Stupid Evil / Comic Books

• The Avengers: During Heroes Return, Morgan Le Fay manages to re-write reality so she's in charge, but every time her nephew Morded points out the flaws in her plans, or that things are going wrong, she tells him to shut up. Morded gets the last laugh when he turns out to be completely right. Morgan's plan of turning the Avengers into her brainwashed goons means that, when the brainwashing inevitably wears off, she's got an army of very angry superheroes facing her.
• Countdown to Final Crisis: The Monitors, whose plan makes no sense, accomplishes jack shit other than pissing off a bunch of other villains, and involves grandstanding to cover for The Mole even though there's no one for them to grandstand for.
• Crossed: This is the defining flaw of the titular Technically Living Zombies. Unlike most such creatures, they fully retain all their former skills, knowledge, and problem-solving ability, with the only real difference being extreme sadism and impulsiveness. However, they're so sadistic and impulsive that they have no ability to form long-term plans and act entirely on their immediate desires, which is usually to cause as much pain as possible to whatever they can find nearby. If they go long periods without something to harm, they turn on each other or even mutilate themselves, which means that they're rapidly burning themselves out. They also put these random impulses ahead of their own survival—for instance, many Crossed strip off most or all of their clothing for no reason than that they can, and charge in against guns and heavy weapons. Crossed that can actually pragmatically plan out their actions or prioritize survival rather than just brutalizing whatever crosses their field of vision are considered one-in-a-thousand geniuses.
• East of West: It is a combination of this and Too Clever by Half that gets Archibald Chamberlain killed. To recap, he managed to arrange things so his final encounter with the Ranger and Solomon would be a The Good, the Bad and the Ugly-style three-way Mexican Standoff, then he improved his chances by unloading Solomon's pistol way in advance. He knew he had this set, he knew who was a priority target and who was and wasn't a threat, and in the subsequent Blast Out, he shoots Solomon first, out of sheer spite. The result: the Ranger blows him away.
• Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom, despite being a widely recognized Magnificent Bastard, frequently suffers from this, especially in his feud with the Fantastic Four. Doom's petty vendetta with Reed Richards means that he can never be content to simply kill the Fantastic Four and has to win in a way he feels proves his superiority over Reed, which inevitibly leads to him losing a number of confrontations he would have otherwise won.
  • Emperor Doom sees Doom successfully Take Over the World by harnessing the mind control powers of the Purple Man. He is aided in his goal by Namor in exchange for giving him rule of the seas. Rather than keeping his end of the deal, Doom reduces Namor to a mind controlled slave for no reason other than because he felt like it. This means that later when some of The Avengers manage to break of Doom's mind control, they free Namor in the assualt on the machine that controlled humanity and he turns on Doom as well. Not that that mattered because at the last minute Doctor Doom realized how bored he was as the uncontested ruler of the world and let the Avengers break his machine. In essence Doom showed if he succeeds in any of his goals he will render his victories meaningless.
• Ghost Rider: The Devil in the Deal with the Devil tends to do this a lot, but Mephisto is one of the worst. He tends to be both a Literal and Jerkass Genie to anyone he makes deals with, fulfilling the letter of a deal but then screwing the dealer in the process; this frequently costs him the soul he'd otherwise be able to easily get. Probably the example that most backfires for him is when he made a deal with Johnny Blaze to save his adoptive father from an unspecified disease, only to get said father killed anyway. This ended up turning Blaze into his Arch-Nemesis.
• Green Lantern: Mongul II, while certainly capable of formulating and carrying out fairly complex schemes (and he sometimes does), tends to waste far too much of his time trying to go further and further beyond the pale by way of being a horrifically sadistic and cruel bully for no real good reason other than because he thinks it's funny or amusing, or just because he feels like being a dick. It's the cause of his many, many Hoist by His Own Petard moments, the last one of which more or less put him away for good.
• Iznogoud: Iznogoud, while generally intelligent (and much smarter than both most people around him and the Caliph), occasionally falls into this trope: a lot of his plans backfire precisely because he made idiotic mistakes, or couldn't resist the temptation to Kick the Dog at the wrong time.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Issue #38 features a Force-sensitive Serial Killer who tried to escape the authorities by booking a trip on a luxury cruise liner. But instead of laying low during the trip, he decides to kill the passengers and crew one by one, until he is the last living person on the ship. Since he doesn't know how to pilot the ship, this means he has effectively stranded himself in the middle of nowhere and would have died had the protagonists not stumbled upon him. He admits that his little murder spree was a bad idea, but he just couldn't rein in his murderous impulses.
• Paperinik New Adventures: The low-caste Evronians, who mix this with Lawful Stupid; when left to their own devices, they prove themselves complete idiots unable to do anything but bicker about what they should do (though they become frighteningly competent as soon as they get orders). Even the smarter ones such as warrant officers and technical leaders can only think so far, being limited to how to enact orders they receive from their superiors and, if something unexpected happens, asking for instructions.
• The Punisher:
  • In The Punisher MAX story arc "Up is Down and Black is White", Nicky Cavella tries to make The Punisher angry(er) by digging up the bones of his family, urinating on them, and filming it. It works… in that Frank is now targeting every wiseguy outfit he knows, and the actual Mafia bigshots make it clear that Nicky is a dumbass. Note that this is the same Nicky who got exiled to Boston years prior for starting a gang war with the Triads by murdering their boss' son and cooking him.
  • Frank kidnaps a Mafia goon named Charles Schitti, scheduled for execution. Schitti's house is squatted by low-level mooks waiting for him to come home, one of which pisses in the fridge. As one of them points out, Schitti won't care about it since he'll be dead, while the mooks still need to wait for him to get there, and since the beer is in the fridge...
• Rachel Rising: The demon Malus is frequently a victim of his own short-tempered... maliciousness. An Intangible spirit that possesses people and is working towards his goal of creating The Antichrist, Malus would be able to pull off his plan without being detected or suspected if he could go more than five minutes without his utter loathing for humanity causing him to lash out and commit some new atrocity. At one point, Malus literally murders a woman in a hospital simply because he was annoyed by the woman expressing sympathy one too many times for a child who nearly died in the hospital. Even the one time Malus does try to really hide his evilness while possessing someone and acting as an Evil Mentor/The Corrupter to Zoe, his act is still pretty transparent and Zoe quickly catches onto him.
• Rick and Morty (Oni): In issue 35, Summer and Morty realize that the workers that Rick once abandoned just want to get off the island, and convince Rick to negotiate with them. But when the workers try to sedate him and fail, he starts bragging about his Acquired Poison Immunity, so they just shoot more darts at him until he does pass out. He then continues to taunt them when he wakes up.
• Spider-Man:
  • Norman Osborn had the world as his oyster during Dark Reign, with him in charge of the US security, the Avengers replaced with a team of villains loyal to him, and all the regular heroes incapacitated or wanted fugitives. But he just had to defy the President and go rogue and attack Asgard for some reason, losing everything and getting the good guys back in power in one day. You know a plan is bad when Bullseye tells you that you're out of your fucking mind.
    • The fact that the Norse god of mischief tricked him into doing it explains but does not excuse his behavior.
    • This is Norman's entire M.O.. While he can be The Chessmaster when he is at his best, he always falls back into this. Throughout Dark Reign, everyone, from Spider-Man to Doctor Doom, continues to hang a lampshade on the fact that he's a ticking timebomb who will implode and cause his own downfall. Largely justified given that Norman is also genuinely nuts; his Chessmaster side is continually struggling against the Chaotic Evil Goblin identity, and eventually the Goblin is going to get out and start blowing shit up.
  • Also among Spidey's enemies, the reason no-one particularly respects Max "Electro" Dillon is that for all his incredible power, he's a rampaging, short-tempered idiot incapable of hatching a plan lasting beyond next Tuesday. Even overlooking legitimate uses for his electrical powers, instead of using control over electricity to deactivate security systems or otherwise commit low-risk, high-reward crimes, he invariably puts on his Bob the Angry Flower costume, picks either Spider-Man or Daredevil, and heads over to start shit with them, or, if not that, commits an extremely risky and visible crime with few actual benefits that mostly just attracts a bunch of unnecessary attention, in a process that invariably ends in a humiliating defeat and a return to whichever Cardboard Prison he'd just escaped, usually within a day or two.
• Supergirl: The villain Blackflame is able to come up with good revenge schemes but she's also prone to ruin them with unnecessary drama and convoluted death traps.
• Superman: Superboy-Prime also goes from Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds to this, as he's a psychotic teenager with the Hair-Trigger Temper to end them all, though with a very strong Freudian Excuse. That notwithstanding, he flies off the handle at the slightest provocation and responds by destroying everything in sight and killing anyone who looks at him funny. Everything in sight, by the way, includes entire planets and a future version of himself, though the latter wasn't bright enough to know that provoking and ordering your younger self (a younger self that he had to have known was extremely unstable and prone to responding with violence to any and all slights) would have consequences.
• Teen Titans: Mammoth of the Fearsome Five:
  Psimon: So who do we blow up first?
  Mammoth: I want to destroy the United States for putting us in jail all those times!
  Psimon: Shimmer, please explain to your brother that it's a bad idea to nuke the United States. Where we are.
• Über: Adolf Hitler is depicted as this, due to having been mostly crazy anyway by the close of the war. Upon obtaining Super Soldiers, his first official command with them is to order them to execute hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs — not only would this probably result in the Soviets doing the same with their German POWs, but it ensures that the Soviets aren't going to be surrendering anytime soon. He then has the inventor of the program's brain melted for keeping the soldiers in reserve until they were ready, rather than deploying them half-finished — something Hitler himself acknowledged was a good idea; he just objected to the guy making the decision on his own. He sends one of his most powerful soldiers almost completely unsupported into London, where she risks her life and accomplishes little besides Monumental Damage and killing a figurehead. This culminates in him insulting another of his strongest soldiers for retreating from a battle where he was outnumbered a hundred to one and had lost an arm… at which said soldier, who already had a grudge, decides to fast-track his plans and gives Hitler a heart attack.
• Wanted: The Big Bad Mr. Rictus is proud to be this. When he takes over control of the Fraternity to blow the League of Supervillains' cover and start a new campaign of unremitted slaughter, the rest of the organization's heads warn him that it will bring the weight of every superhero in the multiverse to bear down on them. Rictus is delighted at this, for even if they lose, he will have enjoyed the carnage.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: After Priscilla Rich (Cheetah) has already ensured two women are working for her despite their misgivings she abducts and tortures them for a day for her own amusement, which ensures they both betray her to the heroes at the first opportunity and clues Diana into the fact that something is going on when the women are abducted.
• X-Men: Mystique is the poster child for pointless, self-defeating treachery and cruelty in the Marvel Universe. It doesn't matter how good a shot she had at getting everything she wanted just by doing things in the most straightforward way possible that anyone with a normal, rational thought process would zero in on. If literally anyone else would have done it that way, Mystique would instead go out of her way to be as cutthroat and underhanded about it as possible, then would take a detour to fuck over an ally for no good reason, kill someone, or ruin someone's life, only to have it blow up in her face and ruin the entire opportunity. Mystique will then inevitably blame someone else for this latest loss and will add it to her list of grudges, which she will likely act on when she next gets the chance, ensuring that she sinks herself again and the cycle repeats.

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