Batman's gallery is built on the Evil Counterpart concept, mainly because writers acknowledge that what Bruce does isn't exactly sane and love to point out how easily it could have gone another way. Many supporting characters and members of the Bat-Family have their own counterparts too.
- Bruce Wayne/Batman himself has no shortage of Evil Counterparts.
- The Joker claims to be this, however the nature of his Multiple-Choice Past makes it hard to be sure if he is telling the truth. Both are the result of something traumatic and life shattering in their past. It's taken further in Death of the Family, as this time he is figuratively borrowing pages from Batman's book, like turning off the lights to get the drop on a group of his enemies, and finding out the Batfamily's secrets so he can hit his enemies where it hurts!
- The Riddler uses his intellect more effectively than physical strength. While Batman is the World's Greatest Detective and can solve any puzzle, Riddler uses his intelligence to create puzzles.
- Two-Face mirrors Batman in his dual nature - Batman's identities are secret and united in their goals while Two-Face's are obvious and opposed. Harvey Dent starts out with the exact same goal as Bruce, making him an example of what Batman could become if he loses his self-control, and is a close friend and confidant of either Bruce or Batman in most continuities.
- The Scarecrow uses fear as a weapon, just as Batman does. But while Batman strikes fear into the hearts of criminals as a means to halt crime, Scarecrow sees fear itself as his means and end, and seeks to terrorise innocents for the sake of it.
- Ra's Al Ghul is a misguided Well-Intentioned Extremist with a lifelong war on crime. But while Batman refuses to kill criminals, Ra's believes the only way to bring an end to crime is to kill those perpetuating it. Ra's also fails to see how crimes committed by himself are as bad as those of other criminals.
- Hugo Strange mirrors Batman's intellectual pursuits as well as his obsession into diving psychologically into the minds of his foes. Ironically Batman and Strange are both affected mentally by their careers.
- Mr. Freeze is a Gadgeteer Genius motivated into his actions by the person he loves most in the world. But while Batman fights crime due to the trauma of losing his parents, Mr. Freeze commits crimes in the hope of finding a way to save his terminally ill wife, Nora.
- Bane is a Genius Bruiser who has trained his mind and body to peak performance. The big difference is Bane's use of the chemical Venom to give himself Super-Strength.
- The Ax-Crazy Black Mask. Like Bruce, he was the son of wealthy parents who died due to unnatural causes. The difference is that Black Mask happened to kill his own parents and run his company into the ground with his own incompetence, before becoming a masked and increasingly violent crime lord. He even met Bruce as a child. He's as much of an Anti-Bruce Wayne as an Anti-Batman, and of course, in his supervillain identity, he wears a black mask, just like Batman.
- Deadshot is the son of a wealthy Gotham family, an Upper-Class Twit by day and a Badass Normal by night. The primary differences in his life from Bruce's are that he attempted to stop his past tragedy as it happened, but his Abusive Parents survived while Deadshot accidentally killed his beloved brother. Already The Unfavorite with both parents, Deadshot initially took to vigilantism and crime out of boredom, before graduating to both Blood Knight and Death Seeker. Batman, in contrast, began his career out of a compulsion to serve justice and later developed a stronger desire to ensure that Everybody Lives.
- While Bruce Wayne had caring, loving parents, Tommy Elliot's were both cut from the Rich Bitch cloth (and his father was an abusive alcoholic). To keep himself from harm and create a better life for himself, he arranged a car accident that killed his father and left his mother an overbearing cripple. Tommy hated that Bruce's dad saved his mom and that Bruce eventually got the life Tommy wanted for himself. Upon being told by the Riddler that Bruce was Batman, Tommy became Hush, an archetype of Batman who is a criminal mastermind.
- Prometheus's Freudian Excuse marks him as the criminal equivalent of a young Bruce Wayne; he's the child of gangsters who were gunned down by the cops when he was a boy. His great physical fighting abilities are the result, not of training, but of "recording" other people's abilities electronically and loading them into his brain with a cybernetic helmet. In contrast to Bruce's wealth, he also has no interest in making a profit off his technology, to the point where Lex Luthor is the one to try cutting him a check.
- The Wrath is a pre-Crisis villain who is has a similar backstory to Prometheus, down to duplicating Bruce Wayne's origin (his parents being killed in a shootout by Commissioner Gordon in his days as a rookie beat cop).
- Killer Moth has no backstory or character similarity to Bruce Wayne, but he deliberately patterned himself as a criminal Batman; where Batman could be summoned by the Bat-Signal to help cops catch crooks, Killer Moth would give criminals a "Moth Signal" to summon him when they were in a bind, and then he'd show up to help them get away from the cops. He put up a pretty good showing back when he first appeared, but his defeat by Batgirl in her debut (before she even officially was a superhero- she was just going to a costume party as Batgirl and happened to stumble on him trying to kidnap Bruce Wayne) completely killed his reputation, and he gradually turned into a minor nuisance with an inferiority complex. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for him to name his supervillain identity after something bats eat.
- Batman (Tom King) takes this trope about as far as it can go: the final villain of the entire run is Thomas Wayne, the Batman of the Flashpoint Timeline. He's seen that Bruce started out becoming Batman as an extended suicide attempt after the death of his parents, and wants him to stop, even if he has to rip down his entire life and take over Gotham to do it.
- Dr. Hurt is Thomas, and to a lesser extent, Bruce Wayne's evil counterpart, using his wealth and influence for evil.
- Ben Turner, like Batman, watched some petty criminals murder his parents. Unlike young Bruce Wayne, Turner killed both criminals on the scene. Also unlike Wayne, Turner was poor and black, and now orphaned and considered dangerous. As a ward of the state, he bounced around the foster system until recruited by Ra's al-Ghul's Brotherhood of Assassins, who trained him to be the Bronze Tiger. Turner is canonically Batman's superior in hand-to-hand combat, but has also since reformed and is on respectful terms with his former foe.
- Jean-Paul Valley's take on Batman, especially when he reaches the pinnacle of his Sanity Slippage, is easily this - a Batman who wears flashy armor, armed to the teeth with deadly weaponry and finally ready to spill blood.
- Catman was going to be one of these for about 5 minutes, specializing in cat-based gear like catarangs or a catamaran. Later he became an (even more) Evil Counterpart to Catwoman (see below), before returning to an antiheroic version of Batman who specializes in tracking instead of detective work.
- Batzarro. Yes, that's right. He is a Bizarro-Batman.
- Huntress/Helena Bertinelli was the scion of a wealthy and prominent old-Gotham family who, when she was a young child, watched her family gunned down in front of her. She then spent the next several years training in combat and studying crime in order to fight back. Then, as a young adult, she was startled when a bat came crashing through the window. This inspired her to become a masked vigilante to take revenge on the criminal underworld. The key difference is that Huntress has no qualms about killing or torturing criminals; indeed, her goal is to kill them. Unlike most of the examples on this list, she is generally portrayed more as a very dark antihero (enough to make Batman look like The Cape) than as a villain, although making her a villain for Arrow required very little change to her character. Certainly she has been a regular antagonist for Batman, almost killing him once, although she has regularly teamed-up with other members of the Bat-family.
- Since the Post-Crisis reluanch, Lex Luthor has frequently been this to Batman. Both characters are some of the richest, most influential men in the DC Universe and are gifted with extradoinary scientific genius, but while Bruce uses his resources to make the world as much of a better place as he can, Lex uses his for his own selfish gain. Both are orphans, but while Bruce's were killed in a tragedy, Lex disposed of his similar to Hush. Both have close ties to Superman, with Batman being one of his closest allies, while Lex is one of his worst enemies, and the contrasts between the two are often highlighted in Superman and Batman team up stories, where Lex is often one of the main villains. Some major Batman storylines, such as "Batman: No Man's Land" and "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive", even make Lex one of the major players because of this.
- Dark Nights: Metal has the Dark Knights, a team of evil alternate versions of Batman who serve as Evil Counterparts to both Batman and other members of the Justice League.
- The Batman Who Laughs, a Batman who killed the Joker, only to be infected by Joker's madness, who represents Bruce's fear of He Who Fights Monsters.
- The Drowned, Bryce Wayne, was a counterpart to himself and Aquaman who took over Atlantis, representing Bruce's fears of metahumans.
- The Dawnbreaker is a Batman with a Green Lantern ring who went well past the Despair Event Horizon and executed criminals and anyone who stood in his way with impunity, representing Bruce's fears of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity as well as losing himself to his inner pain.
- The Merciless is a counterpart to himself and Wonder Woman, becoming a ruthless Blood Knight after gaining Ares' power and representing his fear of what he would become if he broke his famous rule.
- The Devastator is a counterpart to himself and Superman who infected himself with the Doomsday Virus to stop a corrupted Superman and inadvertently became a Walking Wasteland. He represented Bruce's fears of losing all hope as well as being unable to fully trust Superman.
- The Murder Machine is a counterpart to himself and Cyborg, an evil Alfred AI that served as a Replacement Goldfish after the real one was murdered before performing an Unwilling Roboticisation on him, representing Bruce's fears of both losing his humanity and being too dependent on his surrogate father.
- The Red Death is a Batman who used the Cosmic Treadmill to pull a Grand Theft Me on The Flash after the deaths of the Bat-Family, representing his fears of losing his loved ones once more and having old age slow him down.
- Dick Grayson has some counterparts of his own, in both his Robin and Nightwing personas.
- Jason Todd was the second Robin, until Comic Book Death turned him into the (new) Red Hood, a vigilante who kills villains left and right and Evil Counterpart to both Batman and Nightwing (before, during, and after Nightwing briefly became Batman himself) - until the reboot made him less villainous.
- The Joker briefly had his own sidekick named Gaggy, who like Robin, was a former circus acrobat. He never caught on, but returned decades later as an enemy of Harley Quinn and the Gotham City Sirens.
- Batman Confidential introduces a new Wrath, the original's protégé, as Nightwing's foe. He proved to have more staying power than his predecessor and later stepped up to Batman himself as the Big Bad of Detective Comics for a time.
- James Gordon Jr. was described by Scott Snyder as the exact opposite of everything his father stands for.
- Batwoman has a couple:
- Alice, who is literally her twin sister.
- Knife, an assassin who, like Batwoman, is highly skilled physically but grew up in poverty while Kate is from a wealthy family.
- The Catwoman series tried giving Selina Kyle an Evil Counterpart several times. One was She-Cat (another cat-based thief, but a less skilled and less ethical one, who eventually turned out to know Selina from when they were in the same orphanage), another was Hellhound (a male chauvinist who'd been trained by the same Old Master, and been The Unfavorite), and yet another was Mouse (a criminal computer hacker). None of them really caught on.
- With Harley Quinn definitively repackaged as an Anti-Hero, DC created a new character to be the Joker’s henchwoman- Punchline. Like Harley, Punchline is a clown-themed villainess with an obsessive crush on the Joker; however, while Harley is a kooky, talkative Woobie, Punchline is a silent, remorseless Serial Killer. Also, while Harley started out as a well-intentioned doctor who Joker turned to the dark side, and who eventually left him; Punchline is a Joker Fangirl who sought him out and joined him of her own volition. It should be noted that unlike the majority of entries, Punchline isn't Harley Quinn's enemy though, she's Bluebird's.
- Tabby Brennan was set up to be this to the Helena Bertinelli (Huntress) in Birds of Prey, in that both were the daughters of powerful crime bosses, and both schemed to murder their fathers under the noses of several superheroes. The difference is that (in Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood) Helena didn't know Santo Cassamento was her father, and he hated her and was trying to force her into the mob as his personal enforcer and assassin, while Tabby's father loved her and was trying to quit his life of crime for her sake; Huntress killed Cassamento to get out of the mob (and for revenge), while Tabby killed her father to take over his gang. Lampshaded when Huntress thinks of Tabby as "Just like me." Of course, then Tabby got killed off in a really stupid manner, but the less said of that, the better.
