Harmless Villain / Comic Books

• The Hack/Slash storyline Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter featured an entire "secret society" of them. Some members include:
  • Doctor Devil, who has been stealing random bits of machinery from work with the intention of building "some kind of gun" that he will call The Devil Ray.
  • Crime Biker, who has mapped out the best possible escape routes to take after snatching purses.
  • Black Ghost, who intends to hang out at his ex-wife's house and "scare the shit out of her and her new asshole boyfriend, Doug."
  • Digital Demon, who has been hacking adult websites - "Can you imagine? Porn—for free!"
  • Crime Wave, who intends to become a terror of the high seas, having successfully stolen a yacht.
  • Thief of Hearts, who has seduced at least four rich guys...one of them is bound to die, eventually.
  • Doctor Spy, who has completed his x-ray telescope, and, after he finds an apartment across from the girl's dorm, intends to put it to good use.
  • The Mugger.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Man has his share, though given that he's got the largest Rogues Gallery in Marvel, you'd expect as much. From the 80s British punk and punctuation-themed Typeface to the even more pathetic Grammar Nazi Spellcheck to ditzy Playboy Bunny the White Rabbit, who's so stupid that she had to hire actors to pretend to work for her, because nobody would for real ^note Not even the Big Wheel returns her calls. The Walrus is also pretty notable here: Spider-Man actually almost got his ass kicked by him because he couldn't stop laughing.
  • The Walrus is a subversion actually. He is a deadly killer, but his costume and MO is so lame that people constantly think he is this. So he's more a Not-So-Harmless Villain. Depending on the writer in his case. The Walrus is depicted as super-strong and aggressive, but lacking in both intellect and agility. He received something of an upgrade in the mini-series "Fear Itself: Deadpool" (2011) by Christopher Hastings. After Deadpool manipulates the gullible villain to advance his own scheme, the Walrus learns to see through Deadpool's disguises and repeatedly beats the crap out of him. As Walrus points out, Deadpool failed to change his voice while in disguise.
  • The Spot is another subversion; the character was treated as a complete joke (to the point that Spider-Man laughed at him in his very first appearance) until the writers remembered that having portals all over your body and being able to make portals is actually a really awesome power. Since he couldn't realistically work as a joke villain, they went the other direction and now Spot is depicted as being a potentially deadly villain who simply doesn't know how to use his full potential (a reoccuring problem for Spidey's villains). Most adaptations have followed that example.
  • The Wall: a one-shot villain borrowed from an episode of The Electric Company (1971). He was a goofy kid who got changed into living concrete. His master plan for revenge? Change the rules of baseball by running out on the field to cause a routine fly ball to count as a home run against The Mets. You know, because he's a wall and if a ball goes over a wall... Eugh, nevermind... Anyway, Peter is in the stands and goes all Spidey on The Wall. The result? The two are ejected from the stadium. Spidey wonders aloud, "I wonder who won?"
  • The above-mentioned Big Wheel actually acknowledges that he is not cut out for supervillainy. He disappeared for several years and when he turned up again, it turned out that he had quit because he knew he was completely outclassed. The animated series however depicted him as much more competent. One of the main problems with the character is that he has no powers or fighting skills. He is just an average human who is driving a giant, armored monowheel. Without his vehicle, he is helpless.
  • The Stilt-Man was one of these (not to mention a case of What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? — his "gimmick" was that he used Powered Armor with super-extending, piston-powered legs)... before The Punisher killed him.
• Daredevil arguably has it worse. The Matador (not to be confused with the other guy)? His entire gimmick is about obscuring your vision with his cape, which, for Daredevil, doesn't do anything. Aforementioned Stilt-Man originated as one of Daredevil enemies, too (and he kept coming back with a weird frequency). Not to mention the Leap Frog, the guy who wore a frog suit and could jump really high. What made him especially pathetic was the fact that before him Daredevil fought a member of the Ani-Men gang who was a completely similar villain except for the name (Frog-Man). In the early days of his comic, Daredevil was the MST3K of comic book super heroes, basically having a couple of legitimately threatening villains and about a dozen losers.
• Bafflerog Rumplewhisker of The Wizards Tale is the latest in a long line of really unpleasant Evil Sorcerers serving the forces of evil that keep their world in a state of permanent twilight (because they haven't yet found the MacGuffin to make it permanent night). Unfortunately, Bafflerog's spells tend to be much less evil than he intends, such as trying to call up a huge storm and getting a pleasant rain that breaks the drought on the town, summoning a hail of locusts and getting a shower of roast chickens instead, and making friends with the creature he's supposed to be torturing for the location of the MacGuffin. He also phrases his spells in the form of limericks. No wonder he ends up pulling a Heel–Face Turn and saving the world rather than dooming it; turns out he's much happier and more competent as a good wizard than an evil one.
• Batman:
  • Killer Moth is essentially the Butt-Monkey of Batman's Rogues Gallery. He's considered the weakest supervillain in Gotham and is usually captured pretty easily by Batman and company. Eventually he got tired of being picked on all the time and not taken seriously, so he made a Deal With Neron and became Charaxes, a deadly cannibalistic moth creature that spits acid. However, nobody really liked this change and so Moth pretty quickly got retconned back to being the loser we all know and love.
  • Also The Riddler...sometimes. Nowadays, the Riddler is often portrayed as a fiendishly clever yet endearingly incompetent villain.
    • Unlike some, he actually stresses out over this, frustrated with how he is compelled to give Batman clues due to his neuroses — and is kept from revealing Batman's secret identity (which he managed to puzzle out) by the fact that a riddle everyone knows the answer to isn't a very good riddle at all.
    • In another arc the Riddler, due to a year long coma, had lost his compulsion, and goes into business for himself as an extremely successful (if not always correct) private detective.
  • The Joker occasionally plays with this, likely for his own amusement. On any given day, you don't know if the Joker that Batman is facing is a sadistic Monster Clown who'll hold the city ransom and threaten to burn down the whole place, or a loony who concocts an elaborate (*ahem*) Batman Gambit just to hit Batman in the face with a pie.
    • Like everything else about him, this just adds to the Joker's disturbing qualities. He's the only villain listed in every villain trope page who could GENUINELY be all those at once. He's just that friggin' bonkers. Deadpool comes close to being Marvel's answer, however. If you read some of Deadpool's best fights, while turning to that image of him wearing Jean Grey's old costume, you readily see it.
  • And then there's Calendar Man, a guy with a bunch of ridiculous costumes and no powers who performs crime sprees related to dates. Despite an attempt to turn him into a Hannibal Lecter-esque figure in The Long Halloween (which later influenced his really creepy appearance in Batman: Arkham City), he never accomplished anything other than showing up at the top positions of many "Worst Batman villains" lists. Most mentions of his name are nothing more than cheap punchlines. Meanwhile, the Holiday killer used a similar modus operandi and became one of the most feared and impacting figures of the criminal underworld.
  • In the Knightfall arc, Bane breaks all the supervillains out of jail simultaneously, and Batman is so exhausted by the effort of recapturing them all that even fourth-rate villains start becoming a serious threat. The one exception? Maxie Zeus, who escaped still wearing his straightjacket and runs himself face first into a tree.
  • D-List villain Condiment King is so pathetic that on at least one occasion he has been taken down incidentally while the heroes were passing through while trying to track down and thwart someone else. It's deconstructed in one Robin (1993) story, where Tim says that the reason he keeps being released is because the authorities can't take him seriously, and that one day, one of his victims is going to have a severe allergic reaction.
  • The Carpenter, who was smart enough not to get into a fight with Batman in her first appearance, folding as soon as the Walrus was taken down, and subsequently moved away from actual supervillainy into a related career as an actual carpenter (somebody has to build those secret lairs).
• One of the villains mentioned in Watchmen is "Captain Carnage", who pretended to be a super-villain because he got pleasure from being beaten up. This backfires badly when he tries it with Rorschach...who dropped him down an elevator shaft.
• Marvel's alternate-universe Squadron Supreme has Pinball, a guy whose power consisted of inflating his green jumpsuit into a ball and rolling into people.
• Back in the 80's, The Avengers had occasional skirmishes with Fabian Stankowicz, AKA The Mechano-Marauder, a lottery winner turned power-suit-wearing supervillain. From the very beginning, the Avengers never took him seriously: in his first assault, Iron Man considered him so low a threat that he turned down several offers of assistance from the other Avengers. However, Fabian's definitive low point was when he attacked them during a taping of Late Night With David Letterman and briefly managed to gain the upper hand...only to be knocked out by Letterman himself.◊ Eventually, Captain America offered him a spot on the Avengers support crew, mostly to keep him from endangering himself further.
• Explored seriously with Jarvis Poker the British Joker, in Paul Cornell's Batman spin-off Knight and Squire. Jarvis takes on the appearance of the original Joker as a tribute, but always stays the harmless prankster that the Joker has been portrayed as in the franchise's most Lighter and Softer versions. It's even implied that he may primarily act as a trickster mocking and stealing from evil rich people. Things get very sad when, first, he gets terminal cancer, and then the real Joker comes to Britain and decides to show Jarvis what a genuine villain acts like, forcing him to die in a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Bolphunga the Unrelenting goes back and forth on this. Sometimes he's an inept blowhard, sometimes he's actually a skilled fighter and was actually needed when there was a jail break on Oa.
• Baby Face Finlayson from The Beano was originally a harmless villain, with his uselessness being Played for Laughs, but his later appearances in Kev F Sutherland's strips were as a Not-So-Harmless Villain.
• Zipi y Zape: Manitas de Uranio, resident burglar of the neighborhood, is totally inept and gets owned by the twins every time he tries to steal from their house.
• Superman villain the Prankster is a perfect example of this. His schemes usually only amount to pranks and gags to tick Superman off. Thing is, Prankster is well aware that he's harmless and he doesn't want to be a threat. See, Prankster makes the money for his fancy toys and tricks as a "distraction for hire" of sorts; essentially, other supervillains in Metropolis pay him to launch some wacky plan just big enough to draw Superman's attention and while the Man of Steel is busy dealing with that and pounding Prankster's head in, the employers are in another part of the city pulling off their actual crime. Thus Prankster gets money and an opportunity to screw with Superman, while the employers get to make off with their loot without worrying about a big flying alien hurling them across the city. Everybody wins.
• She-Hulk faced of against numerous one-shot harmless villains, typically just so she could complain to Stan Lee or John Byrne about how lame they were.
• The Simpsons: Explored when Dr. Colossus, the guy who named Cartoonish Supervillainy, gets a A Day in the Limelight. Most of his attempts to rob places involve using his "Colosso-boots", inevitably ending with his head crashing through the ceiling, and the people he tries robbing ask Chief Wiggum to arrest him not for the attempted theft, but just because he's being annoying. Chief Wiggum refuses because even he thinks Colossus is harmless, which actually reduces the man to tears.
• Shazam!: Mr. Banjo. The guy was a spy working for the Axis Powers. What's his shtick? He sends out Morse code messages using his banjo. Alright, anything else? Nope, that's literally it.

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