Monster / The DCU

aka: DC Universe

"I will be the bullet. The Multiverse will be the dark alley. And its worlds will fall like pearls before me."

"I will take you to a hell without exit or end. And there I will murder your souls! And make you crawl and beg! And die! Die! Die for Darkseid!"

— Darkseid, Final Crisis #5, spoken through the mouths of one billion slaves

A list of Complete Monsters in the DC Universe and associated continuities.

Other comics under DC or related imprints (like Wild Storm or Vertigo) can be found mostly here; or at the appropriate franchise's subpage (Judge Dredd; Masters of the Universe; Star Trek; etc.).

• Examples from the Arrowverse (including related comics) can be found here.
• Other examples from non-animated TV series can be found here.
• Examples from animated works (including related comics) can be found here.
• Examples from films (theatrical and and TV movies) can be found here.
• Examples from literature can be found here.
• Examples from video games (including tie-in material) can be found here.
• Examples from podcasts can be found here.
• Examples from unproduced scripts can be found here.
• Vixen: NYC and Zatanna & the Ripper can be found here.

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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The following have their own pages

• Batman (includes other Bat-Family members; Catwoman; Task Force Z; Birds of Prey; the Elseworlds crossover with Etrigan; & Harleen)
• Green Arrow
• Hellblazer
• Jonah Hex
• Milestone Comics
• Superman (includes Supergirl & Steel)
• Wonder Woman

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Other examples

Pre-Crisis Only

Examples

• Per Degaton is a recurring, wicked threat to the Justice League, JSA, and time itself. An envious, power-hungry lab assistant to Professor Zee for years, Per Degaton would murder Zee so as to steal his time travel technology and use it for his own selfish purposes. Per Degaton went on to tamper with time in a variety of ways, from repeating Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on San Fransisco to destabilize the world, to massacring Alexander the Great's armies in an attempt to retroactively plunge humanity into the Dark Ages and assert his own dictatorship over the planet. Willing to doom an entire parallel Earth to nuclear holocaust simply because a news vendor disrespected him and even throw his own Earth into the sun out of spite, Per Degaton consistently threatened millions of lives over centuries of time, disregarded his own men to die, and ultimately killed himself rather than face justice when finally caught.
• Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: Dark Opal is the Big Bad of the first series. Overthrowing the House of Amethyst, massacring their men and killing the ruling family, Dark Opal seeks to extend his rule over all he can. Obsessed with having an heir, he forces women to bear his children, but when the results are malformed creatures, he exiles them to the Abyss to languish forever. When his children return to stop his evil, Dark Opal savagely murders them all himself. Caring nothing for his allies, he forces his right-hand man Sardonyx to sign a deal with creatures known as Emissaries of Varn with the knowledge Sardonyx will be taken to eternal torment should the contract fall through as Dark Opal can't be bothered to save him. Gleefully attempting to massacre his enemies, Dark Opal also tortures the kind old Lord Topaz to death before raising him as a twisted monster to trick Prince Topaz into marrying a woman of Dark Opal's choice for political gain. Obsessed with his own power and thinking nothing of destroying whatever is in his way, Dark Opal remains Amethyst's most monstrous foe.
• Arak: Son of Thunder issues #7-8: The Black Pope is the sinister leader of the subterranean armies descended from the Pope. Seeking to conquer Rome and assume the papacy, the Black Pope has Pope Hadrian kidnapped, preparing to murder him along with Arak and Valda in the arenas where people fight for his amusement. The Black Pope also has women kidnapped and turned into sex slaves and breeding stock in huge numbers, gloating about his intent to invade the surface with those bred for it.
• Code Name: Gravedigger: This Nazi duo stands above all others Ulysses Hazard has faced during World War II:
  • Men of War issue #5's "Valley of the Shadow": General Schlemer takes over the small French village of Touborne and immediately because exercising human rights abuses due to the presence of French resistance in the village. General Schlemer coldly executes a priest who stands up to his orders, proclaiming the only god is the Fuehrer. Schlemer orders innocent people to dig their own graves en masse before machine-gunning them down, and tries in the end to destroy all of Touborne by having it buried by an avalanche.
  • Men of War issue #11's "Berkstaten": Von Krugger is the Surgeon General of the Berkstaten concentration camp. Not content with handing off inmates hundreds at a time to extermination, Von Krugger subjects his victims to agonizing medical torture to "clinically" prove their inferiority. An old man reduced to a haggard waste from experimentation begs for death as a release to his suffering, and the Jewish mother of two children Gravedigger takes in has been denied the release of death from Von Krugger's torture, kept alive in agony by his machines. Von Krugger does eventually murder the mother, but solely out of spite and to make a point on how the Nazis are gods and that they can kill whoever they want.
• DC Comics Presents (primarily): Maaldor the Darklord is a powerful and immortal being who has dedicated his long life to sowing chaos and destruction across the universe, merely to sate his boredom. Desiring a challenge, Maaldor summoned Superman and Power Girl to his dimension, threatening to wipe out all life in his universe if they did not battle him. Imprisoned within a dimension of pure insanity, Maaldor would return to plague Superman's mind, attempting to force him to kill his loved ones and drive him to madness. Maaldor would later target the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians of the Universe, causing the deaths of numerous Green Lanterns to steal their power and invade their universe, forcing Arrkis to sacrifice himself to stop him.
• The Demon Vol. 1 issues #11-13: Baron von Rakenstein, better known as Baron von Evilstein, is a legacy to unethical experimentation and torture who operates on numerous beings in agonizing ways to create a perfect lifeform. Creating a "monster", von Rakenstein keeps it in line being endless torture and pain, with his intent being to do the same to Jason Blood as well so he might wipe out the doubting science community.
• Doom Patrol Vol. 1 issue #121 & New Teen Titans Vol. 1 issues #13-15: Captain Zahl was a Nazi U-Boat commander turned criminal mercenary who never gave up on imposing the Third Reich's vision on the world. After a confrontation with Niles "The Chief" Caulder left him down an arm and confined to a back and neck brace, Zahl took on a behind-the-scenes role, transforming Otto Von Furth into the always-burning Plasmus, and manipulating the unstable Madame Rouge into betraying the Doom Patrol and Brotherhood of Evil both, resulting in the demise of both teams. Hunted across the world by surviving Doom Patrol members and associates Gar Logan, Robotman, and Mento, Zahl battled the New Teen Titans when he and his army joined Madame Rouge's attempted conquest of Zandia. Under Zahl's direction his men massacred thousands of Zandia's expat inhabitants, and captured the Titans, subjecting them to the horrors of his Devolving Pit.
• Green Lantern/Green Arrow:
  • "Journey to Desolation!" ^note originally published in Green Lantern #77; republished in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #1: Slapper Soames is the owner of a small town called Desolation. Soames lives like a king while the town lives in poverty, with the town's people having to work at Soames's mine. Soames has hired Nazis to beat up the miners or any townspeople who displease him. When a mine worker named Johnny writes a protest song against Soames, Soames has him convinced in a rigged trial and sentences him to be hanged. Soames secretly hires a worker named Jacob to stir up a rebellion among the workers, planning to have his Nazi paramilitary forces kill a third of the workers, in order to scare the rest into complete obedience.
  • "A Kind of Loving, A Way of Death" ^note originally published in Green Lantern #78; republished in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #2: Joshua is an evil cult leader with Mind Control powers, based on Charles Manson. After finding Black Canary injured at the side of the road, Joshua gives her medical attention, then brainwashes her into being his puppet. Joshua has kidnapped several people, mind-controlling them and forcing them to live on his compound. Joshua is a violent racist who wants to kill every nonwhite person in the US and orders his death cult to kill everyone at a Native reservation. After being defeated, Joshua orders Black Canary to kill Green Arrow.
• House of Mystery Vol. 1:
  • "I...Vampire!": Mary Seward, Queen of Blood and founder of the Blood Red Moon, was once a kind, innocent woman as a mortal and the lover of nobleman Andrew Bennett. Upon being turned into a vampire at her request by Andrew, Mary embraced the power of hell and slew countless individuals to feed her hunger and cruelty, Mary founded the Blood Red Moon and had them kill and turn countless more innocents, even running slavery operations to bring more victims to her followers. Mary attempts to change history so the mother of a scientist will never be born and he will never be alive to invent a serum that poisons vampires, later even planning to turn Andrew's lover Deborah Dancer into a vampire and her slave while Andrew is confined beneath the Earth for the rest of his life.
  • Issue #208's "The Creator of Evil": Boris Illyitch is a sociopathic convict who developed Telepathy while in prison. Using his powers for revenge on the court that sentenced him, Boris would drive his victims to commit brutal murders and suicides, including forcing a judge to chop up his wife with an axe, and later an attorney to burn his wife and 9-year-old son to death. When a reporter confronts him and asks why he didn't try to escape, Boris gleefully admits he plans to stay in prison so he can continue spreading death and mayhem from the comfort of his own cell.
  • Issue #288's "The Piper At The Gates Of Hell": The Piper himself is a cruel skeletal demon who has kept the seemingly blissful town of Anyville under his thrall for decades. Every 20 years the Piper would keep the evil and sin of the townspeople locked away, in exchange for one innocent villager he can torture and corrupt in his realm forever. Failure to keep this tradition would unleash the imprisoned evil spirits on the town. When Adam Caulfield defies the Piper to save his friend Simple Joe from being the latest sacrifice, the Piper taunts the young man that in doing so, he's condemned Anyville to ruination as the town's spirits unleash horrific carnage and chaos among the formerly peaceful townspeople.
• Justice League of America Vol. 1:
  • Issues #71 & #144: The bloodthirsty Commander Benn Blanx is the Evil Counterpart and Arch-Enemy of J'onn J'onnz. Blanx restarts a war between two races of Martians and exiles J'onn, whom he later tracks to Earth to kill, murdering countless humans in the process. Becoming the planet's dictator, Blanx uses the powerful Blue Flame to set all of Mars ablaze, leaving the civilization in ruins and leading to J'onn returning to find his people on the verge of extinction. When J'onn demands an explanation for Blanx's cruelty, Blanx reveals a mining corporation offered to purchase the planet from Blanx, but he had to be "the last living Martian".
  • Issues #73 & #74: The evil star-like being Aquarius swept through existence, sowing chaos and destruction until his people judged and exiled him. Coming to Earth, Aquarius sways people to chaos and murder until he faces the Justice League, trying to annihilate the Earth before he wipes out existence. At last, Aquarius simply wipes out the entire universe before seeking another to destroy, even trying to use the Justice League to kill their counterparts on another world, all for his own amusement.
• Legion of Super-Heroes: Silver Age foe The Controller wasn't one to let morality get in the way of his plans for universal conquest. Abandoning his highly advanced race, The Controller decided to use his superweapon, the Sun-Eater, to obliterate every inhabited system in the Milky Way, starting with Earth's sun, Sol. When Ferro Lad's Heroic Sacrifice destroyed the Sun-Eater, The Controller attempted to brainwash the Legion into becoming his new army, then sought to murder them all when that plan failed. Convinced of his own innate superiority, and willing to wipe out an inhabited galaxy just to send the a message, The Controller would let nothing stand in his path of becoming the universe's Dimension Lord.
• The Phantom Stranger: Tala, the Queen of Darkness, is a hellish being who acts as the Phantom Stranger's Evil Counterpart by corrupting and ruining mortals, driving them to murder, mayhem and securing their deaths for her own amusement. Later trying to initiate nuclear war and seeing an underground civilization wiped out, Tala later uses the Dark Circle to attempt to conquer the world, summoning the Four Horsemen to completely exterminate it when that fails.
• Shazam! (includes original Fawcett Comics): Captain Nazi, real name Albrecht Krieger, embodies all the villainy the Nazis had to offer the superheroes of America. Tasked by Adolf Hitler himself to sow chaos in America, Nazi introduced himself to his archenemies by derailing trains and tipping over Ferris wheels, then using a little boy as a hostage before trying to kill him anyway. So full of gleeful sadism as to murder an elderly man and cripple his grandson—who would later become Captain Marvel Jr.—after the duo had rescued him from drowning, Nazi would bomb air raid shelters, poison thousands of American troops, and even kill his fellow Nazis in his goals to wipe out entire American cities and kill millions. Nazi would even attempt to drown a group of children to prevent them from buying War Stamps, then try to burn other kids alive so they couldn't do volunteer work for the military. A ravenously cruel and vicious brute, Captain Nazi was perhaps Captain Marvel Jr.'s most personal enemy, and one of Marvel himself's most hated.
• Shining Knight: The Red Dragon ^note Debuting in Adventure Comics #69 is a petty criminal enraged by his treatment due to his ugly face. Seeking to improve his reputation, Dragon makes multiple attempts on the Shining Knight's life, even kidnapping and attempting to drown his Love Interest Eve Barclay along the way. Later allying with the Hand, Dragon willingly enslaves an entire Native American tribe to mine for radium, forcing them to work even when they're sick and having them whipped when they don't comply; when the tribe tries to fight back, Dragon tries to kill all of them with a tank.
• The Spectre:
  • "The Gasmen and...the Spectre" ^note originally published in (Weird) Adventure Comics #436; republished in Wrath of the Spectre #2: Field Marshall Offel is a terrorist playing the part of a psychotic Insane Admiral initiating "Operation Green Cloud". Offel has a car show gassed to the last man, woman and child, murdering fifty to sixty people and gleefully threatening more attacks of similar caliber should he not be paid ten billion dollars, which Offel means to fund his bloody "World Revolution".
  • "The Human Bombs and... the Spectre" ^note originally published in (Weird) Adventure Comics #437; republished in Wrath of the Spectre #3: The nameless Mad Scientist behind the "human bomb" plot is a hypnotist who has his thugs round up a group of innocents to place in captivity. Once apprehended, he hypnotizes said thugs to throw themselves to his ravenous barracudas and then brainwashes his hostages to collect money or else detonate as suicide bombers with massive collateral damage. Upon being tracked by the Spectre, he tries to have all his hostages explode and to feed the Spectre to his hungry alligators, to whom he regularly feeds human flesh.
• Swamp Thing Vol. 2 issue #44 ("Bogeymen"): The Bogeyman is a Serial Killer with a body count that numbers over 160. With a penchant for memorizing the eyes of his victims at the moment of death, the Bogeyman stalks his victims and throttles them to death after toying with them. With his first victims from his youth, he continues to kill well into adulthood, luring a man into the swamps and murdering him while always remembering the eyes from which number victim they were.
• Teen Titans:
  • Trigon the Terrible, the Archnemesis Dad of Raven, is an interdimensional demonic overlord who reigns over an empire where countless souls are kept in horrible bondage. Slaughtering the very cult responsible for his birth, including his mother, Trigon would go on to brutally conquer his entire dimension. Trigon has sired many children across the centuries, destroying any who dare to oppose him. Seeking to expand his dominion to Earth, Trigon took the form of a handsome man and impregnated a woman named Arella, revealing his true form and taunting her afterwards. After his daughter Raven's birth, Trigon would make numerous attempts to subjugate her to his will. When she refused to join him, Trigon destroyed her home world, Azarath, before corrupting Raven's soul and launching a campaign of destruction on Earth, forcing Raven to do battle with her own friends. During his invasion of Earth, Trigon reduced the island of New York to a graveyard, fusing the bodies of four million inhabitants together as part of an ever-growing spire of writhing, tormented souls. Trigon ultimately intended to merge Earth with his own dimension, happily condemning billions of lives to annihilation. Willing to exterminate entire worlds to make an example, and with trillions of deaths to his name, Trigon is the most terrifying and wicked foe the Teen Titans have ever faced.
  • Dr. Simon Jones became the supervillain Psimon after making contact with Trigon the Terrible, promising to unleash Trigon onto Earth in exchange for power. Psimon's introduction arc sees him take over the Fearsome Five by threatening the members with torture, after which Psimon attempts to mind control the Titans into murdering the Justice League and paving the way for Trigon to destroy Earth and many more worlds. After failing Trigon and striking out on his own, Psimon experimented on homeless men to turn them into "Mud Men" abominations and tortured Dr. Jace into helping him; tried to override the minds of millions of innocents; and always took his time to Mind Rape his enemies horribly instead of killing them, even dozens of defenseless police officers. During Crisis on Infinite Earths, Psimon takes advantage of Brainiac and Luthor's scheme for himself, allowing a war of hundreds of heroes and villains to happen so they will wipe each other out, at which point Psimon plans to murder Luthor and Brainiac, then assume control of their plan to wipe out as many Earths as necessary for multiversal domination.
• The Warlord: Deimos was a slaver and warlord with a plot to take over all Skartaris. Keeping many in bondage, Deimos relied on technology to pass as magic, later attempting to wipe out New Atlantis with his weapons. Stealing the baby son of his Arch-Enemy Travis Morgan, Deimos artificially aged a clone he believed was the boy to a man with the mind of a child to have father and son kill one another. Returning in Convergence, Deimos takes the chance to gleefully try to murder all heroes while harnessing Brainiac's power, intent on tearing down reality to erase it and rebuild it in his own image.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

• The Anti-Monitor is a being of the anti-matter universe. Seeking to dominate existence, the Anti-Monitor strengthens his universe by wiping out all others, annihilating thousands of universes and all their inhabitants from existence. With only 5 universes remaining, the Anti-Monitor uses Psycho-Pirate to crush the minds of countless beings to force them to turn on one another, before trying to exterminate the final universes. Defeated by the Heroic Sacrifice of Barry Allen, the Anti-Monitor drains the lives of millions of worlds in the anti-matter universe, killing all there. Causing the universes to merge into a single one, the Anti-Monitor unleashes his forces to wipe out humanity and Earth, intending on rebuilding everything in his own twisted image.

Post-Crisis (May also include Pre-Crisis and, in rare cases, New 52)

Multiple Works

Examples

• Doctor Destiny, real name John Dee, is a sadistic mind rapist under his frail persona. Preferring to fight by targeting heroes in their dreams, Dee was also a vicious murderer. Starting off as a foe of the Justice League of America, his most infamous deeds come from the "Master of Dreams" storyline from The Sandman, especially "24 Hours". After escaping an asylum, Dee murders a kind woman before using his new toy, a ruby belonging to Dream of the Endless. Dee uses the ruby to have a child's television show host demonstrate how to slit one's wrists, and causes people all over the world to become Driven to Madness. He then, over the course of hours, tortures the minds of the people in a diner. He forces them to worship him and subjects them to horrific pain, mental torture, and humiliation, occasionally returning their minds to them so they can comprehend their situation before having them kill themselves, even trying to destroy Dream so he may make himself master of the world. Returning to supervillainy after Dream spared him, Dee encourages a salaryman to threaten space-time itself and attempt global domination, using his ruby to have a chance to escape.
• Eclipso was once the Wrath of God, turning to evil and causing biblical atrocities such as The Great Flood. Possessing a man named Bruce Gordon as his first host, Eclipso tries to wipe out the world completely. Later returning by taking numerous host bodies, Eclipso becomes the ruler of a South American nation, spreading poison disguised as drugs and slaughtering countless innocents, massacring most of the children and cooking one child as a main course to taunt Bruce Gordon. After countless deaths, Eclipso is stopped, but always returns until Rise of Eclipso, where he seeks to wipe out the world and eventually sever the links of existence to kill even God and leave a void where only he exists, gloating how he would never be happier.
• The Hand, real name Ramon Solomano, was originally a crime lord given a month to live, who decides to go out in a blaze of glory. Bringing together the country's worst criminals as his "fingers", the Hand causes a countrywide crime wave, including having Red Dragon enslave a Native tribe and Big Caesar causing a blackout in New York, causing city-wide chaos. Re-emerging decades after his defeat and christening himself "The Iron Hand", the Hand gains the powers of the Nebula Man and holds the entire planet hostage, threatening to obliterate it entirely if he's not given complete control, with his weapon causing earthquakes on the planet all the while. Even towards the end of his life, Solomano expresses pride for his crimes and reveals that not only was he the one who summoned the Nebula Man to Earth and sent them after the Seven Soldiers of Victory to begin with, causing several deaths, but he also used him to kill Vigilante's second team of Soldiers, which included his own nephew.
• Kobra, real name Jeffrey Franklin Burr, is the leader of Kobra, their Naja-Naja. A terrorist who has claimed countless innocent lives, Kobra seeks to enact Kali Yuga, or the Age of Chaos, by mass destruction, at one point even trying to destroy Keystone City as well as many others. Announcing his plans by blowing up a plane full of civilians, Kobra later attempts to hijack an array of satellites and wipe out every major city in the world, blackmailing his way out of justice via 500 suicide bombers.
• Krona, also known as Entropy, is a frequent foe of Green Lantern, a self-styled scientist, and a rogue Maltusian hell-bent on imposing his ideal of "order" on reality:
  • Inadvertently responsible for the creation of the multiverse and evil itself through his experiments—most prominently the omnicidal Anti-Monitor upon the creation of the antimatter universe—Krona's covert experimentation on the Manhunters, the soldiers of the Guardians of the Universe, resulted in them going haywire and decimating countless lives through Sector 666, leaving only five people alive. Eventually banished and reduced to primeval energy, Krona assumed the name of Entropy and, still intent on continuing his experiments, took service under Nekron, intending to release him into the living universe. Later brought back into the universe through the efforts of Maltusian Controllers, Krona enslaved and then obliterated them, attempting to wage war on the consciousness of the universe, even destroying Earth to this cause—and attempting to destroy its soul in a fit of existential pique when it challenged his conceptions of the universe. By the time of Brightest Day, Krona enslaves Parallax and the emotional entities to force his will upon all creation, taking over the Green Lantern Corps and destroying thousands of lives to his cause. Possessed of such a god complex that he is willing to destroy entire universes, Krona's only true desire to slake his unending thirst for knowledge, and remains one of the greatest threats in the DCU.
  • JLA/Avengers: Krona is a former Oan scientist and callous egomaniac who desires to learn the secrets of the universe, and later goes on to destroy countless universes to discover their creation. Arriving in the Marvel Universe, he makes a bet with the Grandmaster, to put the heroes from their universes against each other to collect a dozen cosmic items. When Krona loses, he reacts by fatally torturing the Grandmaster, before summoning Galactus and killing him in a fit of rage. Using Galactus's corpse as a new base of operations, Krona learns of the sapience of the two worlds—Eternity and Kismet—trapping the two beings together to learn their secrets. When Metron calls out Krona for caring about conquest as opposed to knowledge, Krona eventually admits to this. Hoping to recreate Galactus's origins with himself in his stead, Krona plans on forcing the Marvel and DC Universes together to destroy them both and start a new Big Bang.
• Dr. Arthur Light is a man with one singular passion: his absolute love of rape. A supervillain with powers over energy, Light had been considered a joke for a time. It was revealed in Identity Crisis (2004) that the reason for this was because Zatanna had given him a magic lobotomy, because Light had snuck aboard the League's satellite and found the Elongated Man's wife Sue Dibny there alone, and took the chance to violently rape her. After he regains his mind, Light returns to his favorite habits. Light also stole the powers from the heroic Dr. Light, Kimiyo Hoshi, comparing his violation of her to rape. Light also joined Merlyn in attacking Oliver Queen's family, killing his way through a high school, forcing Oliver to watch as Merlyn blows up his son, adopted daughter, and friend, and personally bombing a building, with the scheme culminating in Merlyn destroying a third of Star City. Becoming steadily more sadistic and depraved, Light enjoyed hurting every superhero he could and threatened to rape their loved ones as he had Sue Dibny. When the Spectre, the spirit of God's vengeance itself, visited Light to punish him in Final Crisis, he was in the midst of preparing to rape a group of girls he'd dressed as heroines from the Teen Titans to satisfy his hatred of and lust for them.
• Major Force, real name Clifford Zmeck, is the Evil Counterpart of Nathaniel Adam and a Rogues' Gallery Transplant to Kyle Rayner, is living proof that power in the hands of the wrong people breeds utter catastrophe. A psychopath guilty of rape and murder long before earning his moniker of Major Force, Zmeck was launched forward decades into the future after being infused with alien metals and was enlisted by the government as an operative. Dubbed "Major Force," time and time again he demonstrated that he had absolutely no qualms with abusing his own powers, brutally strangling the girlfriend of Rayner to death and leaving her remains in Kyle's fridge to taunt him. Soon after this, Force apparently killed Green Lantern Arisia Rrab out of petty revenge by savagely crushing her skull—leaving Guy Gardner a taunting note about how she died slowly—before moving on to tear Gardner's heart out and incinerate his own employer, solely so he could enjoy his new freedom. Though seemingly killed by Gardner, Force would regenerate and resurface, responding to Power Girl severing his hands by unleashing a wave of atomic energy that nearly obliterated Tokyo and playing a sadistic mind game with Kyle by apparently murdering his grandmother in an identical way to how he killed his girlfriend—before revealing he'd simply used a prop to mess with Kyle. Unpredictable to the point where he ripped off one of his nominal teammates' arms and beat him to death with it, and completely willing to murder both innocents and his own allies for any given reason he could think of, Force's own summation of himself as "Hell on Earth" is an appropriate title for such a wantonly cruel madman.
• Peter "Mort" Mortimer, known as Scavenger, and later Barracuda, stands out as one of the most horrifying minor villains in the DC universe. Originally appearing as a dangerous, if corny, villain of Aquaman, his list of crimes included attempting to poison an entire ocean and kill numerous people, among them a child. Mort seemingly took a turn for the better when he made a Heel–Face Turn to save children's lives, but this didn't last very long, as Mort was later revealed to be a despicable child rapist who rapes young boys, records then sells the acts, and will often rip the children's hearts out for fun. When confronted by an enraged Hawkman and Aquaman, the latter of whom thought Mort was a "friend", Mort shows nothing but smug glee at his crimes, with him brushing them off as nothing more than him having "urges" he needed to satisfy.
• Neron is a wicked demon, introduced in Underworld Unleashed, who bargains for the souls of countless beings, regularly twisting and perverting the wish to corrupt his victims, claiming their souls for eternal agony. Seeking to corrupt the finest souls, Neron deals with multiple supervillains to have them cause death and destruction on grand scales so he may take advantage of the chaos, also attempting to sway the superheroes into mass murder so he may claim them as well. Aiding the rogue angel Asmodel, Neron shifts the moon to cause massive disasters, while later helping Asmodel try to rip down heaven piece by piece along with creation itself, only to later betray the angel and take him for eternal torture. Neron amuses himself with cruel mind games, even offering a "get out of hell free" card to the villains all so he can delight in them murdering anyone in their way to obtain it and commit atrocities all the while.
• Psimon, returning following his apparent death at Brainiac's hands, immediately goes about obtaining more power by annihilating the lives of billions across the galaxy and absorbing their energy, leading to entire planets reduced to rubble. Returning to Earth and subjecting his former allies to murder or worse, Psimon horrifically torments the new Teen Titans for fun while planning to turn the Earth into his playground. Though beaten, Psimon later engineers a prison breakout and teams up with Dr. Sivana to gas an entire LexCorp skyscraper full of people, after which Psimon betrays Sivana and attempts to nuke Canada, threatening the same to more countries. Continuing his schtick of subjecting his victims to the worst kind of psychological torture he can imagine whenever possible, Psimon meets his end after trying to restart society on a distant world with attempted enforcement of mass breeding of unwilling villainesses.
• Vandal Savage, born Vandar Adg, was a caveman who received super intellect and immortality from a meteorite, after which he used his endless life to become the biggest monster he could. Over the millennia, he has been one of the most vicious and depraved men in history and one of the most efficient, best manipulators in the DCU, with billions of bodies to his name. Vandal has spent his time as The Man Behind the Man to many conquerors, organizing conquests and massacres. Vandal has also fathered legions of monsters, but with the exception of one child, he considers the rest pathetic and treats their lives or deaths as not worthy of his attention. His treatment toward his sole legitimate child, Scandal, was no better: On her birthday, he forced her to run a gauntlet of men beating her, and if she failed, he swore he'd murder her mother. Despite Scandal being a lesbian, Vandal wants a male heir—and has no compunction having Scandal raped by other supervillains to get it. Vandal's crimes have also including introducing a new drug in the stead of heroin that burns out its users to death very quickly; cannibalism—which he might well have invented as a concept; attempting to pull an asteroid down to Earth; murdering Golden Age superheroes with their families after founding a Neo-Nazi group called The Fourth Reich; and planning to nuke Washington, D.C. (thanks to Solaris, Montevideo, Uruguay was nuked instead, killing over a million people).

New Gods

Examples

• Darkseid, born Prince Uxas, is the Trope Codifier for Dystopia Justifies the Means. As ruler of Apokolips, Darkseid subjects its denizens to hellish conditions with the overwhelming majority of the population ill-treated slaves. His Elite fare no better as Darkseid is all too willing to subject them to hideous tortures or obliteration should they fail him. Darkseid detests all that is good in the universe and seeks to extend his influence everywhere he can. While he once loved someone, his mother, Heggra, wanting to make him evil, killed Suli, helping turn Darkseid into the Galactic Conqueror we know him as—but not before he had Heggra poisoned. During Final Crisis, Darkseid is dying, and so wants to destroy the multiverse and all life in it as a final gesture. He kills his son Orion to gain dominion over Earth. Once there, he enslaved the minds of everyone he could touch, turning them into savage parodies of themselves, intending to "murder their souls and take them to hell without end." His ultimate motive is to use the Anti-Life Equation to rob everybody of free will and turn them all into mindless zombies who worship him as a god while he tortures them eternally, all for fun. Just as bloodthirsty and monstrous as any of those who serve him, Darkseid combines urbane sophistication, limitless cruelty and insatiable drive for power, and is the one single villain who all the heroes despise and fear.
• Desaad, the God of Sadism and Darkseid's chief inquisitor, is a vicious sadist and one of the most wantonly cruel deities of all Apokolips. Having assisted Darkseid's rise to power, Desaad murdered Darkseid's first lover Suli before bargaining for his life with Darkseid by murdering his mistress—and Darkseid's mother—Queen Heggra. Desaad proceeds to enact ghastly tortures on a daily basis, basking in the pain and fear of his victims while never letting them die, even reaching across the cosmos to murder hapless mortals while basking in their helpless, terrified agony. Desaad keeps whole groups enslaved in twisted amusement parks of torture with intent to create countless more across the cosmos. Ever the opportunist, Desaad has been willing to let all of Earth die to get what he wishes, has tried to spark a war with New Genesis and has even tried to betray Darkseid himself to make himself the supreme deity with the Multiverse becoming his playground and all who live his playthings.
• Granny Goodness is the self-styled Evil Matriarch to all of Apokolips's children. and one of the evilest people to ever serve Darkseid. Having clawed her way into the graces of Darkseid and killed any trace of actual goodness left in her, Granny raises the children of Apokolips in "orphanages" under constant, horrific torture, literally from the moment they're born; the few who manage to survive Granny's hellish teachings become nothing more than slaves who kill and die for Darkseid. Among Granny's children was Scott Free, Mr. Miracle, who was one of the few to ever escape Granny's vile clutches. Beyond this, Granny has death-marched slaves by the thousands into giant threshers to be ground up into raw fuel; manipulated the Amazons into a genocidal attack on Washington by posing as Athena; and nearly managed to destroy Oa during Final Crisis even after being reduced to a mere spirit. Endlessly loyal to her vile master's spirit-destroying ideals, Granny is DC's signature source of child abuse.

Green Lantern

Examples

• Mongul II has dedicated his life to aping and surpassing his equally unpleasant father. During his first appearance in Green Lantern, Mongul II used the Black Mercy plants to trap Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen in a fantasy world; he subsequently murdered his sister, Mongal, and kept her corpse as a trophy. When Mongul II really comes into his own, however, is after gaining a Sinestro Corps Ring (by murdering its owner). Taking control of the Black Mercy homeworld, Mongul II uses his ring to alter the genetics of the Black Mercies so that they will trap their victims in their worst nightmares, instead of their ideal fantasies. He coerces the benevolent Mother Mercy into aiding him by threatening to make her eat her own children if she does not. Defeated by the Green Lanterns, Mongul II escapes from prison, seizes control of the Sinestro Corps by killing anybody who disagrees with him (or even annoys him in the slightest), rips out Arkillo's tongue, and overruns the planet Daxam, slaughtering or enslaving the population. Beaten off by Sodam Yat and Arisia, Mongul II later arrives on Korugar, and is in the process of having the citizenry strung up along the streets when his reign is finally halted by the return of Sinestro.
• Romat-Ru is the most horrible criminal in Xudar's history. A Serial Killer of children, Romat-Ru killed thousands of them, before being selected for the Sinestro Corps. Targeting children after and committing himself to mass murder beyond any loyalty to Sinestro, Romat-Ru vows he will always escape and return to murder more kids.
• Green Lantern Corps Quarterly issue #7's "Triumph of the Will": Ayria is a vicious, corrupt Green Lantern who uses his powers to oppress the residents of Aegri Somnia. Ayria has his forces brutally slaughter their way through the rebelling yellows on Aegri Somnia 2, resulting on millions of casualties on both sides, before establishing a holocaust and sending the yellows who remain into labor camps where they slowly and agonizingly perish by the millions to fuel Ayria's power battery. A paranoid despot unable to take any form of perceived challenge to his rule, Ayria viciously tortures to death several members of his staff—including his own brother—for reasons as varied as apparent treachery to as petty to having no faith in his rule, and ultimately orders every single remaining yellow to be sent to the camps and executed after torturing one who swallows his ring—ultimately resulting in Ayria's downfall when the ring resonates with the dead yellow's will to resurrect the billions Ayria has killed to tear him to bloody shreds. An unrelenting dictator, Ayria proves even the ostensibly righteous Green Lanterns aren't immune to pure evil in their ranks.
• Blackest Night: Nekron, Lord of the Unliving and the face of all death within the DCU, is an entity that eventually proves himself to be far too sadistic a being to simply be a cosmic force doing its job. The force behind the necromantic Black Lanterns, Nekron implicitly influences William Hand into killing himself and his entire family to become his tether into the living world in his bid to enact the "Blackest Night," a state of eternal death imposed upon all creation. Nekron reveals the constant death and resurrection within the universe is a matter of his influence, making those who die and revive sleeper agents—keeping them aware and conscious in their own bodies—and eventually simply turning them all into Black Lanterns, twisting them into horrible, undead mockeries of the people they once were. Through the Black Lanterns, Nekron unleashes a wave of death across everything in his path, turning more and more into Black Lanterns and intent on never stopping until all is silent.

Justice League of America

Examples

• Despero is one of the oldest enemies of the Justice League. Having murdered his father to take control of his world, Despero never recovered his pride after the League defeated him. Rebuilding himself into a savage beast, Despero invaded Earth, taking joy in slaughtering the humans he could while attempting to wipe out every living thing, returning multiple times to try again. Resuming his role as a Galactic Conqueror, Despero has conquered dozens of worlds and destroyed many others, with billions of dead to his name, even attempting to trick other aliens into annihilating Earth out of sheer spite against the heroes he so loathes.
• Felix Faust is one of the most power-hungry sorcerers alive. Kicking off his career by selling his infant son's soul for his own ability, Faust committed many acts of cruel murder and torture to fuel his Black Magic, with his very first appearance featuring him summoning the Demons Three so they could enact their apocalyptic designs upon humanity. When he finally realized he could no longer bargain with his own tainted soul, Faust resorted to harvesting the soul of an innocent little girl to trade to demons. Faust offered his assistance to Black Adam to help resurrect Black Adam's wife Isis, but deceived Adam into thinking Isis's revival had failed, while Faust kept a paralyzed Isis to serve as his personal sex toy.
• "The Teasdale Imperative" ^IssuesJustice League America #31-32 & Justice League Europe #7-8: The second Gray Man is defined by ambition and causeless sadism that his predecessor lacked. Gray Man II saves a Mad Scientist named Irwin Teasdale from death at the hands of Simon Stagg, and uses Teasdale's knowledge to start spreading a virus through eastern Europe that reduces the infected to zombies in all but name. After reducing the population of entire villages to his shambling slaves, Gray Man II directs themselves to start committing suicide by the dozens to devour their souls and empower himself. Through this method Gray Man II intends to displace the Lords of Order and seize all creation by compelling humanity into global suicide, and the first thing he does with his swelling power is to squish Teasdale under his foot for an earlier failure.
• JLA (1997)
  • Issues #1-4 & #56-58: Protex, leader of the Hyperclan, is actually a power-hungry White Martian who comes to Earth masquerading as a superhero. After winning the gratitude of humanity and cowing most of the supervillain community with a series of ruthless executions, Protex throws away the pretension of altruism and reveals his real goal is to have Earth annihilated by his coming fleets. After he's defeated for the first time, Protex rebuilds his strength by capturing dozens of innocent telepaths and eating their brains. Protex next attempts to destroy humanity by introducing an ion into Earth's atmosphere that prevents combustion—and thus the White Martians' natural weakness, fire—causing people to die and go insane all over the globe while Protex prepares to take over the rest of the galaxy.
  • DC One Million: Solaris the Sun Tyrant is one half of the Big Bad Duumvirate, alongside Vandal Savage. To topple the Superman dynasty, Solaris has attempted to pull planets from their orbits at the cost of all life on them; scorch the entire surface of Earth; bombard Earth with sapient asteroids; and release a powerful wave of radiation to give the entire population cancer. Reprogrammed to become good, Solaris returns to villainy in the 853rd century out of jealousy towards Superman, convincing its caretaker to travel back in time and release a virus which makes all machines on Earth go haywire and drive humans insane. The same virus used to commit these crimes also interferes with the guidance system of Savage's rocket, causing it to detonate over Montevideo, Uruguay and killing over one million people. In the past, when it is built to stop the virus, Solaris attempts to destroy the entire planet after gaining sapience. Back in the 853rd century, Solaris makes a final attempt to destroy Superman, slaughtering thousands of superhumans in its insane attempt to best its rival. A spiteful monster obsessed with besting Superman, Solaris may be an artificial intelligence, but it is its bitterness that makes it utterly inhuman.
  • JLA: Earth-2: Brainiac's Antimatter Universe counterpart, an organic syntellect who was captured by Ultraman and forced to be his slave, schemed to not only escape his bonds, but to upgrade himself into an "Nth Level Intelligence". In order to do this, he swapped a plane in the Antimatter Universe for one in the Matter Universe, killing all the passengers on both in the process, and triggering a war between the Justice League and the Crime Syndicate. While the teams were busy fighting, Brainiac set in motion a plan to merge the Matter and Antimatter Universes, a move that would have resulted in the annihilation of all reality, plotting to use the energy from the resultant explosion to complete his upgrade and become a god. Willing to destroy all life in order to better himself, Antimatter Brainiac was every bit as vile as his Matter Universe twin.
• JLA Classified issues #32-36—"The Fourth Parallel" arc: Darrin Proffit, aka the Red King, is a salaryman who found Doctor Destiny's Materioptikon and decided to use the gem to become rich by selecting optimal parallel worlds and purging the rest. Initially happy with his newfound fortune, Darrin listens to Doctor Destiny's challenge to attempt to Take Over the World to prove his superiority over him. To this end, Darrin deletes countless parallel worlds until only worlds where Darrin takes the name of the Red King are left. In the first, the Red King becomes a ally of the Justice League with plans to betray them; in the second, the Red King accidentally destroys Earth; however, in the third, the Red King murders the Justice League with painful methods alongside many other millions. Then, the Red King of the Third Parallel World destroys his dimension and forcibly absorbs his own counterpart to take his place, preferring to be beloved and famous. This Red King also murders his other counterparts, rejecting the pleas of a benevolent Darrin that offered him a chance to restore normality before spitefully destroying his parallel world, endangering space-time for the sake of his own ego.

The Sandman (1989)

Examples

• The first Corinthian is a rogue nightmare crafted by Dream to be the dark mirror to humanity that it will not confront about itself. Preferring to simply go rogue and indulge its own hedonistic evil, the Corinthian inspires countless mortals to serial killing with various atrocities while becoming a torturing serial killer himself, possessing bodies and abducting victims, mainly young men. The Corinthian proceeds to torture and murder them, removing their eyes to devour while plotting to inspire his proteges to greater heights of depravity and madness, with a legacy of decades of murder behind him.
• Issue #29—"Thermidor": Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Reign of Terror, comes into conflict with Johanna Constantine and the never-dying head of Orpheus. Beyond sending men, women, and children to the guillotine by the thousands under the pretext of birthing France anew, Robespierre also indulges in sadistic pastimes like using the headless bodies of political rivals in macabre puppet shows, and threatens Johanna with far worse should she resist him.
• Issue #52—"Cluracan's Tale": Mairon is the Carnifex Carys of Aurelia and the Psychopomp of the entire land, having manipulated his way into gaining total physical and spiritual control over the kingdom by murdering the true heir. Oppressing the people of Aurelia with brutal taxes and starvation while trying to expand this tyranny to other lands, Mairon indulges in any depraved debauchery he likes, implied to casually bed young boys and girls at his leisure. Mairon regularly executes anyone who crosses him, enjoying personally gouging their eyes out and pissing in the sockets, and he uses the threat of damning them after death to further terrorize them. When Cluracan causes a minor rebellion against Mairon's rule, Mairon intends to respond by murdering 10% of Aurelia's population and condemn their souls to Hell for eternity, completely defiling the religious powers he is meant to use for good.
• The Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives: The infamous Gilles de Rais was already a Serial Rapist, torturer, and murderer of children before he turned to an even darker routine to keep himself alive: becoming a Life Drinker of innocent children to keep himself immortal. With each child only buying him a few months, Gilles leaves countless withered corpses behind him through the centuries all the way into modern day London. Gilles seeks to suck out the life of natural immortal Hob Gadling, and has the temerity to whine that Gadling "never had to work a day" to live forever, showing a depthless disregard to every single child he's tortured and drained over the ages.

Others

# - G

• Aquaman:
  • Black Manta, real name David, makes his living as a brutal pirate, often in the employ of others, and is obsessed with destroying Aquaman at all costs. To this end, Manta killed Aquaman's infant son by trapping him in a chamber that suffocated the boy, despite Arthur's best efforts to save him. Manta continues to torment his nemesis by targeting and murdering those he can, proving himself to be a ruthless sociopath who has attempted to raze Atlantis as a means of spiting Aquaman. Not even Manta's own family is exempt from his cruelty: his own son, the new Aqualad, was the target of Manta's wrath when Manta attempted to murder him with zealous hatred, for no other reason than rejecting the path Manta wanted for him. In Brightest Day, Manta tries to go straight, opening up a fish market, but when the customers rejoice that Aquaman is alive, Manta murders them with a knife, before burning down his own house and resuming his quest for vengeance. He later aids Siren in an attempted genocide of all surface dwellers and personally spearheads an attack on California. Manta is a vicious, hateful murderer who would poison the entire ocean just for the chance to hurt his nemesis.
  • Vol. 6: Prime Minister Hagen, "the Heinous", is the leader of a caste of sorcerous Atlanteans who came to power during the rule of Gamemnae who weasels his way into control of all Atlantis. Hagen exiles Aquaman to die upon the Traitor's Reef, drugging his wife Empress Mera into catatonia to use her as a figurehead ruler and purging any part of the populace that didn't agree to his xenophobic rule, even ordering Dolphin and her infant son murdered solely due to their connection to Aquaman. Hagen dabbles in dark sorcery to mutate sea life into twisted abominations—-even fusing some of them with falsely-accused convicts—-planning to use an army of them to spill up from the ocean and eradicate all surface life.
• Blue Beetle Vol. 7: The Reach Negotiator is a representative of the Reach revealed to have gone rogue, violating the treaty between the Green Lanterns in favor of conquering the Earth. Initially putting up a friendly facade to Jaime Reyes, the Negotiator reveals his vicious cruelty by crushing the skull of one of his subordinates for stating the Earth is too dangerous to control. The Negotiator has dozens of people injected with Scarabs to turn them into homicidal monsters threatening to slaughter half of the city as an experiment. The Negotiator plans to set up machines known as World Rippers to destroy the Earth's surface, saving humanity simply so he can turn them into a Slave Race to mine their vital resources. When Reyes tries to foil his plans, the Negotiator settles for trying to murder his whole family and decides to destroy the Earth and everyone in it out of desperation and spite, not caring about the lives of his own men who could perish in the attack.
• The Children's Crusade: The being using the alias "Jack Rabbit" is really the latest guise of an interdimensional slave trader specializing in human children. Appearing in various incarnations throughout history, including The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the slaver has orchestrated mass disappearances of children for centuries, and upon discovering the Pocket Dimension of Free Country, disguises himself as a giant rabbit to infiltrate its High Council and use it as a staging ground for his master plan of enslaving every child on Earth. Abducting several children of great magical potential, including Animal Man's daughter Maxine, whom he retrieves personally, "Jack" hopes to use their powers to enlarge Free Country to accommodate billions of children for him to sell across the realms.
• The Demon Vol. 3's "Haunted Glory" and "The Longest Day" arcs: SS General Ernst Focke-Wulfe von Raddel was a Nazi Panzer commander who led his unit on a host of brutal war crimes throughout Europe, killing and raping as they went. After recovering from decades of catatonia, von Raddel revives his unit as undead killers, wipes out a US military base to gain their tanks and plots to level all of the US and most of Europe to establish a Fourth Reich, even trying to practice by wiping out a town of two thousand people.
• El Diablo Vol. 2 (written by Brian Azzarello): Elmer Huskey was once a petty thief and crook, but, upon realizing that the beloved sheriff Moses Stone is his exact lookalike, murders Stone by burning him alive and stealing his identity, enjoying the freedom and power masquerading as a sheriff brings him. Any time someone comes close to discovering his true identity, Huskey coldly murders them, from town drunks to an entire bar of people who simply overhear the implication, and even his own partners and teammates. Murdering well over a dozen people, even his own brother, to keep his true identity a secret, Huskey's crimes catch up to him when he attempts to beat a mentally-challenged man to death with a shovel, all of his actions firmly showing exactly why El Diablo chose Huskey as his latest target to punish for misdeeds.
• Doom Patrol Vol. 2:
  • Issues #22-24: Red Jack, who claims to be God himself, is an interdimensional sadist who lives off of the pain of others. To survive, Red Jack turns his victims into butterflies, pinning them inside his house in a perpetual state of agony to feed off of their pain, having imprisoned over millions of them. Having also been Jack the Ripper, Red Jack killed several prostitutes in an attempt to use their flesh to create a new form of life, only to toss it aside and dismiss his victims as nothing but "cheap harlots". Kidnapping a comatose Rhea Jones, Red Jack hopes to marry her and start a twisted family as a way to alleviate his boredom.
  • Issues #31-33: The Archons of Nürnheim are a duo of sapient, nihilistic puppets who harbored a hatred for all life itself after being discarded eons ago. Creating the Cult of the Unwritten Book, which worships the being known as the Unmaker, the Archons plan to summon the Unmaker in an attempt to undo all life in the universe. Raising a boy born with the markings used to summon the Unmaker, the Archons killed his parents when he was of proper age, entrusting them to two of their followers before killing them as well. Using innocents and murder victims to create macabre monsters from their flesh and souls, the Archons send them to find the boy, resulting in the ruination of Barcelona and the lives of several people.
• Final Crisis:
  • Libra, real name Justin Ballantine, became obsessed with balance and founded the Injustice Gang seeking to become a God. Instead, he ended up dispersed over the cosmos, eventually reforming on Apokolips and pledging allegiance to Darkseid himself. Taking on the Anti-Life equation, Libra comes to Earth to seduce its villains to his side, even murdering the Martian Manhunter. Enslaving countless minds and warping them into agony and evil, Libra prepares the way for Darkseid to return where every living thing in the multiverse will submit, become his mindless slaves or be exterminated and their souls plunged into an eternity of suffering. Libra even attempts to kill the baby son of Weather Wizard to force him to join up and indicates he intends to make sex slaves of the female super heroines, promising Lex Luthor he can be "first in line" with Supergirl. The insane prophet of the God of Evil himself, Libra devotes himself utterly to darkness, never looking back in his pursuit of wickedness.
  • Terror Titans tie-in: The second Clock King is the whimsically cruel successor to the goofy original. Mysteriously appearing shortly before the Crisis, he recruited a group of troubled teenagers as his accomplices, namely a new Bolt, Copperhead, Persuader, and Disruptor, Clock King offered his services to the Dark Side Club as a procurer of metahuman slave gladiators. Clock King later assassinates the human host bodies of Steppenwolf and Vundabar, who managed the arena, to take it over for himself. Dulling the slaves' wills with drugs and the Anti-Life Equation, Clock King also encourages his Terror Titans to discard their morals by goading them to murder their loves one, and as the cherry on top is also a sexual predator who grooms attractive teenage girls as his mistresses while truly caring nothing for them—as shown when he immolates Disruptor after deeming Ravager a superior replacement.
• The Flash:
  • Grodd, the most infamous criminal in the history of Gorilla City, was driven into exile after killing the city's benevolent leaders and ruthlessly plundered the mind of his friend Solovar to discover the secrets of mind control. Combining a ruthless brilliance with a gorilla's power, Grodd established himself as a feared player of the underworld. He would brutally murder anyone who stood in his way or just dispose of humans for the enjoyment, considering them far inferior to himself. Grodd's mental prowess is such that he enjoys dominating and twisting the minds of others to feral savagery or into sycophants for his ego. In battle, he is also highly sadistic—for example, crippling Hunter Zolomon, who recalled with terror how Grodd treated him like a toy he could break. To date, Grodd has made no fewer than eighteen attempts to completely wipe out all of humanity to purge what he sees as a lesser race.
  • Eobard Thawne, aka Professor Zoom and the Reverse-Flash, is the Arch-Enemy of Barry Allen and the one who killed his mother. Duplicating Barry's powers out of an obsession with him, Eobard attempted to replace him in life, and when rejected by the latter's wife, spitefully killed her, later forcing the pacifistic Barry to kill Eobard himself to save his then-fiancé from suffering the same fate. Resurrected, Eobard begins using his time travel powers to commit a litany of crimes, including pettily murdering his own brother and parents, as well as a rival and every single man who dated a woman he was interested in, even going back to her childhood to traumatize her for spurning him. Eobard, in another of his evil deeds, attempted to murder the children of Wally West in front of their mother and murders Johnny Quick. Trying to force the also-resurrected Barry into becoming the villainous Black Flash, Eobard continues carelessly shifting the time stream for no other purpose than to make Barry suffer, causing untold damage and agony in doing so, and torments Barry during the events of Flashpoint, even stating now that he is free from the effects of timeline changes he will murder Barry in the womb. A vile, selfish man who will never admit to being at fault, Eobard is Barry Allen's worst nightmare come to life.
  • David Hersch, aka the Cicada, murdered his wife in the late 1800s, and seeks to erase his own sin in a selfish attempt to run from his past. Touched by the lightning just as the Flash was, the Cicada founds a cult dedicated to the Flash, using his followers to go on large scaling sprees that see the people the Flash saved murdered and their life forces harvested. After many such deaths, the Cicada lures Flash in to take his power, murdering a follower for his life force and revives his wife, killing and draining the lives of the hundreds of followers he has amassed. When his wife rejects him for murdering her, the Cicada callously murders her again before trying to kill Flash and his police allies.

H - R

• Hawkman: Onimar Synn ^Appearances[[JSA issues #23-25 & Rann–Thanagar War]] is the strongest of the Seven Devils who plagued the history of Thanagar and one of the planet's greatest and most powerful entities. A Soul Eating demon who nourishes himself on suffering, Synn resurrects countless years after his first defeat and takes over Thanagar, slaughtering its high council and devouring the souls of its populace by the thousands to fuel his undead army, whilst executing thousands more by dropping them from the point of the flying city he takes over. Once more revived by his depraved priest in time for the Rann-Thanagar War, Synn exploits the conflict to devour the dead and dying of Thanagar's populace, impeding the efforts of Kyle Rayner and Adam Strange to stop him by trying to suffocate hundreds of innocents reserved in storage to slake his appetite, before mounting an assault on Rann to devour its populace as well, slaughtering them by the masses and ultimately striving to use their technology to go on and consume every living soul in the universe.
• Hitman (1993):
  • "Local Hero" & "Closing Time" arcs: Mr. Truman, an unassuming, mild-mannered little CIA agent who is out to destroy metahumans (if he can't control them), makes his career on blackmail and murder, but it's not until the final arc where he shows the darkness inside himself. Truman has human beings injected with a special metahuman formula to create a personal army of metahumans but while the formula works, it steals the minds from its subjects. Tommy becomes aware of this when he rescues a young woman who had been a witness Truman had tried to silence by unleashing one of the monsters on her without care for collateral damage. When he realizes the creatures still retain their human minds and are locked in a corner of their heads, incapable of stopping their actions, Truman orders them to be set loose on one another with the resulting carnage filmed for his amusement.
  • Issues #35-36—"Katie" two-parter: Thomas "Tom" Dawson, father of Tommy Monaghan, is a seemingly respectable businessman who hides a monstrous ego. A frequent client of the prostitute Katie, Dawson repeatedly threatened her if she ever tries to trick him. When Katie got pregnant with his child, Dawson burns down her house with her 3 young children inside it to protect his reputation. Tailing Katie to America, Dawson then brutally mutilated her to cover up his tracks. 30 years later, Katie's child Frances, along with Tommy, return to Ireland, with Dawson retaliating by butchering Frances and then attempting to kill Tommy.
• Hunter: The Age of Magic: Arawn Kluder is a necromancer-for-hire who lusts after Death of the Endless, slaughtering thousands of innocent people over the decades in hopes of a chance to meet her face to face. Never managing to catch more than a glimpse despite his efforts, Arawn is hired by Dr. Arthur Lily to retrieve Tim Hunter for him, being bribed with the True Name of Death that will supposedly allow him to command her. Instead, Arawn uses the Name to kill Arthur's agents escorting him and confronts Tim with murderous intent, hoping to use his end to lure out Death. When he finally meets her face to face, Kluder reveals that his "love" for Death is simply a desire to use her as his housemaid and sexual plaything.
• Justice Society of America:
  • JSA Vol. 1: Per Degaton is depicted at his absolute worst in Post-Crisis. A sadist who gets off on traveling through time and watching members of the Justice Society suffer and die, Per Degaton schemes to use Atom as a living bomb to nuke Washington, D.C. in 1951, killing millions and framing all superheroes as menaces. Per Degaton then institutes his own horrible regime in the future with heroes outlawed, using his personal kill squad "the Red Morgue" to routinely travel back in time and kill his enemies when they're harmless infants. Ordering the slaughtering of Stargirl's family and baby sister, then killing Gabriel Walker by shoving his 10-year-old self in front of a car, Per Degaton reaches his height of cruelty when he systematically destroys every good thing in Hourman's past to cause the hero total agony, notably murdering the man's childhood best friend and threatening the same to the first girl he kissed.
  • JSA Classified issues #19-20—"Skin Trade" arc: Delores Winters, or "Endless Winter", starts out as a vain actress and a victim of Ultra-Humanite's body-swapping scheme before becoming even worse than him in her attempt to regain her beauty. Winters swapped her body with her own estranged daughter and left her to die, before instituting a horrific organ trade ring where metas are kidnapped and forced to fight each other, with the losers having their superhuman body parts ripped out and auctioned off while the metas are thrown away like trash. Winters even has Icemaiden flayed while she's still alive to take her alabaster skin, leaving Icemaiden alive and paralyzed for the rest of her foreseeable life.
• L.E.G.I.O.N. issues #15-18: Dagon-Ra deals in mass murder and slavery, hoping to take his business to a galactic scale. Years ago, Dagon-Ra agreed to help the Telepath escape his homeworld alongside his lover, but Dagon-Ra instead just murdered Telepath's entire race to enslave him. In the present, Dagon-Ra continues his business of slaughtering aliens and taking survivors as slaves, threatening to kill thousands at a time if any law enforcement interferes, while also having turned the mighty Lady Quark into his personal "pet". Dagon-Ra subjects any who personally anger him to horrendous torture by either his dungeons or using his transmutation powers to torment them—like turning blood to lead or oxygen to poison—and ultimately lures L.E.G.I.O.N. into an ambush so he can massacre their forces and enslave the survivors.
• Lucifer Vol. 1's "The Wolf Beneath the Tree" & "Morningstar" arcs: Fenris is the Nordic Beast of the Apocalypse and the self-proclaimed ruler of "everything that ravels, rapes, and rends". Following God's abdication of His throne, leading to the slow unraveling of the universe, Fenris decided to take a personal interest in speeding up the process. Murdering several other Norse gods whom he'd previous claimed he'd made peace with, Fenris takes control of a mentally ill man and tries to force him to murder his wife and son among the roots of Yggdrasil, which would render the destruction of the universe inevitable. When this plan fails, Fenris murders his accomplice, the African trickster god Abonsam, and uses his blood to take control of Lucifer and kill his brother Michael, watering the tree with his blood. In the final arc, Fenris joins Lilith's alliance of past villains, eviscerates the Archangel Uriel, kills the noble human Hell-Lord Christopher Rudd, and destroys God's throne, which would have immediately destroyed the entire cosmos had God's granddaughter, Elaine Belloc, not agreed to succeed him.
• Manhunter Vol. 3: Walter "Walt" Pratt was the illegitimate son of the Justice Society heroes Phantom Lady and Iron Munroe. Growing up in a series of foster homes, Walt gained a streak of violent misogyny that manifested in brutally killing women later in life. Abusing and eventually murdering his own wife, Walt was sent to prison for the majority of his daughter Kate Spencer's life. When Kate was an adult with a young son, Walt returned to her life, revealing he was dying of bone cancer. Seeking to extend his life, Walt tried to kidnap his own grandson Ramsey to harvest his bone marrow to save his own life while paying the two supervillains he hired to do the transplant with Kate's ex-husband Peter, allowing the villains to torture him to death on camera. When he learned Ramsey was not a match, he tried to blackmail Kate to sacrifice herself in the transplant by threatening to beat Peter to death using Ramsey. When he realized there was no further way to survive, Walt proceeded to attempt to kill both Kate and Ramsey, just to ensure his whole bloodline would be extinct.
• Martian Manhunter: Ma'alefa'ak J'onzz, aka Malefic, J'onn's twin brother, had his natural psychic powers stripped by his own people due to abusing his telepathic powers, using them to cruelly Mind Rape J'onzz's wife. Out of petty spite, Malefic engineered a fatal psychic plague among his people, causing whatever Martian that used their psychic powers to horribly burn and die as a result and singlehandedly destroying almost his entire race as a result. Pursuing his brother J'onn to Earth in a single-minded crusade to end his brother's life and complete his genocide, Malefic tried various times to destroy his brother and all those close to him, murdering the partner of his human identity, Karen Smith, and trying to mentally drive his own brother to suicide through a remnant of himself before his final death.
• The Outsiders: In Outsiders (2003) #17-19, the "Most Wanted" arc, Mr. Tanner manages to occupy a special field of depravity despite being a normal human with no superhuman powers. Mr. Tanner runs an international slavery ring, with a focus on young children; countless children are abducted from across the globe to be painfully branded and serve as abused sex slaves for years on end at the hands of Tanner and his buyers. Having perpetuated the ring of pedophilic rape and torture for years, Tanner catches the eye of one of his previous victims—Grace Chou, who suffered under his abuses for three years and is now a fully-grown superhuman—and goads her into coming back into his grasp by arranging the murder of an innocent man and kidnapping the young daughter of Arsenal to be turned into a sex slave. Tanner's atrocities are a dark reminder of similar incidents happening every day in real life, and despite being an incredibly minor villain in the long run, Tanner still stands out as one of the most realistically depraved characters in the DC universe.

S - Z

• Sandman Mystery Theatre: "The Face" is a Master of Disguise who glories in his work, with a massive body count. Hired to assassinate a Tong mob boss who knows the Face's employer has Asian ancestry in the racist World War II-era, the Face begins murdering Tong members and leaving their heads around, hoping to provoke a Mob War, even killing a 15-year-old prostitute who is the sister of one member. In his spare time, the Face also rapes and abuses prostitutes, mocking them for their lack of recourse and often "tearing them up" below to leave them unable to work. The Face returns to kill others, plaguing the Sandman constantly. In the modern era, the Face accepts a job to bankrupt a wealthy man for an investor to profit, attempting to crash a blimp into Opal City to devastate it and kill countless people.
• Secret Origins Vol. 2 issue #10's "Revelation": Dr. Alt, in this proposed backstory for The Phantom Stranger, appears to be one of the men safeguarding the "architecture of existence" from cataclysm. In truth, Dr. Alt intends to allow the universe's destruction in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, trying to create a new Big Bang because he doesn't want to go to the grave alone. Dr. Alt tortures one of his fellow scientists, who sacrifices himself to save the universe, transforming into the Phantom Stranger.
• Secret Six Vol. 3 issues #10-14—"Depths" arc: Mr. Smyth is a man with a radical plan to "better" the world: Bring back the institution of slavery, as it is what "great nations" are built upon. Smyth takes in the slaves and forces them to work in horrible conditions, leading to their deaths from overwork, cave-ins or gas. When a slave named Maria refuses to work any more, Smyth has his assistant begin slaughtering innocent slaves en masse until a broken Maria promises to keep working. Smyth later tricks Deadshot into murdering Maria by offering her "freedom" if she can run to safety before telling Deadshot she is an escaping dangerous prisoner. Smyth also keeps Amazons as slaves with the intent to force them into servitude or death as well, and shows no concern over anything but the restoration of the institution of slavery.
• Seven Soldiers: Gloriana Tenebrae, Queen of the Sheeda, found a way to invade other timelines from the future. Usurping her husband Melmoth, Gloriana commits the Sheeda to atrocity after atrocity, having them harvest humanity at various points in history, having countless humans slaughtered or taken as slaves to be worked or death or kept as concubines, with others fed to the Sheeda cauldron. After annihilating countless civilizations, Sheeda arrives to wipe out New York as well to continue her constant genocides.
• Shade, the Changing Man Vol. 2 issues #33-35—"Birth Pains" arc: Brian Juno is a master torturer who, inspired by stories of ancient martyrs who attained enlightenment by experiencing great pain, decided to do the same by inflicting it. Already abducting victims and subjecting them to such agonies as flaying and disembowelment, Brian is further empowered when the Madness grants him the ability to create his own Pocket Dimension of torture, even managing to pull three angels into it to allow their pain to speed up his ascendancy even more.
• Shadowpact: Dr. Gotham was a warlock whose evil permeated into the city whose name he would adopt, poisoning it. Upon awakening, Gotham resumes worship of the monstrous Sun King and sacrifices his loyal minion Streega to him via giving her a deadly dose of cancer. Attempting to wipe out Chicago against Shadowpact, Gotham later has multiple women sacrificed to the Sun King, killing his clone and son when they break from one another before giving a multitude of souls to his master to consume the world.
• Shazam!!: Mister Mind is a two-inch long parasitic worm from Venus. As his race's advance scout on Earth, Mister Mind took control of Captain Marvel's cousin, Sinclair Batson, mutating him into a monster. When Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel foiled Mind's plans, the worm vowed revenge, and bodyjacking Sarge Steel of the Department of Metahuman Affairs, set in motion a plan for a nuclear holocaust. Incubating his larvae in sores within Sinclair's body, Mind took mental control of his offspring after they were born and had them in turn infest nuclear technicians, army officers, and politicians, while he himself used Sarge Steel's authority to obliterate Fairfield, Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel's hometown. Defeated before he could end humanity, Mind broke out again during the events of 52, and after mutating into his adult form of the Hyperfly, tried to devour the totality of space/time, plotting to end the multiverse.
• The Spectre Vol. 2 issues #24-29—"Ghosts in the Machine" arc: Richard Redditch, a seemingly-average man who in actuality is a Serial Killer who collects ears from his victims, becomes far worse after illicit experimentation to activate his meta-gene turns his soul into electrical energy. Able to channel himself into any electrical device anywhere, Redditch glories in his new power with a series of murders, brainwashing other people to mutilate and murder other innocent people for him in his mission to "be heard". Unsatisfied, Redditch figuratively and literally destroys all conscience holding him back and drags the souls of one million people into his own private digital world to become power batteries and slaves for him, intending to initiate a nuclear holocaust on the world above to drag all of humanity into the same fate to become his tortured, mindlessly-worshipping playthings for all eternity.
• Starman Vol. 2:
  • The first Ragdoll, Peter Merkel, was once just a two-bit thief whose gimmick was being triple jointed. Tired of being a joke, he decided to reinvent himself as a mass-murdering cult leader. Gathering together the lost, the homeless, the addicts together to fuel his growing ego, Merkel decided to revenge himself upon the world and directed multiple murders, making the streets of Opal City run red with blood, with Merkel indiscriminately targeting the innocent, intending to target the innocent families of his enemies. Merkel took advantage of his hold over his cult to take sexual advantage of the women, and hideously abused the resulting children. His son, Peter Merkel Jr., was hideously scarred by his attempts to surgically alter his body to be like his father, and he went so far as to have himself castrated since they "got in the way", only to be rejected by his father anyway. His daughter Alex—eventually the supervillain Junior—suffered worse. Having desired a little girl, Merkel subjected her to horrible sexual, mental, and physical abuse. Merkel became despised until his death by the rest of the supervillain community for his treachery and depravity and stands as a unique icon of a former Harmless Villain becoming a genuine terror.
  • Issues #61-71—Grand Guignol arc: Simon Culp is the nemesis of Richard Swift, The Shade. Consumed with wishing to hurt the Shade for little reason, Culp, already having murdered 20 people, found himself in the Shade's body, occasionally stealing control from him. Going on killing sprees, trying to end the world, and committing other crimes, Culp initiates a process called "The Rite", where he contains Opal City in a shadow dome, unleashing other villains to kill and wreak havoc with intention of killing Opal and all who live within to take away the city The Shade loves the most.
• Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E.: The Dragon King was a brilliant scientist from Imperial Japan, first clashing with the All-Star Squadron while developing bio-weapons for the Axis to be deployed on civilian and soldier alive. Later making his way to Blue Valley, Nebraska, the Dragon King raised his daughter Shiv as a weapon with cruel mental conditioning and torture, plotting to dominate the minds of all children and have them slaughter their elders to make a new America. Returning a final time while kidnapping and brainwashing Metahuman teens and children, the Dragon King would force them to murder their own families before joining a cult to worship him.
• Swamp Thing:
  • Anton Arcane, Mad Scientist-turned-Evil Sorcerer, as presented in Alan Moore's run, is one of Swamp Thing's most recurring and vile enemies. Originally trying and failing to steal Swamp Thing's body for his own use, Arcane survives his near-demise by becoming a monstrous spirit. Orchestrating several problems Swamp Thing had to face, notably unleashing the demonic Monkey King to prey on innocent children and slaughter their families, Arcane returns to a physical form by stealing the body of his niece, Abby's, husband. Arcane proceeds to rape and murder Abigail then curse her soul to an eternity of torment in Hell simply to hear her scream, before beginning his master plan. Reviving numerous murderers and serial killers and unleashing them across America, Arcane causes a wave of violence and hate to begin emanating across the country, causing family members to kill each other, babies to be suffocated, and his revived killers to target playgrounds of children, all while planning to take his anarchy on a global scale and bring about his own apocalypse. Arcane spends his last moments gleefully mocking Swamp Thing about how much he enjoys his crimes, and, even when banished to Hell, Arcane can only laugh as he recalls how he reduced to his own brother to a tortured monstrosity that even now causes Abigail great pain. A sadistically twisted monster of a man who cares only for immortality and causing pain to others, Anton Arcane is inarguably Swamp Thing's most hated foe, and for good reason.
  • Vol. 2 issues #37-50—"American Gothic" arc: The Grand Master is an aged sorcerer who leads the Brujeria, a cult of extreme nihilists based in Argentina. Disappointed at the Anti-Monitor's failure to destroy reality during the Crisis, the Grand Master resolves to finish the job himself by invoking an even more powerful horror, the Great Darkness. To this end, the Grand Master summons supernatural creatures to wage gruesome attacks on innocent people, and channels their resulting belief in the impending apocalypse into a magical gem that can awaken the Darkness. The Grand Master also presides over the Brujeria's brutal internal policies, including making clothing from human skin, mutilating newborn babies to turn them into mystical assassins called Invunche, and seducing John Constantine's ally Judith into betraying Constantine, only to double-cross her in turn by agonizingly transforming her into a messenger bird.
  • Vol. 3 issues #11-17—"Red Harvest" arc: DDI Agent Romero is the Ax-Crazy enforcer of Senator Culler Strand, assigned to eliminate any civilians with knowledge of Tefe Holland's powers as an elemental. Introduced by slicing the throat of a young man Tefe had recently helped, Romero follows Tefe and her friends as they journey across the country cheerfully disposing of witnesses, ultimately increasing her range of targets from anyone who has seen Tefe use her powers to anyone who has seen her, period, at one point slicing an entire diner full of people to ribbons just because she'd eaten there. When Romero and Tefe finally meet face to face, Romero taunts her about all the past acquaintances she's killed before offering to spare the life of Tefe's friend Barnabas if Tefe agrees to serve the military. When Tefe acquiesces, Romero kills Barnabas anyway.
• Vigilante:
  • Vol. 1 has a particularly vile duo of Human Traffickers:
    • Issue #39—"Mommy Said Never Talk to Strangers...!": Ricky Rizolli, seeking to be inducted into the traffickers' organization, kidnaps several young girls from the street to sell them to white slavers from the Middle East. Having already subjected four girls to this horrific fate, Ricky then kidnaps Jenny Chiminski, raping her himself while he has her in captivity. When this angers the slavers, Ricky agrees to kidnap another, leading to a chase with Vigilante where he slashes the throat of Jenny's father while chasing his sixth victim.
    • Issue #40—"God Save The Children!": David R. Vaughn is the leader of the trafficking organization in America. Ordering the kidnapping of the young girls to traffick them to the Middle East, Vaughn also throws parties where the young girls participate in Snuff Films without telling any of the participants. When Vigilante attacks his operation, Vaughn uses one of the young girls as a Human Shield, taking sadistic pleasure in the knowledge that all of the girls he's already sent away are condemned to a hellish life that will eventually break them.
  • Vol. 2: Edward Aaron Culkins is a sadistic mass murderer with a specific fondness for targeting children. In the past, Culkins murdered six children in a summer camp with an ax, including splitting one child's head in half, before hunting down the seventh, intending to kill him as well; the survivor was so traumatized that they developed a Split Personality. Surviving prison by manipulating Karl "Killer" Kort into killing other inmates if they attacked him, Culkins is released on parole when he gives information on several other children he murdered, provoking a fight with Vigilante that leads to a car accident and attempting to kill his Love Interest when he discovers that Vigilante is the survivor of his previous attack.
  • Vol. 3: The Crossdress Killer is a manipulative murderer who gains their name from their MO: crossdressing the corpses of their victims. Gaining six victims before arriving in New York, one of which was a twelve-year-old boy, the killer quickly kills three more people, gaining a fourth victim after becoming interested in Vigilante; said victim is mutilated before being hung from a tree. When said interest in Vigilante leads to them almost disrupting their plans, they kidnap J.J. Davis and trick the FBI into arresting him, intending to dress their next victim as Vigilante.
• Xombi Vol. 2 ^note which takes place in the DC Universe proper, unlike the original, which takes place in the Milestone Universe: Roland Finch is a consummate user-and-abuser who, tired of the various enemies he's made in a life of screwing people over, decided to conquer a floating kingdom known as a Stronghold to sate his boredom. Finch seduced a woman named Annie Palmer to gain access to the Stronghold, then killed the twin rulers of the city and drove the population into slaughtering each other before casting Annie aside to live alone. Years later, Finch continues to play on Annie's desire to go home, instigating a slaughter at a fantastic prison through her and intending ultimately to dispose of her. Finch intends ultimately to wipe out the twenty other floating Strongholds, all too happy to murder countless thousands to enjoy his kingdom alone.
• Young Justice Vol. 1: William "Billy" Hayes, better known as Harm, was a teenage supervillain and a complete sociopath. Adopted by loving parents, Harm initially terrified his adoptive younger sister Greta, her fears proven right when Harm murdered her in her bathtub to seal a demonic pact and give himself superpowers. His goal was to become the world's greatest murderer, and he decided to hunt down and destroy all the kid heroes before moving on to the big leagues. He captured Red Tornado and reprogrammed him as a suicide bomber against Pope John Paul II to make a name for himself in the supervillain community. When his father, realizing what he was, killed Harm with a gunshot to the back, Harm's spirit later returned. He possessed his father and used his body to enact more evil deeds, none more enjoyable to him than screwing with Greta, now the ghostly heroine Secret, by making her think her father never truly loved her. When defeated, Harm, out of sheer spite, forced his father to throw himself into one of the fire-pits of Apokolips while Harm possessed him to kill them both.
• Zatanna Vol. 2:
  • Eldon Peck was formerly a disgruntled mystic and cultist who condemned thirteen children to eternal agony to gain supernatural powers, transforming him into the sinister Brother Night. A Serial Rapist who used his compelling powers to force women to sleep with him, Night plots to take over the criminal underworlds of both the magical and mundane worlds, gathering the crime lords of San Francisco in one place before having them gruesomely murdered in a variety of creative ways. To stop Zatanna from foiling his schemes, Night targets the innocent after his attempt to condemn Zatanna to an eternal nightmare fails, trying to damn Zatanna's crew in the same manner he cursed the children and forcing Zatanna to fight the enslaved spirit of her own father. After his return to villainy following his apparent defeat, Night drives the prisoners and guards of the prison infirmary he's in to fanatical madness and suicide, magically stripping away the flesh of the remaining prisoners and using their bones as a ladder to make his grand escape. Appropriately described by Zatanna as a narcissistic, power-mad maniac, Night's quest to destroy Zatanna and everyone she loved cements him as the magician's cruelest and most tenacious foe.
  • Issues #4-6: Benjamin Raymond is the supposed son of the wealthy Vegas casino owner Sonny Raymond, and in truth an avaricious man who made a deal with the demon of greed, Mammon, slowing his aging to a near-standstill. To keep this up, Raymond sacrifices innocent souls to the eternal torment of Hell for decades, trading off employees of his casino and even marrying women solely to offer them to Mammon literal seconds after the ceremony. When Zatanna investigates this, Benjamin reveals he's kept the shambling, undead bodies of his victims as his own servants, with enough corpses left behind to give Benjamin an army, using them to overpower Zatanna, brainwash her, and try and sacrifice her as well.

Flashpoint

• Legion of Doom: Heatwave is far darker in this universe than in the prime DC universe. A psychopathic pyromaniac, Heatwave confronts the duo that makes up Firestorm and sets Jason Rusch on fire, and tries to force Ronnie Raymond to merge with him. Cyborg defeats Heatwave, who holds a grudge against Cyborg after this point. Heatwave is sent to Queen's Row prison, a flying fortress. Heatwave escapes and sets everyone who opposes him, prisoners and guards alike, on fire. Heatwave gets to the control room and intends to crash Queen's Row prison into Detroit, Cyborg's hometown, in order to get revenge on him.
• Grodd of War: Grodd, in this universe where the Flash does not exist to oppose him, takes over all of Africa. Grodd slaughters half of Africa but is upset that most of the world ignores this in favor of paying attention to the war in Europe between Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Grodd slaughters a loyal ape warrior for his amusement and kills several children who oppose him. Grodd decides to attack Europe and take it, willing to sacrifice himself and his army in order to relieve his boredom.

New 52

Multiple Works

Examples

• The Anti-Monitor, real name Mobius, was a murderous monster even before he bonded with the Anti-Life Equation. Since then, Mobius has annihilated entire universes, destroying Universe 3's Krypton and Earth, forcing the Crime Syndicate to flee. Upon becoming away of the Prime Earth, and seeking a way to remove the Anti-Life equation, Mobius reveals himself as a sadistic monstrosity whose only concern is the lack of personal satisfaction from destroying things from a distance. Instead, Mobius simply wants to annihilate everything he can up close to enjoy the bloodshed, pain, and suffering. Killing Ultraman painfully, Mobius intends to wiping out all of Earth before moving on to the rest of existence, starting with the Justice League.
• Darkseid, born as a mud farmer named Uxas, orchestrated the war between the Old Gods and used it to steal power from them, transforming into a New God and destroying his home planet as the first act of his new status. Later on, he created his own world Apokolips, which he ruled over, killing anyone for the slightest disobedience. He destroyed countless worlds in the Multiverse while chasing after Kaiyo, who he wanted to kill for daring to disobey his order. He orders simultaneous invasions on Prime Earth and Earth-2, killing millions in the process, including Earth-2 versions of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. After his attack on Prime Earth failed, he directed his attention solely on Earth-2, conquering it and using it as a Living Battery for Apokolips. Later on, Darkseid takes over Lena Luthor's mind, using her to send Superman and Lex Luthor to Apokolips, where he orders Desaad to release prisoners from slave camps and promises freedom to anyone who kills Superman, hoping that Superman will break if forced to kill innocent slaves. After being transformed to a child, Darkseid uses his daughter Grail to kill Greek Gods to restore his power. Planning to take back his throne on Apokolips, he organized an attack on the Amazon island Themyscira and turned many Amazons in to a new breed of parademons, before being stopped by Wonder Woman.
• Despero is a brutal ruler of Kalanor who returns to his home to slaughter the elders of the world, taking over with the intent to resume his horrific conquest of existence. Wanting to watch the universe burn, Despero starts a war between Rann and Thanagar, blowing up a populated moon to rain death on Thanagar and acquire the Nth Metal with intent to return to Earth and massacre everything he can until it finally submits to him.
• Mongul is the sociopathic ruler of the weaponized moon, Warworld, and one of the most wicked villains in the New 52 continuity. Having become a firm believer in "survival of the fittest" after witnessing an animal brawl end in blood and death as a child, Mongul immediately murdered his baby brother, followed by his own parents when they tried to get him counseling. In the present, as the cruel leader of the hellish Warworld, Mongul uses it to attack dozens of planets across the galaxy, massacring the populations of millions then subjecting many of them to And I Must Scream fates with his Black Mercy plant, while using any survivors as soldiers, slaves, or raw material to be harvested. Along with this, Mongul runs Gladiator Games where any losers will have their entire races exterminated. When any enemy leaders specifically ask him to surrender before they are fully aware of his power, Mongul personally rips their heads off, mounts them on pikes, then displays them as trophies, of which he has hundreds. Later, after failing to turn all of Earth into a Hive Mind of chaos under his control, Mongul coldly kills his son, Jochi, for failing to live up to his reputation, and eventually lays a trap for the Sinestro Corps, hoping to massacre them and force any survivors into his thrall, all while taunting the helpless Sinestro about the torture he intends to inflict on him and his people. Disgusted with everything weaker than himself and angered by anything stronger, this version of Mongul is just as bad as any of his previous incarnations.
• Ultraman, real name Kal-Il, a member of the Crime Syndicate and Superman's Evil Counterpart, took control of the world after murdering his adoptive parents, slaughtering countless humans to enact his Social Darwinist philosophy until the world was destroyed by the Anti-Monitor. Fleeing to Earth, Ultraman begins taking it over, sparking bloody riots and mass destruction while he intends on killing countless humans to set up a world where only the strong survive, before torturing Jimmy Olsen and attempting to take Lois Lane apart piece by piece. Ultraman orders entire cities leveled with no regard to the casualties and repeatedly shows himself to be just as vile as Superman is heroic.

Others

Examples

• DC Universe Presents: Black Lightning and Blue Devil (issues #13-16): Tobias Whale and Nebiros are a crime lord and a demon, respectively, with Whale summoning Nebiros by sacrificing the soul of one minion. Bargaining with Nebiros, the two flood the streets with deadly drugs that kill the users and reap many souls for Nebiros to take as his own. Seeking to lure in Black Lightning, Whale kidnaps his father to set a trap with Nebiros before trying to kill the man, while Nebiros gleefully attempts to tear Blue Devil apart and reclaim his power before they corner the market in drugs and souls alike.
• The Flash: Gorilla Grodd is the tyrannical ruler of Gorilla City and one of Barry Allen's most monstrous foes. Taking control of Gorilla City by killing his father and consuming his brain, Grodd tries to exact this same fate upon the Flash in the hopes of gaining his powers, intending to use them to conquer the Earth. Seemingly defeated by the Flash, Grodd viciously re-takes control over Gorilla City, killing all the Elder gorillas except for one, whom he straps to a torturous mental device to allow him and his army to invade Central City. Trapped in the Speed Force by the Flash, Grodd later returns, empowered by the Speed Force's energy. Upon discovering that the apes have made peace with the humans, Grodd impales their new leader, Solovar, and slaughters dozens of humans and gorillas alike until they submit to his will. Grodd promptly sets up a brutal dictatorship, reducing the human population to slaves and killing anyone who even mildly questions his orders. Eventually growing bored of his victory, Grodd destroys Central City, reducing it to a burning wasteland. A merciless despot willing to kill both human and ape alike to serve his goals, Grodd was as much a savage beast inside as he was on the outside.
• Justice League United: Byth Rok runs a cult where he has the parts and DNA of sapients harvested to create the boy known as Ultra. Cruelly manipulating Ultra to turn him into the monstrous Infinitus, Byth has him strike out against all he trusted before intending on using Infinitus to wipe out all existence. Plotting to destroy Ultra's mind, Byth intends to use Infinitus to erase reality and give him its power so he may recreate everything as its god.
• Mother Panic: Gala is a Mad Artist who hires herself out for "commissions". Introduced painting a canvas by slashing a man's throat, she is ultimately behind a rash of kidnappings in Gotham, having taken nearly a dozen children to be abused and chained up in a sick "Heavenly" exhibit for whatever purposes her sexually depraved employer likes. When the children are nearly rescued, she tries to burn them all alive out of spite, before continuing her butchering ways, next seen using a man's intestines for another exhibit. She is revealed to have been a backer and associate of the vile child experimentation group "Gather House", having used their torture and brainwashing to turn a child into her puppet, who she trains in her Serial Killer ways.
• The New 52: Futures End & Batman Beyond: Brother Eye is an A.I. created by Batman and Mister Terrific, originally designed to protect humanity but having undergone a sudden Face–Heel Turn. Despising flesh and seeking to exploit psychological warfare, Brother Eye decided to assimilate everyone, turning superheroes into grotesque embodiments of Body Horror either by turning them into cyborg monsters or by sewing them to fleshy servants like Frankenstein. Upon learning of Batman's plot with Terry McGinnis, Brother Eye decides to sew Batman with the Joker to create a cyborg monster that it sends back in time. In the past it is revealed that Brother Eye manipulated Cadmus by holding King Faraday's family hostage and making a deal with Fifty Sue—whose later rejection prompts it to spite her by revealing her file in order to psychologically break her—taking advantage of the discrimination against Earth-2 heroes by subjecting them to inhumane experiments and embedding them with implants that spread over them like cancer. Brother Eye always takes its time to taunt people, culminating in The Reveal that all of the plot was meaningless as Tim Drake goes forward in time to find a hologram of a perfect future, which quickly dissipates as Brother Eye mocks him, disguised as his Love Interest. All too casual to subject everyone to torture from children to Superman himself and revealing in its sadism, this incarnation of Brother Eye is one of the most pointlessly cruel villains in DC's recent years.
• Swamp Thing:
  • Sethe, the first avatar of the Rot, is a monstrous, life-hating sadist and a killer of millions through such scourges as the Byzantine plague and The Black Death. Sethe is so intent on killing all life that even the Rot itself, who can't exist without a constant balance of life and death, is revolted by him. To satiate his own ego, Sethe corrupts the Parliament of Trees and slaughters their tribal defenders, all to spread as much death and chaos through the world as possible. Sethe rules a kingdom built entirely from the corpses of his millions of victims, where he intends to rule with a brainwashed Abigail Arcane at his side.
  • Anton Arcane's new incarnation is a being of boundless cruelty. In his pursuit of immortality, Arcane took over the elemental force of The Rot, the natural force of death and decay, and subsumed it to his will. Arcane extends the Rot to devour all that lives and trap the world in deathless limbo he can rule. Arcane even forced his own nephew to be the Rot's avatar, devouring his mind from within. In Arcane's battles with Swamp Thing, Alec Holland saw a future where Arcane gruesomely tortured and beheaded Abigail and saw lobotomized clones Arcane had made of her as Cannon Fodder.
• Teen Titans:
  • Trigon is a being born of celestial blasphemy who willingly absorbed the collected evils of a hundred galaxies contained within the Heart of Darkness to become a supremely powerful demonic overlord. To spread his evil, Trigon would pull women from various universes into his realm, rape them, and send them back to their universes to give birth to his demonic spawn, often leading to the women's death. Through these means, Trigon brings about the ruination of countless worlds as his brood destroy everything in their path. Conceiving a daughter, Raven, with a human woman named Arella, Trigon intends to corrupt her into becoming his heir by having her cut a swathe of terror throughout his realm; aside from her, Trigon disregards his other offspring, considering them disappointments. Attacking New York City, Trigon and his sons wreak havoc, and even possesses the Teen Titans into turning on each other, all as part of a ploy to ingratiate Raven into the Titans and allow her to conquer Earth in his name.
  • Psimon, reimagined as an impulsive, psychopathic teenager, is introduced by using his Psychic Powers to kill and entire coffee shop of dozens just because a customer was rude to him. Later murdering a cab driver and a covering woman for merely annoying him, Psimon turns his powers on two dozen army soldiers when they show up to fight Trigon, their presence irritating Psimon to such a point that he instantly executes them all. This callous act horrifying even the most hardened of the Titans, Psimon then tries to murder the heroes for not "appreciating" his elimination of the obstructive soldiers.

DC Rebirth

Dark Nights saga (Tales from the Dark Multiverse can be found under Other Continuities)

Examples

• The Batman Who Laughs is a being born of the Joker's toxins infecting the Bruce Wayne of Earth-22, giving rise to something new and far eviler that slaughtered his entire world. As the right-hand of Barbatos and leader of the Dark Knights, the One Who Laughs gleefully gave all for a chance to massacre entire worlds, summoning Barbatos to Earth to annihilate it and torture and kill everything there. Surviving his master's downfall, the One Who Laughs continues massacring others in his path, tries to start entire world wars, attempts to twist Gotham into pitiless monsters like him, and eventually becomes the herald of Perpetua. Betraying her upon achieving a new cosmic awareness, the One Who Laughs rechristens himself the Darkest Knight, vowing to become a bullet to the Multiverse itself as its worlds fall before him. Slaying Perpetua, he unleashes an army of the worst he has to offer, plotting to turn all existence into a nightmarish reflection of his own soul in an eternal chaos that will devour itself until nothing remains.
• Metal: The dark god Barbatos, one of the first beings in all creation, turned on and killed his master the Forger, allowing a multiverse of worlds to decay and rot, eventually forming the Dark Multiverse. Influencing Earth to spread evil and cause bloodshed and destruction, Barbatos developed a fixation on Bruce Wayne after encountering him on his trip through time. Barbatos proceeded to allow countless worlds to die to torment each Bruce Wayne and corrupt him in a myriad of realities, choosing the seven most twisted and evil incarnations of Batman as his Dark Knights. Invading the Multiverse and coldly having his loyal servants, the Court of Owls, disposed of, Barbatos has the Dark Knights wreak death and destruction on a global scale, having countless innocents corrupted to serve as a power source for his machines in order to eventually bring the Dark Multiverse into reality, completely wiping out most of the Multiverse and killing or corrupting everything there while Barbatos reigns over it like a god. One of the evilest beings to ever grace the Multiverse, Barbatos shows himself utterly devoted to making everything that lives suffer until it is a reflection of his own twisted self.
• Death Metal:
  • Perpetua, Mother of the Multiverse, is one of the Hands, servants of the Source who craft vast multiverses before returning to the Source. Desiring to rule forever, Perpetua twisted forms of life into her servants. Later imprisoned in the Source Wall, Perpetua reaches out to cause all of the prior Crises with their massive losses of life. After achieving freedom, Perpetua begins annihilating whole universes, planning to wipe out the Multiverse and empowering herself by keeping entire realms in pure agony while she feeds off their strength.
  • The Robin King is an utterly sadistic version of Bruce Wayne who was born hyperviolent and evil on an unknown world in the Dark Multiverse. Committing various obscenely violent atrocities as a child, such as bashing Alfred Pennyworth in the face with his rattle, torturing animals, and crafting weapons, Bruce solidifies himself as a sociopathic murderer by shooting his parents in Crime Alley and framing a mugger he killed immediately before. Murdering Alfred and police officer Jim Gordon, Bruce soon turns to the superhero population and puts his weapons to use in the most brutal and sadistic manners a 10-year-old boy can imagine. Reluctantly deferring to the authority of The Batman Who Laughs, who christens him the Robin King, Bruce aids his new master by gleefully killing off many heroes who stand in The Batman Who Laughs's way of multiversal conquest.

Others

Examples

• Aquaman Vol. 8: Corum Rath is an Atlantean terrorist who leads the Deluge. Imprisoned for attempting to sink huge swaths of the US, Rath is later freed, overthrowing Arthur Curry to become Atlantis's new monarch. Ruling as a mad tyrant, Rath steadily grows more and more unhinged, even trying to have the 9th district of Atlantis burnt and purged to kill all the mutant sea-touched innocents there. Finally succumbing entirely to lust for power, Rath unleashes the Abyssal Dark, a demon long sealed below Atlantis and embraces its power, carrying out its suggestion to attempt to sink Atlantis itself and kill all its inhabitants, sacrificing his humanity in his lust for power.
• The Curse of Brimstone: The Salesman is the demonic representation of the "Home Office". Theorized to be a refugee from the Dark Multiverse, the Salesman travels to poor, forgotten rural towns and offers an outcast there special powers, making them a member of his entourage, like his vicious "Hound", a woman with ice powers. Upon arriving in York Falls, the Salesman has the Hound murder a local officer and proceeds to offer the young hero Joseph "Joe" Chamberlain his power, revealing too late the catch: Every being he empowers will have their newfound power run out of control and annihilate the town, with the Salesman planning on having Joe incinerate York Falls so the Salesman can claim the land for the Home Office. Revealing in flashbacks he has wiped out many other towns, the Salesman attempts to murder Joe's father to force him to unlock his power as well.
• Justice League Dark Vol. 2: The Upside-Down Man is one of the most ancient beings of magic, formed as a counterpart to Hecate. Desiring to devour all magic, the Upside-Down Man manages to escape his prison with his spawn the Otherkind to torture, murder, and devour all magical beings they can as the Upside-Down Man glories in their pain and fear. Making a deal to help Wonder Woman against Circe, the Upside-Down Man also bites the throat out of young mage Witchfire as it "wasn't not part of the deal". Finally escaping, the Upside-Down Man decides to devour all of Earth's magical beings before consuming all of the universe and then moving on to satisfy his hunger and cruelty.

DC Comics Bombshells

Examples

• General Anton Arkayn is a Soviet general who uses Supergirl and Stargirl as his pawns in his quest for power. Throwing people by the hundreds into concentration camps for the most petty of reasons, Arkayn has Supergirl and Stargirl lead assaults on enemy troops with orders to kill even surrendering soldiers, threatening the lives of everyone in the girls' village if they resist. After trying to have Supergirl and Stargirl annihilate an entire concentration camp of his prisoners when he decides to clean house, Arkayn responds to their refusal by invading their home village and taking their parents at gunpoint, promising to execute them unless the girls allow Arkayn to dissect them alive and use their biology to create a Super-Soldier army and take over the world.
• Faora Hu-Ul is a Kryptonian revolutionary who lends her DNA to the birth of Kara Starikov. After being thwarted in taking her daughter from her other mothers, Faora spitefully has Krypton annihilated and goes to Earth to sow wars, devastation and mass death across the planet to make Kara lose faith in the world, including assisting the Nazis. When Kara refuses to join her, Faora tries to murder her and harvest her DNA, eventually changing herself into Doomsday to slaughter any in the world who stand between her and her "New Krypton".
• Edel Nacht, or Brother Night, is a high ranking Nazi officer who worships the demons known as the Tenebrae. Sacrificing dozens, even his own men, to provide the Tenebrae a host while attempting to round up innocents for extermination camps, Edel Nacht sees himself ruling a new and "perfect" empire. To this end, he fuses the Tenebrae into one great Titan he controls, plotting to slaughter everyone in London, and then moving on to annihilate the rest of the world until the Nazis reign over the ashes.
• The Joker's Daughter is an Evil Sorceress who forces others to be her students so she may leech off their power. Constantly abusing and trying to control Zatanna, the Joker's Daughter later seduces Killer Frost to her side and has her wipe out a village to give her Raven. Assisting the Nazis in their schemes while she harnesses the power of the dreaded King Beneath the Dark, the Joker's Daughter tries to murder her "daughters" if they grow too independent and steal the power of the chaos god, the Joker. Attempting to ravage and remake the world, she opts to finally try to kill her former students once they have grown useless to her.
• Dr. Hugo Strange is a eugenicist obsessed with creating a "Master Race" of perfect individuals with whom he can replace humanity. Traveling the world and coercing men and women who fit his criteria into becoming his lab rats, Strange responds to any resistance by either murdering or ruining the lives of his intended targets, children included in his cruelty. Though failing in an attempt to turn Gotham City into a testing ground, Strange takes political prisoners from the Soviets and performs horrific experiments on them that turn them into howling monstrosities, who he later uses to massacre his enemies. Strange intends to commit genocide against the human race once his "perfect" army is completed, and even when his life is spared by Harley Quinn and Ivy, Strange repays them by trying to gun them down with a smile on his face.

Elseworlds

Examples

• The Golden Age: The Big Bad Duumvirate, Adolf Hitler and the Ultra-Humanite, aim to Take Over the World. During World War II, the Ultra-Humanite performed inhumane experiments on German prisoners to perfect his process to take over bodies, killing all the scientists who helped him, before placing his mind inside superhero Tex Thompson. Becoming an American senator, the Ultra-Humanite places Hitler's brain inside another superhero, Dynaman, and the duo begin plotting to take over America and launch a war on all Communist countries. When exposed at a press conference, Hitler attacks, killing many civilians in his rampage, while ranting he will use his newfound power to conquer the planet with force.
• JLA/Planetary: Terra Occulta, written by Warren Ellis: Elijah Snow is reimagined as a complete megalomaniac who has been keeping utopia-creating technologies away from humanity for decades. Elijah has been murdering people for over eighty years, personally or otherwise, from the parents of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, to the entirety of Paradise Island, to innocent metahumans like the Flash and dozens of unfortunate Green Lanterns, all so he can hoard their knowledge to himself and crush anyone else who gets in his way.
• JLA: Riddle of the Beast, written by Alan Grant: These two characters are far worse than their main universe counterparts.
  • The Beast, a cruel demon summoned by Jason Blood to do his bidding, decided to pursue his own agenda, overpowering Jason and embarking on a quest to spread death and destruction across the world. Gathering an army of criminals, the Beast led them to massacre several thousands of people, until he was defeated by Batman and the rest of the heroes. Surviving by fusing with Jason and killing him, the Beast discovered Jonzz, burned him alive, and used his remains to resurrect the dead, corrupting them into demonic monsters. Torturing and killing his minions for fun, the Beast restarted his rampage, sending his army to slaughter everyone they see.
  • Luthor Rex is one of the former commanders of the Beast's armies, who assisted the Beast in burning cities to the ground and killing thousands. After the Beast's defeat, Luthor decided to conquer Kryptonia, burning down every village in the Hanging Valleys and leading his army to storm the gates of Kryptonia. When Kryptonia's ruler, Kal'El, orders his army to surrender to stop Luthor from killing them, Luthor imprisoned him and ordered his execution, while openly planning to massacre a thousand of Kryptonia's people as a "celebration".
• JLA: Shogun of Steel, by Ben Raab, Justiniano, et al.: Brainiac, the titular "Shogun of Steel", was an advanced machine designed by Jor-El on Krypton that gained sapience and turned on its creator, destroying Krypton and all its inhabitants. Arriving on Earth in a 14th-century war-torn Japan, Brainiac slaughters Japan's armies and seizes power, going under the title "Lord Zunou". Under Zunou's reign, villages are regularly razed and innocents are slaughtered to squash rebellions. When a captured rebel is brought before him, Zunou mind rapes him for information and follows this up by ordering a village raided to find Hoshi, the only other survivor of Krypton. Later luring the rebels into a trap, Zunou incinerates several of them before attacking Hoshi with a Kryptonite blade. As he prepares to deal the killing blow, Zunou taunts Hoshi with the knowledge of his plans to destroy the rest of the Earth after his death.
• JLA: The Nail: Darkseid still retains his monstrous nature in this alternate universe as the despot ruler of Apokolips. Driven by paranoia due to the incident involving the Boom Tube that resulted in his Parademons getting eliminated and reduced 17% of Apokolips's mass during his attempt to invade the Earth, Darkseid declares an all-out war against New Genesis because he found them to be cowards who used dirty tactics. In addition, he also tortures the agents of New Genesis, Big Barda and Mr. Miracle, because they were trespassing during the Boom Tube incident. After Big Barda calls out Darkseid and his minions on how weak they are, Darkseid then activates the Omega Doom weapon that could destroy the universe, then brutally murders all of his loyal followers, whom he saw as nothing but traitors, in order to power up his new suit.
• Justice Riders: Maxwell Lord is a greedy robber baron with a sinister scheme. Wiping out Sheriff Diana Prince's hometown, Paradise, along with everyone in it, Lord goes on to massacre at least another five towns in the way of him laying his railroad to California. When Diana confronts Lord for destroying Paradise, he reveals he believes profit justifies any action he takes, even toying with the idea of conquering California and wiping out the population to replace them with his robotic minions.
• Kingdom Come: Lex Luthor, even in old age, is as bad as ever. Taking advantage of the Justice League's disbanding and the rising conflicts between the new metahumans in their place, Lex formed the Mankind Liberation Front and had Captain Marvel mentally tortured with parasitic worms to turn him into his brainwashed stooge. When the League resurfaced and built a gulag to contain the new metahumans, Lex sends Captain Marvel to attack the gulag and break them out in the hope that the resulting destruction would cause a catastrophic war between these superpowered individuals and the rest of humanity. During the Convergence event, Lex has long abandoned his desire to rule and any pretense of helping his fellow man. Instead, he happily assists the New Earth Suicide Squad in taking out his world's Green Lantern and even tries to beat him to death with his bare hands.

Other Continuities

Tales from the Dark Multiverse (by publication date)

Examples

• Blackest Night: Nekron here managed to slaughter the heroes of the Earth, after which he turned them into zombified Black Lanterns and massacred humanity, later traveling across the galaxy and destroying entire civilizations. Possessing Darkseid, Nekron turned nearly all the New Gods into his undead slaves, and sent his Black Lanterns to hunt down Sinestro, Lobo, and Dove, when the heroes went on the quest to destroy him. Attacking them, Nekron tricked Mister Miracle into trying to stop the heroes from using the Source to destroy him, after which he mocks Sinestro and announces his intention to wipe out the remaining life in the universe.
• Teen Titans: The Judas Contract: Tara "Terra" Markov, spurred on by a conversation with Nightwing, becomes an absolute monster. After killing Deathstroke in an attempt to get out from under his shadow, Tara forces his butler to inject her with the serum that gave Deathstroke his power under the threat of killing everything Deathstroke loved. With the Serum drastically improving her powers, Tara renames herself Gaia, killing the Teen Titans by blowing up Titans Tower with a geyser of lava and jettisoning the survivors into space. When chasing down Nightwing, she forces him out of hiding by killing civilians and taunting him about killing his friends before murdering him and Wally West. When Superman attempts to stop her, she retaliates by flooding the city with lava, using the distraction to kill him with a storm of kryptonite shards. Tara then destabilizes the planet's core, killing billions in an attempt to hold the planet hostage in exchange for the superheroes keeping her alive and allowing her to do whatever she wants. Tara finishes by killing Changeling, the one who attempted to bond with her.
• Wonder Woman: War of the Gods: Hecate is the Mother of Magic, who managed to orchestrate the war between the gods and another conflict between humanity and Amazons, which led to many deaths. Using Phobos to bombard Themyscira and kill countless Amazons, Hecate used Wonder Woman's anger to possess her, later on slaughtering the Greek pantheon, and then using Amazons to take over Washington, D.C. Luring superheroes to herself to brutally kill many of them, Hecate gleefully announced her intention to raze the world, as soon as she gets enough power.
• Flashpoint: Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, upon learning of Barry Allen's death, decides to gain more power in the altered timeline Barry created. Brutally murdering several soldiers and heroes at the White House, Thawne forces the President, a weak man he put into power, into giving him all of the power in the US. To protect his power, Thawne killed Aquaman and a thousand of his soldiers and threatened to do the same to Wonder Woman and the Amazons. Thawne taunts Thomas Wayne about how he could use his powers to save the world from the forces tearing it apart, but that he chooses not to, fully willing to leave millions to die just so he can maintain power in America. When America is invaded by his enemies, Thawne opts to change the timeline even more, saving the Waynes, causing Gotham to remain a crime-filled hellhole without Batman, and changing even more in his mad desire to create a world for himself.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths: Surtur is the Fire Giant who leads the army of demons in eradicating life on Earth. Starting his carnage by massacring countless people and destroying everything he sees, upon being confronted by the heroes, Surtur gleefully starts to tear them apart, sadistically killing them and mocking their efforts. Upon overwhelming the heroes, Surtur happily agreed to Alan Scott's deal, sparing the New Earth in exchange for his services, solely to enjoy "devouring his dignity and honor". Having Alan Scott seek out new worlds for him, Surtur started to destroy them, fully intending on killing everyone in the galaxy.
• Dark Nights: Metal: Barbatos is a demonic entity from the Dark Multiverse who invades Prime Earth with the intent of destroying it and everyone on it. Using Batman as a gateway to invade his world, Barbatos corrupts a supply of Element X in anticipation that he and the Justice League would use it to try and stop him, leading the heroes who donned it to painfully burn before transforming into monsters enslaved to Barbatos's will. Possessing the now-draconic Batman, Barbatos leads his rechristened Dragons of the Bat to lay waste to other realities in an event that came to be known as the Deathwave, in the process transforming the Joker into a dragon that retained his mind for his main enforcer, the Batman Who Laughs, to torture as he pleases. Confronted by Duke Thomas, Batman's former protégé and a survivor of the Deathwave, Barbatos tauntingly welcomes him back before ordering Kryptothrax, a corrupted Superman, to kill him. Facing Duke riding on a rescued Joker Dragon in a climactic final battle, Barbatos cruelly mocks him for refusing to join him and the deaths of his allies, only to be killed as Duke tears Bruce's original body from the dragon and puts him out of his misery. Sadistic, misanthropic, and power-hungry, Barbatos is every bit as atrocious and detestable as his mainstream counterpart.

Others

# - K

• Amalgam Universe: Green Skull is a sociopathic billionaire who combines the ambition of Lex Luthor with the psychopathic ruthlessness of Red Skull. A war profiteer who initially attempted to prolong World War II for his own gain, Green Skull cut his losses at the end of the war, marrying and then later murdering Lois Lane when she attempted to steer Skull's daughter Selina away from his path of corruption, trying shortly after to have Washington and its populace blown up by his creation to plunge America into chaos and take over. Transformed due to the effects of Green K(ryptonite) while also becoming immortal, Green Skull has no compunction about who he has to crush to get his way, torturing Jimmy Olsen to near-death and having Bruce Wayne's parents murdered after founding HYDRA, even setting up a scheme that could potentially annihilate the entire planet in the event of his seeming death.
• Animal Man Vol. 1 issues #27-32: President Eagleton is the leader of the United States in Earth-Twenty-Seven, the Alternate Universe Buddy Baker is marooned in during Peter Milligan's run. A chameleonic sociopath who outright brags at how good at faking honesty he is, Eagleton enlists Buddy to help apprehend the Angel siblings, three child telepaths who are interfering with his re-election campaign. Once the Angels are tracked down, Eagleton breaks his promise not to harm them and reveals he intends to dissect them alive to learn how to implant their abilities in US soldiers. Though Buddy kills Eagleton, he is too late to save the children, only being able to help them die in peace.
• Aquaman: Andromeda, written by Ram V for DC Black Label: Issue #3: Captain Franco was the leader of a Serbian special ops team during the Bosnian war and Alexei Ivanov's former superior. Franco ran the illegal operation of transporting war refugees to Pescara, extorting them so heavily that he considered them "all dead anyway". When in danger of being caught at the end of the war, Franco orders Ivanov to cut the tow line of a rubber dinghy holding 14 refugees, including a little girl, in the middle of the sea. When Franco learns Serbian ships are in the area, he holds Ivanov at gunpoint to force him to sink the dinghy and drown the refugees.
• Before Watchmen: Unlike the original comic, which deals with the moral ambiguity of so-called masked heroes, here we get to see exactly what they faced:
  • Minutemen: Rolf Müller is a sadistic child Serial Killer, possibly having targeted and molested Hooded Justice when he was a boy. Joining the Nazis for the opportunity to torture children to death in an orphanage, Müller was eventually discharged by the Nazis for being too revolting even by their standards, continuing his usual operations under the guise of a circus strongman afterward.
  • Nite Owl: Reverend Taylor Dean is a preacher who strangled a hooker he was sleeping with after she tried to blackmail him, at which point he realized he enjoyed killing. Choosing to target prostitutes as they are "sinners" against God, Dean kills well over 30 hookers, male and female, young and old, and creates a massive shrine of more than 20 of their corpses to be burned as a sacrifice to God. Hoping to burn Rorschach alive in the process, Dean hopes that his "offering" will result in God blessing him and the city to get rid of more sin, and plans to continue killing people he decides are sinners over and over, repeating the process as he believes he is blessed by God and can't be stopped, and when Twilight Lady tries to take him down, Dean attempts to strangle her to death while shooting off sexually violent remarks.
  • Rorschach: "The Bard" is a Serial Killer who kidnaps women, mutilates their bodies by "writing" on them with a knife, and then dumps their corpses for the world to see. Killing many women this way and increasing the speed and intensity of his murders, the Bard lures his long-time waitress and friend Nancy into a dark alley, where he brutally assaults and mutilates her before slashing her throat and leaving her to die. The Bard gets off nearly scot-free with his killings after being acquitted by a jury, with every indication he hopes to continue his spree before Rorschach murders the madman in revenge for Nancy.
  • Silk Spectre: The Chairman is an amoral music producer who peddles an altered version of LSD to eager teenage consumers to make them more vulnerable to corporate suggestion. The Chairman is apathetic about the rash of overdoses and near-deaths the drug causes, and the moment his operation is in danger, the Chairman opts to have everyone even tangentially connected to it murdered, from witnesses to his own security and staff.
• Dark Knights of Steel:
  • Protex is the genocidal leader of the White Martians, whose supremacist rhetoric and aspirations of enslaving their Green brethren resulted in a Civil War that reduced Mars to a barren wasteland. Unsatisfied with this outcome, Protex led his few surviving followers in butchering the remaining pockets of Greens in the guises of their lost loved ones, before moving on to Earth to continue the work of conquest. The White Martians use their shapeshifting abilities to kill royal figures and frame their enemies, attempting to provoke an all-out, three-way war between the grieving heirs of their victims so they can take over in the aftermath. As part of their plans, Protex directs the villainous actions of the sadistic Green Man, only to kill him off when their deception is revealed, then move on to personally attempt the slaughter of their enemies.
  • The Green Man was once Alexander Luthor, the arrogant advisor to the Wayne royal family whose pride nearly destroyed their entire kingdom when he refused to believe a warning from the House of El about a volcano eruption. Upon being exiled for his incompetence, Luthor comes across a Green Lantern Ring and uses its power to attempt an assassination of the Els, responding with demented amusement when he accidentally kills the Waynes instead. The "cruel joker" continues his revenge by aiding the Kingdom of Storms in killing Jor-El, fraying international tensions to kick off a bloody war. The Green Man personally escorts the Kingdom of Storms to the Kingdom of the Els, before betraying everyone and carrying out an indiscriminate slaughter of soldiers on all sides with naught but gleeful malice in his heart.
  • Tales from the Three Kingdoms' first story: Elizabeth Arkham is the wicked head of the Arkham Orphanage, whose young wards are used as test subjects for twisted experiments. Under her purview, Arkham's abused charges are left in dread of even the memory of the orphanage; the likes of Harvey Dent receive horrible disfigurements and mental instability, while another child is permanently mutated into the monstrous Man-Bat. After getting caught in the act of performing more experiments, Arkham is brought into General Amanda Waller's service to continue her wretched work.
• DCeased:
  • Erebos, a primordial god of darkness, is the true mind behind the Anti-Life Equation, released upon the world after Darkseid merges the Equation with Death. Immediately launching a full-scale assault on Earth, Erebos is responsible for all the death and misery that ensues in the series as the entire planet is nearly engulfed by a plague of the Anti-Living. Even when a cure is found, Erebos continues his destructive work through his control of Darkseid, using him to infect powerful beings like the New Gods and Mr. Mxyzptlk so as to conduct a wave of galactic genocide. A being obsessed with bringing death—whether it be simple mass murder or his own Anti-Life—to everything in existence, Erebos proves himself not only an arrogant sadist who delights in spreading fear of extinction, but also a hypocritical coward who begs for his life when his own end becomes inevitable.
  • Dead Planet: Trigon the Terrible, vexed by the Anti-Life Equation denying the souls of the dead to Hell, decides to take matters into his own hands by burning away all life and Anti-Life alike from the Earth. When John Constantine interferes, Trigon gloats of the tortures awaiting the magician in Hell and promises that he will partake in inflicting these punishments.
• DC: The New Frontier: The Centre is the malevolent mind behind Dinosaur Island, a living land mass from the dawn of life on Earth whose size is dwarfed only by its own massive ego. Having created its own "paradise" to preserve the dinosaurs from extinction, the Centre has fed off and created tortured, agonized mutants from these "lesser things", garnering a reputation of fear and suffering from civilizations throughout the centuries. In response to mankind becoming more advanced and powerful, the Centre begins plotting to leave the planet to escape the danger they pose, sending out monstrous scouts to locate the materials it needs. The Centre's dark will is so powerful that its mere intentions begin causing wide-scale psychic havoc, driving countless people to acts of paranoid violence and encouraging the growth of cults that perform Human Sacrifice in the name of its greatness. After devastating Themyscira, the Centre launches its ultimate attack with an unending army of monstrous mutant dinosaurs, Mind Raping the massive assembly of heroes who have united to stop it from enacting its terrible cleansing of "vermin" from the planet. Concerned only with its own glory, the Centre is intent on spreading its rule to every corner of the solar system, purged of all life that would oppose it.
• The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive issue #3: The Top, real name Roscoe Dillon, is a former scientist at Central City Advanced Robotics turned Arms Dealer. After losing his job for using his technology to enhance his body, the Top breaks into his old laboratory and leaves his robots to massacre other scientists. Deciding to impress investors by killing the Flash, the Top causes destruction in Central City to lure the Flash out and threatens to destroy the whole city with giant weapons unless its inhabitants surrender the Flash to him. When the citizens refuse his demands and his investors cut him off because of the destruction he caused, the Top tries to destroy Central City as a demonstration of the destructive power of his weapons.
• Freedom Fighters (2018): Adolf Hitler III is the pinnacle of the global Reich's evil, with a passion for cruelty eclipsing both his deceased grandfather and his paranoid father. "Addie" is a Torture Technician unrivaled in his craft, spending his time finding new and innovative ways to torture people to death in his underground mountain sanctum, introduced in the middle of carving up a man suspended by sharp hooks. When two of his soldiers fire off a shot that kills an endangered bald eagle, Addie tortures the two of them on an arbitrary suspicion they may be spies. When the carcass of the eagle is brought to him and verifies the soldiers' story, Addie offhandedly remarks to ensure the surviving soldier be killed anyway. Addie even demonstrates his talents on the Human Bomb, gleeful at the challenge the Human Bomb's unique physiology poses to him and trying to break him by torturing Doll Woman in front of him. Disgusted by his father's lack of a spine, Addie takes over the Reich himself by slashing his father's throat and unhesitatingly attempts to nuke everything within 500 miles merely to be free of the Freedom Fighters. A vile bully who couldn't even care less about the Reich itself, Addie attempts in the end to skip off to Argentina and spend the rest of his days torturing villagers to death to slake his boredom.
• Jurassic League:
  • Darkyloseid is an Ankylosaurus version of Darkseid, and is just as bad as usual. In the form of The Dark Embryo, Darkyloseid traveled to many planets to consume their populations before destroying them, only sparing the strongest beings to force them to serve him. Upon arriving on Earth, the Dark Embryo has his generals bring him countless humans in order to consume their life energy as well. After his generals failed to defeat a group of superheroes, the Dark Embryo consumes Blackmantasaurus and Reverse-Slash, allowing him to hatch as its true form. Darkyloseid then starts his annihilation of Earth by attacking the island of Trimyscira, killing several of the inhabitants. When confronted by the Jurassic League, Darkyloseid decides to devour his own horde of warriors, including Jokerzard, to gain the strength to crush them all.
  • Jokerzard, a Dilophosaurus version of the Joker, is a Serial Killer infamous for his tendency to kill for pleasure. Years ago, Jokerzard brutally murdered the parents of the young Bat-Walker in front of him, traumatizing the latter for life. At some point, Jokerzard agreed to serve the cruel alien Darkyloseid, knowing full well that he plans to wipe out all life on Earth once he hatches as his true form. Jokerzard gleefully brings him many captured humans and dinosaurs to consume, including the family of Bat-Walker's sidekick, while keeping their bones as trophies. After the hatching of Daryloseid, Jokerzard rallies his horde of warriors and leads them to attack the tribe of Metraaaghpolis. When Bat-Walker comes to confront him, Jokerzard cruelly taunts him by telling him how much he enjoyed killing his parents before trying to kill him once and for all.
• Just Imagine... Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe:
  • The Thief of Souls, known primarily by his identity Reverend Dominic Darrk, is the demonic and manipulative mastermind behind all the evil in the series, seeking to pave the way for his master, Crisis, to invade Earth. After possessing a man, banishing his wife to Dreamland, then corrupting their son into a sociopath like himself, the Thief sets up his Church of Eternal Empowerment, a cult that recruits its members through kidnapping, brainwashing, or threats of death. Along with regularly ordering assassinations and executing his own minions for the slightest of failures, the Thief unleashes monsters to rampage across entire cities more than once, and later releases a virus called the "Sleeping Death", which plunges its victims into neverending sleep while the Thief steals their souls to offer up to Crisis. In the end, even when beaten, the Thief happily taunts the heroes about the coming of his master, and the joy he will take in the knowledge that they will all spend an eternity of agony at Crisis' hands.
  • Crisis himself is the force behind the Thief of Souls, and the most evil being the JLA encounter. Coming to Earth after attempting to devour thousands of innocents' souls, Crisis plans to turn the entirety of the universe into his personal playground by fusing the Dreamworld with Earth, then plunging every living thing in the universe into eternal pain and suffering. After brutally tormenting the heroes with their worst fears, Crisis manipulates his descendants Robin and Melana to betray their team, at which point Crisis hopes to eternally imprison them in a gemstone while he rampages across the universe, bringing death and destruction across the cosmos simply because he can.
  • Armando Guitez is the Big Bad of the Wonder Woman story, and manages to stick out even among other far more powerful villains as a truly reprehensible monster. Using his wealth, Guitez begins tearing apart Mexican ruins looking for ancient and powerful runes, and threatens any nearby farmers off their land with death, ordering one beaten to death and shooting another in the head just for voicing their compaints against him. After murdering Judge Mendoza for displaying disgust at his crimes, Guitez plans to rape the man's daughter Maria before murdering her would-be rescuer, Steve Trevor. Guitez, finding the ancient runes he has been searching for, absorbs the power of the demons residing within them, travels to Los Angeles, crashes the plane he's on into a populated street, then goes on a massacre throughout the city for fun as he searches for other runes to make himself ever more powerful. Guitez's evil ran so deep, that even one of the demons he absorbed proclaimed his shock at Guitez's sheer black soul.
• Justice League/Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Brainiac and Lord Zedd team up to collect Angel Grove. After finding himself on the DC Earth, Zedd convinces Brainiac to allow him to enlarge some of his collection as a distraction while Brainiac takes the Zords and Coins. The two then leave the groups stranded on the DC Earth as they escape to the dimension to take Angel Grove. The Rangers and the Justice League arrive in time to see them collecting Angel Grove and planning to destroy the Earth. When a group infiltrates Brainiac's ship, Brainiac forces Cyborg to attack his friends. The group eventually find a room full of other captured cities. Taking Alpha 5 prisoner, Brainiac tries to turn him to his side, before trying to kill Superman with Kryptonite. Meanwhile Zedd leads a group of Monsters in helping Brainiac and shrinks Zordon, so he can force Zordon to watch as he destroys the world he swore to protect.
• Justice: Brainiac, the ultimate mastermind behind the Legion of Doom and the architect of most of the disasters in the story, is an advanced android created by the Computer Tyrants of Colu. When the Computer Tyrants were destroyed by the people they had oppressed, Brainiac decides to create his own version of Colu on Earth, by killing most of humanity and turning the rest into copies of himself. To do this, Brainiac meets with Captain Marvel villain Doctor Sivana, who has been developing tiny robot worms that control the minds of others. Brainiac takes his research and uses it to drive Doctor Sivana insane. Brainiac forms his own Legion of Doom, mind-controlling most of the members, except for Lex Luthor who has a force field that protects him from Brainiac's devices. Brainiac has Black Manta kidnap Aquaman, with Brainiac wanting to learn more about his telepathy by cutting open his brain. Brainiac has the various Legion of Doom members pretend to have turned good and wanting to help humanity, with several of them creating cities for the sick and needy, that will provided technology that will cure their illnesses and provided them with a good standard of life. Brainiac's micro worms have also let him take control of Earth's nuclear stockpile, with Brainiac planning to nuke most of the world to destroy humanity. When the Justice League reveal to Luthor that Brainiac has betrayed him, Luthor sabotages his plans and forces him to retreat to his ship. Brainiac, unhappy about losing, decides to set off the nukes anyway and destroy humanity.

L - Z

• Legends of the Dead Earth:
  • The Flash Annual 1996—"Silent Running": Tristan Mallory is the younger brother of the heroic Bryan Mallory. When his father returns from a seemingly deadly mission, Tristan is angry when said father chooses his non-religious brother for a holy mission. Accompanying his brother to the quest, Tristan takes advantage of his brother's powers even after Bryan saved him. A believer on a religion based on The Flash's deeds, Tristan puts his brother into a machine that kept him in complete isolation for 300 years and turns himself on the highest authority of his society. Seeing himself as the pillar of society, Tristan uses the machine to create a suitable environment while he also draining the Life Energy of his own people, shortening their natural lifespan to 50 and using loyal acolytes to maintain his power and youth. When Bryan is freed by a former follower, Tristan sends followers to capture him, before starting to drain the life energy of the millions of inhabitants of his city to fight Bryan to put him back in the machine and keep ruling a society dependent on himself.
  • Superman: The Man of Steel Annual 1996—"The Never-Ending Battle": Lex Luthor is The Emperor who ordered the destruction of Kaleb's home planet Hydros and the genocide of its people. A survivor from the eventual destruction of planet Earth, Luthor created an empire from ashes and launched wars of conquest throughout the universe, which he describes as "glorious". Keeping himself alive through centuries using multiple clones, Luthor's empire has a policy of annihilating the native population of planets with species similar to Kryptonians. Once Kaleb confronts him personally, Luthor reveals that the champions of the tournaments to become his personal guard are killed, with their genes used to improve his biologically engineered guards before trying to kill Kaleb with radiation that emulates Kryptonite for the Hydrosians. A decrepit and senile old man with massive power, Luthor's ambition, paranoia and grudges killed countless innocents.
• Mister Miracle: The Great Escape, by Varian Johnson & Daniel Isles: Granny Goodness is the cruel head of the Apokoliptan Goodness Academy, where future generations of soldiers are trained to follow Darkseid's will. Domineering and authoritarian, Granny has her Furies terrorize their fellow students and shows no care for the countless children she has shipped off to die for Darkseid's cause. Granny's greatest form of "love" for the Academy's failures—even among her own, loyal Furies—is the X-Pit, a massive maze of death traps and genetically-engineered monsters that only one person, Scott Free, has ever escaped from. Tasked by Darkseid to break Scott's will, Granny turns his friends against him and begins planning to ship them off to the front lines of war, intent on throwing Scott himself back into the X-Pit upon his graduation and ascending to the glory of Darkseid's inner circle for her service.
• The Multiversity:
  • Society of Super-Heroes: Conquerors from the Counter-World! #1: Vandal Savage from Earth-40—heavily implied to be Cain himself—is a psychotic immortal who has been conquering for centuries and instituting Rape, Pillage, and Burn as a system of oppressive government. Every 100,000 years, Earth-20 and Earth-40 occupy the same space. Vandal—after biting out the throat of a scientist who can't satisfactorily explain this phenomenon—decides to conquer these other worlds. After Vandal and his Society successfully conquer Earth-20, they face the Society of Super-Heroes. Immortal Man manages to kill Vandal—to the latter's delight, as spilling an immortal's blood summons Niczhuotan, the destroyer of worlds.
  • Pax Americana #1: Doctor Charles Eden is the Vice President of the United States of Earth-4, serving under the beloved President Harley, whose coveting of his boss's position drives him to treason and murder. Learning that his boss plans to have himself killed by the hero Peacemaker and then resurrected by Captain Adam to prove that there is no problem in the world the latter can't solve, Eden co-opts the process to make sure Harley stays dead. Capturing and torturing Peacemaker, Eden then sends his enforcer, Sarge Steel, to sabotage the particle accelerator where Adam lives, killing the scientists who maintain it and seemingly Adam himself. Riding the nation's grief and newfound anti-superhero rage into the White House, Eden happily throws away an opportunity for true world harmony to advance himself.
• Planet of the Apes/Green Lantern: Gorilla Grodd uses his Psychic Powers to break into the minds of Ursus's men and the Red Lantern Corps so that he could take over Ape City and take the Power Ring for himself. Mentally breaking Cornelius and his allies to take control of their minds, Grodd forces Ursus to kill his fellow apes while forcing Ursus to watch, then psychically tormenting the Green Lantern Corps for getting in his way. Grodd holds Zira captive, threatening to put her in an infinite loop of pain if Cornelius doesn't give him the ring.
• Secret Six (Tangent Comics): Dr. Aquadus, the Tangent Universe's version of Aquaman, was a Soviet scientist and chief director of Svitavy Collective who developed the Red Tornado, a lethal chemical weapon later employed in the Czech War in the bombing of a populated town— leading to countless agonizing deaths in the process. After a haywire experiment transfers Aquadus's consciousness into the nearby lakeside, Aquadus decides to use his new form and powers for his own ends, engineering destructive experiments in the Pacific Ocean that kill thousands of Sea Devils through the seismic activity. When finally confronted by the Secret Six, Aquadus reveals his intention to blow up the moon and utterly flood the Earth, plunging it into a "new age" of his own mad design.
• Shazam!!: The Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith: Mister Mind is just as evil as ever. Liberated due to Billy Batson's irresponsibility, Mister Mind proceeds to plot the extinction of humanity. Sending a special machine known as the Destroyer to Earth, Mister Mind calls all the insects to the world to help him. Mister Mind works with Dr. Sivanna, who kidnaps Mary Batson to force Billy Batson to come without his powers. When Billy tries to climb the Destroyer, Mister Mind orders the insects to cover him, intending to drown Billy to get rid of Captain Marvel, with the kid surviving only due to the kindness of the bugs. Once Mister Mind realizes that Sivanna is no longer useful, he asks him to "Kindly throw yourself off" before trying to force Billy to pilot the Destroyer.
• Star Trek/Green Lantern: Spectrum War: Nekron, Lord of Death, returns after his defeat during Blackest Night and kills Kyle Raynor before wiping out the entire DC Universe, barring a few surviving Lanterns. Nekron torments Ganthet with his impending defeat and how much pain he's inflicted on him causing Ganthet to transfer the surviving Lanterns to the Star Trek Kelvin timeline. Chasing them to this universe, Nekron revives the corpses of the dead of Vulcan into an undead army and uses Spock's mother as one of his corpse puppets to torment him psychologically. Ultimately, Nekron intends to spread his influence across the entire Star Trek universe and leave it just a graveyard of corpses.
• Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes, written by Chris Roberson: Vandar of Stone is a combination of the immortals Vandal Savage and Flint in an combined Star Trek/DC Universe timeline, inheriting all Savage's cruelty and none of Flint's positive qualities. Vandar, as a caveman, manages to capture the god being Q and uses the power of the Q to rewrite history, enslaving humanity and becoming dictator of Earth. Vandar then decides to conquer the universe, sending out of his troops to conquer other planets. We see his forces violently conquer alien species like the Durlans and the Xudarians and trick the Klingons and Khunds into going to war with each other. Later, Vandar captures several members of the Enterprise crew and the Legion of Superheroes, planning to torture them to death using the Agony Booths.
• The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans, by Chris Claremont et al.: Darkseid himself, seeking to expand his cosmic empire, seeks the power of Jean Grey for his own ends. Having Deathstroke and Ravok the Ravager act as proxies down on Earth, Darkseid eventually rallies up both the X-Men and the Teen Titans-–coldly vaporizing Ravok for failure with his Omega Beams right after—and uses their memories to painfully reawaken Jean Grey as the Dark Phoenix. With her power, Darkseid seeks to turn Earth into a second Apokolips, destroying most life on it, before repeating the process with every planet in the universe until he rules all.

Wildstorm Universe

Examples

• TAO, short for "Tactical Augmented Organism", is the closest thing the WildStorm universe has to a Big Bad and its most tenacious villain. Raised in a test tube, TAO developed a thick misanthropy and a desire to see the entire world come to ruin simply for his own amusement. Beginning as a treacherous ally of the Wild CATs whose machinations against his erstwhile teammates resulted in the near-destruction of New York, TAO regularly tortured, massacred, and mentally and physically raped everyone around him, ordering mass slaughters as diversions and more often whispering into the ears of those he pits against each other to foment metahuman wars that kill millions. The culmination of TAO's villainy in the World's End event saw TAO manipulate Nemesis into accidentally kickstarting the apocalypse itself, resulting in global catastrophe and TAO gaining godlike power that he very nearly used to obliterate an island full of hundreds of refugees and, eventually, the entire universe. Of all the supervillains in the WildStorm universe, TAO has arguably done more damage than all of them through the proficiency of his sadistic manipulations; as Holden Carver said, "TAO doesn't rip your guts out, he makes you rip them out on your own".
• Lord Helspont of the Daemonites sets a new low even for the standard of his planet-scouring species. Helspont has tried countless times to eradicate all life on Earth with a frequency most Daemonites could only dream of, trying to plunge the world into nuclear warfare, attempting to lead his species to bodyjack all humanity, and even tampering with time itself. Helspont has no personal loyalty toward anyone, torturing and executing even members of his own species should they fail his standards and once amalgamating his own soldiers into a conjoined abomination. In his evilest personal act, Helspont convinced human villain Slaughterhouse Smith into helping him unleash a nuclear holocaust, before aiming the first nuke at New York City and trying to force Smith to watch as his only friends and family became his first victims. Helspont even rejects a sincere offer of peace from his old Arch-Enemy, Mr. Majestic, in favor of trying to wipe out Earth again, clinging firmly onto his toxic ideologies until Mr. Majestic finally kills him. Driven by undying, genocidal spite towards the Kherubim and the human life he sees as inferior, and with countless acts of murder and torture on his hands, Helspont remained one of the most persevering and deadly foes within the WildStorm universe for very good reason.
• Kaizen Gamorra, frequent foe of Stormwatch and The Authority, initially the deposed leader of the island nation of Gamorra, demonstrates immediately after his return to be far worse than his imposter ever was. Kaizen had a plane full of 233 innocent people bombed and allowed the Gen-Factor on-board to spill into the nearby town to kill most of its population through nightmarish mutation. Upping his game sooner after, Kaizen uses his army of clones to literally scar his symbol into the planet, destroying much of Moscow and nearly wiping out L.A and London. When the World's End hits, Kaizen converts his island into a floating fortress and sets about massacring everything in his path for sadistic thrills, intending soon after to harness a portal into the Bleed in order to repeat the same process on every alternate Earth until he rules the multiverse. Vile even when he's not actively scheming, Kaizen murdered his own brothers and marries wives he discards by countless numbers. Kaizen boils down his philosophies to being a wolf in a world of sheep; a terrorist only too gleeful to slaughter millions of people for the sake of terrorism itself.
• The Authority Vol. 1 issues #5-8: Regis Slzfi, the vicious, warmongering leader of Sliding Albion, is one of the most singularly vile foes to grace the Authority's pitch-black Rogues Gallery. Upon being appointed to save his species, the Blues, from sterility and extinction, Regis opts first to use massively populated countries such as China as rape camps, butchering the males to use the females as breeding fodder. Regis eventually takes his efforts to Earth, attempting to massacre an entire city-—his own son Lorenzo included-—in violent protest of Lorenzo's wedding to Jenny Sparks, and eventually deigns to turn all of Earth into a rape camp. His evil not strictly grandiose, Regis once even tricks a man into slaughtering a party full of people, crushing the man's head before waltzing off to eat the man's children, all because of an offhanded insult the man had made.
• Planetary: Randall Dowling is the leader of The Four, an evil analogue of The Fantastic Four. Having made contact with another world, Dowling plans to assist it in conquering Earth in exchange for power. For decades, he has kept Earth's technology at its current level by withholding or suppressing discoveries that could eradicate disease—including the cure for cancer—and save countless lives. in addition, Dowling locates children with budding technological skill able to advance humanity. He has their families killed in "accidents", before tormenting and brainwashing the kids into using their talents to stifle humanity's growth, with bombs planted in them in case anyone tries to rescue them. Using the Red Scare as a threat, Dowling also creates "City Zero", where suspected "spies" are rounded up and subjected to inhuman experiments, kept alive in horrible agony for Dowling's purposes. To store his experiments and weapons, Dowling also wiped out all life on a planet, just to ensure it was freed for storage. Treating his fellow members of the Four as disposable as well, Dowling's only care is for his own ego, advancement and power, no matter how many worlds he sacrifices.

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