Cameron Nemo: Sometimes you make yourself so difficult to love... but mark my words, Elisa Cameron, I will break you. It may take a century or two of slow butchery, and you may not be worth keeping when it's all over — but you will be broken. Tire her out a bit.
Christine: Mr. Nemo... why does she want you to hurt her?
Cameron: Don't be stupid, Christine. She doesn't want me to hurt her. She's just playing hard to get.
Christine: But you like hurting her?
Cameron: You bet I do! Almost as much as I like smacking around you whimpering moppets! That's it. No more questions. Ever. You utter another phrase that ends in a question mark, and I turn your skull into a doorstop, got it?
Christine: Mr. Nemo... why does she want you to hurt her?
Cameron: Don't be stupid, Christine. She doesn't want me to hurt her. She's just playing hard to get.
Christine: But you like hurting her?
Cameron: You bet I do! Almost as much as I like smacking around you whimpering moppets! That's it. No more questions. Ever. You utter another phrase that ends in a question mark, and I turn your skull into a doorstop, got it?
— Ghost Vol. 2 issue #17—"When the Devil Daydreams, Part 2"
In The Dark Age of Comic Books—and a subsequent 2010s reboot—Dark Horse Comics filled their shared universe with a large variety of extra-nasty villains.
The Barb Wire film can found here.
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Original Continuity
Examples
- Cameron Nemo was once a benign Energy Being, but after being rejected by Elisa Cameron, he became obsessed with forcing her to his side by any means necessary. Manifesting in the real world and making people kill each other and themselves, Cameron also breaks Elisa's mind with an illusion that she's his abused housewife. Later on, he takes over Archibald Scythe's body and drives the town of Black Heart, Nebraska into insanity, with people killing and raping each other by the dozens and Ghost and Barb Wire almost being gang-raped themselves. After a failed attempt to remake Scythe's cult, Nemo returns to his dimension and creates dozens of children to lure her into his castle, capturing her and forcing her to fight monsters to the death; when she escapes anyway, Nemo murders the children for their failure. By far Elisa's most personal and sadistic nemesis upon becoming the Ghost, Nemo's attempts at playing the victim only further showcase the devil he truly is and always has been.
- Reverend Archibald Scythe was once a failed rock star who become an absolute monster upon discovering his power: the passive generation of pheromones that drive women mad with desire for him. Taking advantage of this power, Scythe forms a cult of women and uses his powers on them, implanting mental hooks to ensure they can never escape and giving him the power to transform them into bloodthirsty monsters; when the women no longer entertain him, Scythe kills them and dumps the bodies in a mass grave. Scythe then came in contact with Dr. Trouvaille and begins handing off his women to him for experimentation, including Elisa; later on, he has his furies bring in Elisa's sister Margo, which they do by killing everyone in the club she's visiting, before forcing Elisa back with her hook. Even after dying and being resurrected, Scythe immediately seeks to continue his work by killing Elisa, the woman who just saved him from Demonic Possession.
- Crux is Arcadia's worst crime lord, with a vicious ambition that exceeds any other. Having previously been given an enslaved Elisa as a gift, Crux forced her to be his personal hitman, killing dozens of people to protect himself. In the present day, Crux kills even more, including assassinating Elisa's parents and having Miasma's predecessor turned into cat food, before releasing Dr. October to cause even more chaos. Having been searching for a mythical key to the city, Crux leaves clues regarding Elisa's death to trick her into finding it, all while kidnapping X and forcing him to shoot himself in the head. When Elisa's journey leads her to the Goblin Nation, Crux indiscriminately massacres everyone in sight, even promising to spare anyone who surrenders before killing them anyway, and turns the key, causing an earthquake that almost destroys the entire city. In a desperate bid to spare his life, Crux reveals why he knew so much about Elisa's death: he was the one who ordered it to begin with.
- Dr. Trouvaille is an evil scientist who became obsessed with death and the spirit that leaves the human body upon death. After experimentation, Trouvaille discovered how to remove this spirit himself, doing so to several unwilling victims before rendering their spirits into the Ghost agent, attempting to do the same to Elisa Cameron and turning her into the Ghost; this obsession caused him to ally with Silhouette. Continuing his work, Trouvaille has Mr. Park summon incubi to drive at least one woman to suicide, intending to experiment on her spirit. He later kidnaps Margo to force Elisa to come to him, putting Silhouette in Margo's body to begin the Shade invasion against humanity; not even death can stop him, as his consciousness is put in his armor after death for him to happily continue his work.
- Silhouette is the leader of the "Shades", a race of extra-dimensional entities beginning a silent takeover of humanity. Through Scythe and Trouvaille, Silhouette arranges for a host of people to have their spirits removed for Shades to take their bodies, keeping the victims locked from the afterlife all the while. When Silhouette wakes up in Margo Cameron's body, she goes on a rampage across the city attacking abusers and victims alike, culminating in attempting to wipe out all life in Arcadia just because Elisa sympathized with her. After permanently taking Margo's body, Silhouette releases Scythe's "Ghostkillers", having them kill the spirits of her previous victims. To finally begin her large-scale invasion, Silhouette tortures Concordia Leveche to take over her body, intending to use her powers to find even more bodies to take over and remake the world in her own image.
- Vol. 1 issues #6-9: Hunger is a vile psionic rapist who has used his powers to denigrate and destroy the lives of "around twenty" women, often driving them to suicide. Having ruined so many women he's become bored by the control he has over them, Hunger experiments in new ways to amuse himself, including using his powers to brainwash women into sex before cutting off his powers mid-way just to humiliate them. When he finds Ghost is beyond is control, Hunger targets her and others around her, using his powers to force her and an ally of hers to have intercourse against their will just to get Ghost's attention.
- Special #2—"Immortal Coil": Mr. Borazzon once had his heart give out on him and discovered that he goes through hearts exponentially fast. To save his own life, Borazzon begins orchestrating massacres across Arcadia, indiscriminately killing massive crowds of people. He then has the corpses trafficked to his cruise ship, uncaring if they're actually dead or not, in order to harvest their hearts for transplanting into his own chest. All of this is to get the attention of Ghost in order to harvest her heart, with Borazzon also kidnapping and threatening to kill Barb Wire to ensure her cooperation.
Other comics
Examples
- The metahuman calling himself "Law" was the very first person infected by the Vortex, giving him superhuman powers and an ambition to consolidate as much power as he could, no matter who he crushed in the process. Breaking out of Block 13 in Division 13, Law hits his stride in his own solo series Agents Of Law, where he murders a random woman to use her corpse as a decoy for the city's real leader, Grace, to trick the city's population into electing him as their new leader. Law promptly begins murdering everyone who could pose a threat to him, having his entire boardroom council massacred—and killing his own minions to make the setup look convincing—and later on having a detention center full of Grace's dissident prisoners massacred to almost the last man. Law has no issue ruthlessly killing his own innocent servants just to make a point, and he hits the pinnacle of his evil when he begins testing a device called the Judgment Gate on countless multitudes from the tent city outside the Golden City, in the hopes of making a metahuman army; only 7.6% survive the process, while the rest are reduced to monstrous, agonized abominations.
- Barb Wire Vol. 1: Maureen Skach, the second Ignition, overshadows the original in selfishness and sadism. The former girlfriend of the original Ignition, Boyd Mack, Maureen kills him after mistaking several women visiting him for other girlfriends. Absorbing his powers upon his death, Maureen uses them to help Mace Blitzkrieg wipe out several police precincts, and even kills her new partner Hardhide after he shows disapproval of her cop-killing methods. Discovering she has the ability to absorb the powers of superhumans upon killing them, Maureen commences a superhuman killing spree, hoping to kill every superhuman in Steel Harbor and gain an enormous amount of power.
- King Tiger & Motorhead: Giu Xian is an occultist dedicated to bringing about the end of humanity. Slaughtering a crowd of people to obtain the Abattoir Key, Xian tries to use it to summon a group of demons to feast on a cruise ship's restaurant, only stopped by King Tiger and Motorhead. When this fails, Xian instead sets his sights on a nearby Mardi Gras parade with thousands of people in attendance, intending to massacre them all to open the gate for demons to enter our world and slowly feast on all of humanity.
- Comic Book/Motorhead issues #4-5: Tumulus Pallbearer is a centuries-old sorcerer who specializes in stealing other people's souls. Having clawed his way into power without caring who he hurt along the way, Pallbearer became convinced that he deserved unlimited power, attempting to gain it by siphoning people's souls. To do this, he opens an amusement park called the Catacombs, with the seemingly-harmless attractions designed to show people their worst fear and harvest their souls, leaving hundreds of people as mindless husks with no will to live once they're through. Pallbearer also has no care for his underlings, killing one just for questioning his plan, and spits on the concept of hospitality by poisoning Frank's tea so he can steal the Motor for himself.
- X Vol. 1: The Ziggurat, aka Coffin, is by far Arcadia City's nastiest Psycho for Hire. The Ziggurat was the man who sliced out the eye of the man who would become X years ago on behalf of crime boss Carmine Tango, and years later he's no less proficient in his cruelty when Tango brings him back aboard to deal with X. The Ziggurat kills people one after another often just for annoying him, biting off their fingers and slicing their throats, at one point threatening an entire family in debt to Tango while mockingly cradling their infant baby. When X finds him, he's in the middle of mowing down dozens of homeless vagrants while gleefully quoting Mephistopheles, stopping just short of slaughtering a mother and her children when X intercepts him; after this, the Ziggurat blows up the entire waterfront district, destroying countless more lives just to spite X.
Project Black Sky
Examples
- The Archon is one of the most powerful supervillains in the rebooted setting. A former Nazi sympathizer who ruled over a country called Lutzany, the Archon experimented on countless members of his own countrymen to eugenically breed a superhuman army modeled after himself. Introduced in X where he leaves a huge chunk of Arcadia City in ruins after his fight with X, the Archon returns as the Big Bad of Captain Midnight, where he pulls the strings behind many of the comic's other villains, from unleashing Tempus on Midnight's hometown, to having his personal assassin Phang kill dozens, including a laboratory full of unarmed scientists. The Archon's final plan for the world, a nightmare worse than the Third Reich, is so bad that Midnight's old sidekick and an actual Nazi team up to fight against him.
- Tempus, a super-terrorist and Arms Dealer who rents out his fantastic products to the highest bidder, is introduced in the crossover 2 Past Midnight by using his latest invention, an "insanity ray", to try to provoke officers into gunning down a subway full of people. His rap sheet full of similar episodes of mass murder and casual cruelty, like when he goes about murdering bedridden witnesses to his evil by sticking needles in their eyes, Tempus hopes to steer the insanity ray onto the whole of Arcadia City to make its entire population rip each other apart, then selling this technology to maniacs he knows will use it on entire countries. Busted out of prison in Captain Midnight, Tempus promptly takes Midnight's entire hometown hostage and threatens to destroy it if Midnight doesn't surrender, and promptly blows the entire town up anyway when Midnight does, gleefully cackling "I Lied!"
- Brain Boy: The unnamed psychic Reader possessing General Emil Ricorta values nothing more than the ability to torture, rape, and kill whoever and whenever he likes. As "Ricorta", he oversees a massive, murderous dictatorship in which thousands of people are thrown into concentration camps and executed in swathes, all as he preys upon countless children to fulfill his disgusting, pedophilic desires. Using his mind control abilities to regularly force innocents to kill themselves and those around them at his behest, "Ricorta" uses hundreds of civilians as human shields in one of his fights with Price, and mind rapes the superhero with images of the atrocities committed under "Ricorta"'s banner. When he runs out of usage for Ricorta, the Reader bodyjacks one of his closest allies and frames the real Ricorta for everything, forcing him to commit suicide as the Reader wanders off to perpetrate even more crimes, threatening all the while to kill untold numbers of innocents if Price dares to halt his hedonistic lifestyle.
- Ghost:
- "Bobby Chambers", this continuity's version of Cameron Nemo, is a carnivorous, manipulative demon from another world which he and his race scoured of all life. When a foolish inventor accidentally opened a hole to this world from Earth, the demon possessed him, then murdered his way into the influential Chambers family, eventually settling on the identity of Bobby Chambers, mayor of Arcadia City. Bobby puts demons in charge of every major position of Arcadia City, turning the city into a Wretched Hive for his own profit, all while he routinely sacrifices innocent people to the rest of his race so they can eventually break free and devour the rest of Earth. When his current lover, Dr. October, stops being of use to him, Bobby gleefully mutilates her face and eventually body jacks her to escape his own death.
- Vol. 4 issues #5-8: Von Ghastly used to be, by his own admission, a "boring old human" until he started dabbling in the art of Human Sacrifice, setting up his path to becoming a would-be god. Von Ghastly becomes a TV personality and sets up a show called Cinegeddon, where he dresses up his messy slayings as special effects to his eager audience. All the dozens of people he kills on-air are meant to fuel a ritual to make him omnipotent, whereupon he plans to let the eldritch contents of the multiverse spill upon Earth so he can feed on the terror of all humanity.
- King Tiger: Tiger's evil father, the Evil Sorcerer known only as "Dragon", mated with an eldritch horror named Canthastius to produce many half-demon children, of which Tiger was the one success. Having twenty people taken as sacrifices, the final three being the thugs he'd hired to kidnap the other 17, Dragon burns them alive to summon the demon who bore his progeny, unleashing it upon an innocent city with the intent to have it consume the world so he may build a new order from its ashes, intending on sacrificing Tiger himself to fully power Canthastius.
- The Occultist Vol. 2 issue #1: Carol Frances Markwart, despite having been dead for decades, is one of the most monstrous individuals in this comic's history. Having run an orphanage in the 20's, Carol spent her time raking in money from the government, spending it all on herself instead of the orphanage before eventually abandoning it entirely. In the process, she let all of the babies within starve to death, condemning dozens of babies to a hellish undeath as Wights in the process. Even when her spirit is summoned, she insists that she took care of the babies properly, unrepentant of the horror she caused.
- X Vol. 2:
- Issues #2-3 & #17-20: Dr. Lawrence Heide, a twisted Mad Doctor and one of the most sadistic villains faced by X, debuts by surgically altering the comic's Starter Villain into an insane Pig Man. Forming his own gang soon after, the "Skin Traders", Dr. Heide surgically warps and drugs random people to turn them into his minions, then has them go out and kidnap random women so he can flay them alive to create the perfect skin graft. When the first recipient of his miracle skin graft—one of his own victims—ends up deformed even further when the graft fails, Heide rules her a failure. Heide later captures X and flays him, head-to-toe, for his regenerative skin, and as he's escaping orders everyone in a hospital he'd taken hostage massacred because some of them heard his real name.
- Issues #6-8 & #23-24: Lt. Jeffrey Setter is the most corrupt cop in Arcadia City. A drug peddler under the alias "El Jefe", Setter sets up honest cops to die at the hands of X, then tortures and tries to kill them himself when X spares them, threatening to shoot X's assistant as well. When X spares him too, Setter spits on X's mercy and forms a new gang, causing a horrible new drug epidemic that makes its victims bleed non-stop from their eyes and attack everyone around them. Setter tries to engulf the entire northern quarter of the city with this drug, forming a mob of hundreds of people Setter has reduced to raving, addicted lunatics.
