Superpowered Evil Side / Comic Books

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• Astro City: Anti-hero (but firmly one of the good guys) Hellhound in the Dark Ages arc has a huge, colorful demon inside him. When it comes out, well, the demon isn't one of the good guys.
• Batman:
  • In the Batman RIP storyline, Dr Hurt's mental attacks on Batman unleash a "back-up personality" Bruce had installed in his psyche, known as the "Batman of Zur-En-Arrh", who is essentially Batman without Bruce Wayne, i.e. completely unstoppable, but willing to do things the normal Batman wouldn't dream of to get results (including, it is implied, torture). Once again, more of a "superpowered" (he's still a Badass Normal) Id Anti-Hero side than truly evil.
  • Two-Face is sometimes treated this way, being able to do the nasty deeds that "good" Harvey Dent can't bring himself to. This is particularly evident in the story "Two of a Kind".
  • In an Elseworld story called "Batman/Demon: A Tragedy", Bruce Wayne is (unknowingly) the host of Etrigan the Demon, who emerges every night to violently battle criminals in Gotham. However, Etrigan is only as restrained as he is because of Bruce's virtue, and in reality, Bruce has been trapped with Etrigan for over a thousand years thanks to the wizard Merlin trapping the demon within Bruce with his consent. Now posing as Bruce's servant Alfred, Merlin watches over Bruce and constantly changes his identity to give him some form of peace from Etrigan. Bruce attempts to exorcise Etrigan, but the results are disastrous, resulting in the deaths of Catwoman, Killer Croc, Commissioner Gordon and several police officers, as well as Bruce's fiancee Glenda. Bruce consigns himself to repeating the cycle once more as Etrigan's jailer, his memories wiped so he can pose as his own descendant.
  • In "The Third Mask", a story in the Batman: Black and White anthology series, Batman tracks a serial killer with some kind of split personality condition, including an alternate personality who's dramatically muscled and capable of superhuman feats of strength and agility. At the end of the story, Batman manifests his own similar alternate self to confront him.
• Black Knight: Dane Whitman's first squire, Sean Dolan, suffers from this. As himself, he's a normal human Plucky Boy and Boisterous Bruiser-in-training who looks up to Whitman and wants to be a good sidekick. But when he makes the mistake of drawing Whitman's cursed sword, he turns into the demonic Bloodwraith who is willing to kill good and bad alike, cruelly mocks Whitman and his friends and can (literally!) level small countries. Sean spends much of the time afterwards trying to keep his evil side and addiction to the sword's influence under control and failing miserably.
• Daredevil: Mary Walker is a sweet, innocent woman who has two evil personalities, Typhoid Mary and Bloody Mary, who have sole access to their super powers.
• The Darkness: Jackie Estacado fits this, and likes it during the early parts of the series, as it gives him more unique ways to kill people.
• Doom Patrol: Crazy Jane is a woman with severe Dissociative Identity Disorder, caused by sexual abuse by her father. When the alien Dominators detonated their gene bomb during the ''Invasion!" event, activating the metagene in thousands of humans, Jane was one of those affected. Jane has 64 different personalities, some good, some bad, and some neutral or inactive (the Jane personality has no powers). Among the evil ones are Black Annis (a violent, psychotic misandrist with blue skin and razorsharp claws and teeth), and "Daddy" (a giant copy of Jane's father made of insects, excrement and puzzle pieces). The Daddy persona was destroyed when Robotman entered Jane's psyche and helped her defeat him.
• Eclipso: Eclipso has acted as this to various characters in the DC universe. Subverted in one Blue Beetle comic, where Eclipso invokes this by releasing Jaime's darkest fantasy of ultimate power to serve as her champion against Paco. This backfires when this turns out to be a dentist, who is easily defeated. Jaime's deepest desire has nothing to do with power; what he wants is a stable career to help support his family.
• Etrigan: Etrigan the Demon serves as this to his host Jason Blood.
• Green Lantern:
  • Star Sapphire, villain and Love Interest of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, was similar, with Carol Ferris being unaware of what her alter ago was up to.
  • The Golden Age Green Lantern also had a villainess who was an otherwise innocent woman's split personality, the first Thorn. Alan Scott would actually end up marrying the Thorn's good side, Rose Canton, while she was using an assumed name. Unfortunately, the Thorn re-manifested and Rose fled for Alan's sake, and then later had to give up her children to protect them. These children were in fact Obsidian and Jade. Some time later Rose would have another child, Mayflower of the Force of July, but her father was never revealed.
• Hound: Cú Cullan displays unnatural strength at the expense of losing his reason whenever Morrigan's influence takes hold of him.
• The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk is the canonical super-Hyde. The Hulk, over time, has been softened down from "evil" to "pure id". Not that that stops him from racking up the damage bill every time he shows up.
  • Banner does have the Devil Hulk personality inside him, which is pure evil... possibly. Immortal Hulk makes it a little ambiguous, with the Devil Hulk (an Appropriated Appellation) hating the human world, but being genuinely protective of Bruce and the classic, Savage Hulk, surprisingly friendly towards Peter after Loki in an odd attempt at kindness had stripped Bruce of the Hulk (and Peter's luck being what it is, meant he got it) because he chose to stay with Bruce while he changed (when Devil Hulk couldn't protect him), and being downright horrified by the One-Below-All.
  • As well as Gray Hulk and Guilt Hulk — though Grey Hulk isn't really "evil"; he's another closer to "id".
  • Bruce Banner's wife Betty Ross was once transformed into the villainous Harpy. Later she became Red She-Hulk, who's more The Atoner, and currently is the Red Harpy, whose looks and mentality are a mix of the former two.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Hyde is this to Jekyll. He points out (true to the source material) that this was not originally the case. Quite the opposite: Jekyll was originally a big strapping fellow while Hyde was rather diminutive. The reason Jekyll is a pale and sickly shadow of his former self while Hyde is a big hulking brute now? Without Hyde, Jekyll has no drive, and without Jekyll, Hyde has no restraints.
• Martian Manhunter: J'onn J'onzz has a fear of fire for good reason. When he loses his fear of fire? He unleashes Fernus, the last Burning Martian who beat the entire Justice League of America at once and Batman needed to call Plastic Man in to help. Yes. That Plastic Man.
• Miracleman: In the Alan Moore Retelling of the comic Marvelman, Kid Miracleman is the only survivor of a nuclear blast (he thinks) and stays in his superpowered form for years. In this form, but using his civilian name of Johnny Bates, he grows up. His moral code begins to erode because he is the most powerful man on earth and he has no one to tell him what to do. When Miracleman confronts him years later, he is the CEO of a computer company and a rather nasty piece of work. They fight, and he is forced to change back into a normal human child (His other self didn't age for years while in stasis) and left at an orphanage. There he is constantly bullied by other orphans, having to carry the dreadful knowledge that he could become more powerful than any of them, but he dare not because KM would start killing people. Then he is pinned one day, and some of the boys attempt to gang rape him, and this pushes him past the breaking point. The resulting awakening of KM results in the slaughter of the boys and a significant number of the population of London. Miracleman is forced to make him transform back into a human and end his life with a Neck Snap. In an apocryphal story called "The Rascal Prince", a book read by followers of Johnny Bates who think he was a tragic victim tells a tale two ways: The revisionist version that depicts KM's meeting with an older woman as a flirty chaste romance, and as the Real Life version depicting the rape of an unwilling victim.
• Rising Stars:
  • Stephanie Maas/Critical Maas; The only normal in a town full of superheroes actually just shunted her super powers (including flight, strength, and creepy-puppetmaster mind control) into her secondary, psychopath personality.
  • Incidentally, Critical Maas is undoubtedly the inspiration for Heroes' Jessica/Niki, right down to her history of abuse by her father and her penchant for calling her 'weaker' half 'little mouse'.
• The Sentry: The Sentry and the Void, from Marvel Comics, are this trope taken to its extreme. They manifested as alter-egos of a single person, representing the good and dark sides of humanity, respectively. The Sentry is a superhero and the Void is a supervillain, and in a slight variation on this trope, the Void is exactly as powerful as the Sentry, and occasionally kills someone for every person the Sentry saves.
  • It was later revealed that the Void exists because before becoming the Sentry, Bob Reynolds was a junkie who broke into a research facility looking for crystal meth and ended up drinking a serum that gave him the powers of the Sentry. He became addicted to that serum and the rush of being an admired and respected superhero, but deep down he was still a selfish, murdering junkie — and this expressed itself through the Void.
  • And later it was revealed that the Void was in fact the Angel of Death. The Sentry is kind of a mess — it doesn't help that he's a fully fledged Reality Warper, meaning that it's quite possible that his backstory genuinely does change whenever he thinks up a new one.
• Sonic the Comic:
  • Super Sonic. In that comic's canon, the Chaos Emeralds are full of pure evil (as energy), rather than their neutral alignment as confirmed as video game canon by Sonic Adventure. Super Sonic came about by overexposure to the Chaos Emeralds, and as such... he's insane, and evil, sadistic, psychopathic... and equipped with the power of the Chaos Emeralds. When he split from Sonic and lost his powers he mellowed out, but returned to form when he got them back.
  • Doctor Robotnik is also this to his former self Dr Ovi Kintobor, due to exposure to raw evil Chaos Energy.
  • Sonic's Alternate Universe Evil Counterpart King Sonic inverts this trope by virtue of his own Super Sonic self being pacifistic in nature.
• Spider-Man:
  • Mr. Negative takes this to a whole new level. He was born when a synthetic drug split a man's personality in two — the pure good side became philanthropist Martin Li, while the pure evil side became Mr. Negative. Both fight with each other in an interesting way — Negative likes to corrupt all Li's good deeds, while Li helps people that suffer because of Negative.
  • Curt Connors and Lizard are often portrayed this way. However, one Retcon claims that Connors was always in control of Lizard and let him out when life was too hard for him. He just keeps telling himself it's not true.
  • Though not portrayed this way in the original comics, all subsequent portrayals of the Venom symbiote have made it out to be this, with even the comic book symbiote having been RetConned into a more malevolent entity.
• Supergirl:
  • In the Red Daughter of Krypton story arc, Siobhan Smythe — who usually is the super-villain named Silver Banshee — let her Silver Banshee evil self out during her fight with Supergirl to try to hold her mindless friend back. Despite of her fears, she manages to keep her banshee side under control.
  • In Supergirl vol. 2 college professor Barry Metzer built a machine to kick-start his brain and body's evolution; but he developed an evil, ruthless split personality who took over.
• Teen Titans: Raven has to maintain strict control over her emotions to the point of being The Stoic. If she doesn't, she runs the risk of manifesting the extradimensional demon side of her family tree and becoming Daddy's Little Villain. Whenever evil wins over Raven in some way, there is a serious chance that a (yes, a) Dark Raven will appear, who is much likelier to exhibit violent powers than Raven.
  • The first Dark Raven, who served as The Herald for Trigon when he first came to Earth, was Raven's body filled up with Trigon's power.
  • The second Dark Raven, the severed evil part of Raven's soul mixed up with the souls of some evil Azarathians, was a Depraved Bisexual who would infest her victims and lieutenants with Trigon Seeds.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): The Silver Age version of the Cheetah was the violent split personality of a celebrity, Priscilla Rich.
  • In pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity, Stacy Macklin appeared for several years in DC's Wonder Woman series. She made her final appearance in World's Finest, inheriting Moonman's powers and developing an alter ego as Lady Lunar.
• Worlds Finest 1941: In issue #98, astronaut Brice Rogers became the Moonman after passing through a comet's tail while traveling to the Moon. During the day he was Brice, but exposure to moonlight forced the emergence of his criminal alter ego.
• X-Men:
  • Wolverine has a tendency to lapse into a "berserker rage" while in close combat. In this state he lashes out with the intensity and aggression of a mindless animal and is even more resistant to psionic attack. Though he loathes it, he acknowledges that it has saved his life countless times. Of course, he uses it so often without negative side effects that the whole "evil side" part is something of an Informed Flaw.
  • It's still not clear whether Dark Phoenix is Jean Grey's Super-Powered Evil Side or a variation on Grand Theft Me. (Whether Jean actually became Phoenix (and then Dark Phoenix) or was merely replaced by the Phoenix Force is in an almost constant state of retcon, so the confusion is quite understandable.) However, one thing remains the same: if you see her green costume turn red, you want to be in the next galaxy over. (That's Not Hyperbole; she's responsible for the eradication of a whole solar system.)
  • Angel has Archangel, the persona he developed after being experimented on by Apocalypse. Warren usually has wings and average healing powers. Archangel has razor sharp, retractable wings that launch out metal feathers that are dipped in his natural poison. X-Force had to call upon Archangel more than a few times, though he has since been extinguished, and Angel now possesses angelic metal wings.
  • Professor X has had this happen as he tends to repress every negative thought and emotion he experiences. First, in The X-Men and the Micronauts, there was the Entity, a personification of his dark side. Later there was the supremely powerful Onslaught, who also contained elements of Magneto's evil side. Then there is Cassandra Nova, who combines this trope with elements of the evil twin and alien invader. Onslaught and Cassandra Nova ended up taking on lives of their own.
  • Magik was partially transformed into a demon by Belasco. Her "Darkchylde" side is intelligent but malicious, though almost powerless on Earth, where her magic doesn't work very well. In the end it took over her and nearly ended the world in a major Crossover Event.
  • Legion was first introduced with a Super-Powered Evil Side in Jack Wayne, as well as a Super-Powered Jerkass Side (the pyrokinetic Cyndi). He usually has one or more evil personalities, except when they are temporarily merged.

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