs like killing people with his bare hands without a shred of remorse in front of everyone.
  • As of now, it appears that this was a subversion, Oliver is very much one of the good guys. Probably.
• Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass. While in her civilian garb she plays off as an innocent little girl, but outside of this, due to Training from Hell from her father, she is incredibly skilled with any weapon but she favors swords and knives in particular and can slice through an army of thugs in minutes and can shatter a man's leg with a single kick. She does all of this with sadistic glee, and she's one of the good guys.
• Klarion (bum..bum..BUM!) The Witch Boy. That said, Grant Morrison started a tradition of portraying him as more of an Anti-Hero than outright villain with Seven Soldiers.
• In the comic book L.E.G.I.O.N. '94 (the "modern-day" version of the Legion of Super-Heroes), the superintelligent Lyrl Dox took control of the intergalactic police force L.E.G.I.O.N. from his father, Vril Dox (the son of Brainiac), brainwashed all but a handful of the force's members, and turned it into a fascist organization that nearly took over the universe. All of this before his second birthday.
• Robin (1993): Recurring foe Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong was a mass murderer by ten, nearly started a war by eleven, and graduated to full-on criminal mastermind by age fifteen.
• Jimmy Marks aka Hybrid. The son of a human woman and a Rom Spaceknight's Dire Wraith. He started out as a relatively normal child, but when a bunch of his dad's old comrades showed up looking for him, they took an "interest" in the boy and taught him the ways of power and evil. Jimmy took to their lessons like a fish to water and started terrorizing his parents (even his Dire Wraith father was terrified) and killing livestock For the Evulz. Even worse, around this time Jimmy's mutation — extremely potent Psychic Powers — also manifested itself. Psychic powers, the ability to go One-Winged Angel into a super strong Nigh-Invulnerable monster even fouler than a typical Dire Wraith, and a penchant for evil that terrifies his own Dire Wraith father (who is a member of one of the most evil races in the Marvel universe, which is saying something) — not a good combination. In his debut he ages his own mother to death, impales his father with a pitchfork when dad tries to kill him out of remorse for letting him become a monster, engineers a Let's You and Him Fight scenario between Rom and the X-Men by pretending to be a helpless child, and tries to abduct Kitty Pride for breeding purposes. Hybrid was so evil that Rom was willing to set his weapon to "kill" when Hybrid proved too powerful to be banished to Limbo. Hybrid not only survives but gets worse with each later appearance. In Avengers Academy, he pulls the exact same "helpless youth" act to get admitted into the Academy, all so he can enslave everyone there and make the men his soldiers and the women his breeding partners.
• In Squee, the six/seven-year-old Pepito is this... on account of being literally The Antichrist. His introductory scene has him disintegrating a child's head.
  Pepito: I have many names. Son of the Dark Prince, Child of Darkness. Some call me the Altar Boy of Doom. Others know me as the Second Coming of Damnation. My mom calls me Pepito.
• Wonder Woman (2006): Ares' children are a group of boys who all look about eight, are closer to one, and run about spreading a Hate Plague and personally inciting murder, and being dissapointed when things aren't violent enough.
• X-23 of the X-Men. She is Wolverine's clone and was raised from birth by a Government Conspiracy to be a killing machine through Training from Hell that descended into outright physical and emotional abuse, and often is able to carry out missions because she is so cute that no one suspects her. She even duped Captain America after her "field test" by masquerading as victim of a massacre she herself perpetrated. However, Laura is also not a straight example: She constantly fights against her upbringing and desperately wants to be more than just a weapon.
• Later X-Force villain Genocide is a ten-year-old boy. A giant, radioactive skeleton in an intimidating-looking containment suit, but a ten-year-old boy. He's got enough nuclear firepower to blow up a town, and he curbstomped Wolverine. Subverted in that he doesn't appear to be a "bad" kid, exactly, he just admires and tries to please really bad people (the followers of Apocalypse, if you must know).
• The villains of the X-Men event "Schism" are a quartet of rich 11-to-12-year-olds who have joined the Hellfire Club. They include the new Corrupt Corporate Executive of the company that manufactures sentinels, who got the position by murdering his father and blackmailing the board of directors; a Bavarian child prodigy descended from Victor Von Frankenstein; an Ax-Crazy badass hotel heiress; and a West African Self-Made Orphan who's taken over his family's slave trading empire.
• Prince Harrandatha Estillo from the X-Wing Rogue Squadron comics. He's Royally Screwed Up.
  "All those years of dipping from the same genetic pool caused a wrinkle, a flaw in an otherwise normal family line. We set out to keep ourselves above the common man and found ourselves with a thing from the deepest pit of the Sith."

---