Curated playlist
DC Comics male supervillains
- Joker (character)The Joker was nearly killed off in his second comic appearance. An editor saved him with a hastily drawn panel.
- Lex LuthorLex Luthor has no superpowers, no secret identity and no alien heritage, yet he has outlasted nearly every other enemy of Superman. Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster created him, and he first appeared in Action Comics #23 in April…
- Jason ToddJason Todd, the second Robin in DC Comics, had his life or death decided by a telephone poll in 1988. Readers of the Batman comics were handed two 1-900 numbers. One meant the boy would live. The other meant he would die. They had only a…
- DarkseidDarkseid, the stone-skinned tyrant of the planet Apokolips in DC Comics, has a name that fans have never fully agreed how to say. Mark Evanier spent several years as assistant to the character's creator, Jack Kirby. Evanier says the name…
- DeathstrokeDeathstroke wears a mask split between black and orange, and it covers a right eye that is missing. He is Slade Joseph Wilson, a mercenary and former U.S. Army soldier. Within the DC Universe he is regarded as the greatest and deadliest…
- HomelanderGarth Ennis, who created Homelander together with the artist Darick Robertson, offered a blunt way to picture him. In Ennis's words: "It might help to think of the Homelander as having all the self-control of… let's say… a…
- Two-FaceTwo-Face, the coin-tossing enemy of Batman, makes his first appearance in Detective Comics #66, published in August 1942. Late in that issue, Batman chases him down and corners him. The hero offers a simple deal: give up and start over.…
- Billy ButcherBilly Butcher hunts gods, and he does it with no superpowers of his own. He is a fictional character, one of the two main protagonists of the comic series The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. He leads a group of…
- Doctor ManhattanDoctor Manhattan, the blue-skinned superhuman of the graphic novel Watchmen, wears a mark that nobody assigned to him. Military planners prepared a hat for his public unveiling, decorated with crossed ellipses meant to suggest an atom. Jon…
- ClayfaceDetective Comics #40, cover-dated June 1940, introduced a murderer called Clayface, and the man under the costume was a B-list actor named Basil Karlo. Nobody could have guessed what the name would grow into. Over the following decades it…
- Black NoirBlack Noir is the name shared by three characters in The Boys, a story created in comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Eric Kripke later developed it for television. In both versions, Noir belongs to the Seven, a hedonistic and…
- Ra's al GhulRa's al Ghul, the DC Comics supervillain best known as Batman's immortal rival, once admitted that he could not keep track of his own age. In Azrael #6, from July 1995 and written by Dennis O'Neil, he tells the young hero Jean-Paul Valley:…
- Bane (DC Comics)Bane, the DC Comics supervillain, got his name from an insult. At the age of eight, a boy inside the Peña Duro prison on the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca stabbed a criminal who was trying to use him to learn the prison's secrets. It…