"When the world went to hell, The Maestro was standing at the gate with the key. He was smart enough and strong enough to create this city from the ruins. Below ground, in miles and miles of survival tunnels lived people like myself and others. No one down here knew that aboveground, the Maestro was building a dystopia. Now it's too late. He takes what he wants. Does what he wants. Lives for his own amusement and gratification. If he favours you great if not forget it. He's insane Bruce."
— Janis Jones to Bruce Banner on The Maestro, Future Imperfect, Issue #1
The Incredible Hulk, since 1962, has featured Bruce Banner, as well as other characters, struggling with his Hulk identity while dealing with life as a superhero. Among the many supervillains in his rogues gallery, there have been some who have been particularly vile.
- Examples from What If? and Old Man Logan (2016) (Other Continuities) can be found here.
- Examples from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (including tie-in comics) can be found here.
- The Incredible Hulk (1977) can be found here.
- Examples from animated works (including related comics) can be found here.
- Examples from literature can be found here.
- Examples from video games can be found here.
Volume numbers are based on the TV Tropes numbering.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
Earth-616 Hulk
- Recurring Villains:
- Brian Banner, Bruce Banner's father, regularly beat him and Brian's wife, Rebecca, eventually killing Rebecca when she tried to leave him and forcing Bruce to lie in court that Brian hadn't done anything to hurt either of them. Arrested after drunkenly bragging about having gotten away with murder at a bar, Brian returned to murder Bruce years later after his release, blaming his own slip up on Bruce. After being killed and resurrected by the Chaos King, Brian, transformed into the Devil Hulk, would try to kill his resurrected wife a second time along with his son Bruce, now known as the Hulk, and grandson, Skaar. During the events of Immortal Hulk, Brian aids the One Below All in his attempt to enter the physical plane so he can completely destroy the Marvel Multiverse, planning to use his own son Bruce as a host to allow the One Below All entryway.
- The Maestro, later featured in his own series, is a future version of the Hulk. Ninety years after the world is devastated by nuclear war, the Hulk has changed his name to the Maestro and builds a city state called Dystopia out of the wreckage of New York City. The Maestro rules as a dictator, taking whatever he wants from his subjects and hoarding almost all the food and resources for himself. When Maestro sees a woman he fancies, he forces her to become his slave. The outside of his palace is littered with corpses of those who have defied or displeased the Maestro. The Maestro has his Secret Police patrol the streets, killing anyone who would oppose him. After the Maestro's forces have captured one of Rick Jones's rebels, the Maestro subjects the rebel to a machine which forcibly scans a person's mind, which puts him in a vegetative state. When Rick Jones uses Dr. Doom's time machine to bring the Hulk to the future to defeat the Maestro, the Maestro takes one of his slave girls hostage to force Hulk to surrender to him, before paralyzing the Hulk by breaking his neck and forcing one of his slave girls to perform sexual acts on him without the Hulk's permission. The Maestro even murders an elderly Rick Jones, the man who was once his best friend, for opposing him. The Maestro also tells the Hulk he prefers his harem of slaves to his former wife Betty Ross, because his slaves don't talk back to him or have opinions of their own.
- Vol. 2:
- Issues #111-112 & 269-270: The self-proclaimed Galaxy Master was the worst of an already Always Chaotic Evil species, proving it by wiping out every other member of his race. So he will never be challenged, the Galaxy Master begins a campaign to exterminate all sapient life in the universe, wiping out worlds one after another and leaving over a thousand galaxies dead and lifeless behind him. Even the one race he spares, the Saggitarians, are forced to find new worlds for him to scour lest he take out their own—while the Galaxy Master inevitably plans to kill them all anyway when their usefulness ends.
- Issues #301-308: The Puffball Collective is the rogue element of a peaceful Hive Mind of alien puffballs, having developed a manipulative, power-hungry personality. Secretly dabbling in dark magic, the Collective summoned the demonic N'garai to its home dimension, leading to the entire species being slaughtered and the world reduced to a lifeless wasteland. Banished to the interdimensional Crossroads by its dying race, the Collective encounters the Hulk and poses as a caring friend to manipulate him into escaping exile. Upon returning to its homeworld with the Hulk's help, the Collective betrays Hulk to the N'garai, cruelly taunting him for seeing it as a friend and planning to lead the demons in laying waste to thousands of worlds after Hulk is disposed of.
- Issues #302 & 303: Maktu, the bloodthirsty leader of the Iron Knights, took over the benevolent planet of the Greens and reduced it to a lifeless hellhole through a systematic genocide. Maktu orders the construction of a "City of Death" from which he rules the desert he's made of the Greens' world; every building in the city is made from the bones of the Greens he's slaughtered. Maktu only spares the Greens' noble princess, the fair Nalee, because her defiance amuses him, planning to forcibly marry her while having her watch as he continues to mill the bones of her people by the millions.
- Issue #311—"Life Is a Four-Letter Word!": Dr. Daniel Decyst is a 300-year-old Scottish Mad Scientist displaced from his native 1800s on an alien world. When the natives mistook him for a god, Decyst decides to exploit this in his pursuit of biological immortality. Dr. Decyst initially meets Bruce Banner on friendly terms before the reveal of his longevity is revealed; for three centuries, Decyst has been drugging and then bleeding out the natives like pigs to turn their blood into an elixir. Decyst keeps the natives alive and conscious for every second of this agony until they finally give, a fate he plans for Bruce Banner himself after having witnessed Bruce's transformation into the Hulk.
- Issues #351 & 352—"Total Recall" & "Fervor": Grand Inquisitor Risuli is a cruel tyrant native to the Microverse who conquered his home world K'ai and turned into a mass-torturing theocracy that worshipped the Hulk. When the Hulk again came down to K'ai, Risuli decides to have him murdered so he can continue ruling through his false dogma, systematically torturing dozens of rebels along the way and merely sighing "how disappointing" when one appears to croak.
- Issues #390-392: Farnoq Sawalha Dahn, ruler of Trans-Sabal, is a tinpot dictator with nuclear ambitions. Trans-Sabal is a humanitarian's nightmare: people are executed merely for criticizing Dahn, and he once had an entire town wiped out to kill a few paltry rebels, leaving an entire emergency ward stuffed with burned and maimed survivors. Trans-Sabal tries to use Havok of X-Factor as a living nuke, and dissuades the USA from intervening by tying two dozen innocent people to missiles and threatening to fire them. To prove he's not bluffing, Dahn orders two of them fired anyway, a mother and her child tied to each.
- Hulk/Wolverine: Six Hours, written by Bruce Jones: "Shredder" is an Ambiguously Human hitman introduced torturing his latest client to death when he's brought on to dispose of two drug dealers named Sid and Whitie. Shredder sets about murdering everybody in his path, connected to his targets or not, with disturbingly casual satisfaction. He carves an old couple to pieces; disembowels a friendly fisherman; kills not only Sid and Whitie but their harmless drop agent as well; and throws a twelve-year-old boy rendered inert by coral snake venom into a lake.
- Planet Hulk: The "Red King", real name Angmo-Asan, seemingly saved Caeira's life in a flashback from the slaughter of her village before enslaving her. In his gladiatorial match against the Hulk, the Red King begins by slaughtering a group of the arena's survivors. Ordering the deaths of any who question the tributes he receives, the Red King dismisses the complaints of peasants, whom he compares to animals. In his rematch against the Hulk, the Red King tries to destroy the arena with a nuke, uncaring for the audience within the blast radius. When confronted about his atrocities, the Red King smugly proclaims killing to be his right, duty, and pleasure. Finally defeated, the Red King tries to destroy the planet he is on as a final act of spite.
- The Savage She-Hulk Vol. 1 issues #1-5: Nicholas "Nick" Trask is a crime boss and the very first foe faced by Jennifer Walters. Responsible for the death of She-Hulk's mother in the past, Trask later murdered his own bodyguard and framed one of his rivals Monkton, later trying to have Jennifer killed. After causing the death of Jennifer's close friend, Trask used a robot duplicate to murder several people in order to frame her; used a venomous snake to kill a man to use his dead body as bait; sadistically manipulated Jennifer's father, Sheriff Morris Walters, into trying to kill his own daughter; and attempted to rob the oil out from Roxxon Corporation to bankrupt it, take over, and rule the world behind the scenes.
- The Sensational She-Hulk:
- Ceremony: Carlton Beatrice is the CEO of Carlton Industries who tries to purchase Apache sacred land, Keewazi Reservation, for business purposes. Learning about the Apache people's religious ceremony, Beatrice masters the art of soul stealing. Learning that he lacks the beneficent energy produced by women, he killed an Apache woman who tried to stop him. Learning that the mystic basket that could expand his powers was in the possession of She-Hulk, Beatrice attempts to persuade her, and when his assistant hurts She-Hulk with his spirits, Beatrice punishes him by ripping his soul apart—not because of any standards, but because he needed She-Hulk to give the basket to him to harness its power. To this end, he ripped out her fiancé's soul and used it as a bargain to retrieve the basket. After retrieving the basket, Beatrice performs a ritual to consume all of the souls in Earth to gain more power.
- Vol. 1 issues #21-23: Jasper Keaton is the founder of the American Purity Foundation whose goal is to purify America of all pornography and smut. Keaton experiments on two of his employees, permanently transforming one into a monster during a failed medical experiment. Keaton tried to locate the "rosebud bomb" to persuade the Senate to save his company. However, Keaton later decided to simply use the bomb to destroy all of Las Vegas, trying to kill 2 million people as a means to purge the city of its indecency.
