Curated playlist

Marvel Comics male supervillains

Magneto (Marvel Comics)In 2014, IGN ranked Magneto first on its list of the top 100 comic book villains. Six years earlier, Stan Lee, the writer who co-created him, said in an interview that he never thought of Magneto as a villain at all. Magneto is a Marvel…
Doctor OctopusDoctor Octopus, the Marvel Comics villain known as Doc Ock, began as a name before he was anything else. Stan Lee, who created him with the artist Steve Ditko, later described how the idea arrived. "For some reason, I thought of an…
Ben ReillyBen Reilly first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #149, published in October 1975, and he was seemingly killed in that very same issue. He had no name yet. He was a nameless clone of Peter Parker, the man behind Spider-Man, grown by a…
Venom (character)Venom, the alien symbiote of Marvel Comics, began as a $220 purchase. In 1982, a Marvel reader from Norridge, Illinois, named Randy Schueller received a letter from Jim Shooter, the company's editor-in-chief. The letter said Marvel liked…
Sabretooth (character)Sabretooth, the Marvel Comics villain whose real name is believed to be Victor Creed, makes a point of finding Wolverine on his birthday. Writer Chris Claremont described the ritual in his own words. On every one of his birthdays, he said,…
Apocalypse (character)En Sabah Nur is the birth name of Apocalypse, a supervillain from Marvel Comics, and Marvel says the name means "The First One." That translation is considered grammatically incorrect. Broken into parts, the name joins words for "the,"…
HulkThe Hulk is a Marvel Comics superhero who lives as two people in one body, and the two typically resent each other. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him, and he first appeared in the debut issue of The Incredible Hulk in May 1962. One half…
Doctor DoomDoctor Doom is a comic book villain who answers to no court outside his own country. He rules the fictional eastern European nation of Latveria, and his status as head of state has historically shielded him from prosecution for crimes…
ThanosThanos first appeared on a comic book cover dated February 1973, in The Invincible Iron Man #55, and Marvel's heroes have not been rid of him since. He is a warlord from Titan, a moon of Saturn, born into two branches of a superhuman…
Kraven the HunterKraven the Hunter, born Sergei Nikolaevich Kravinoff, greeted Spider-Man with a borrowed phrase. In The Amazing Spider-Man issue 15, published in August 1964, he called the hero "the most dangerous game." The line comes from a short story…
Bullseye (Marvel Comics)Bullseye, the Marvel Comics assassin, once killed a man with a toothpick thrown through a window from a hundred yards away. No gun was involved, and no bomb. His menace comes from an eerie gift for turning almost any ordinary object into a…
GalactusGalactus first appeared in Fantastic Four #48, cover dated March 1966, as a god-like figure who fed on the energy of living planets. His creators, writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, wanted to escape the standard villain. Lee…
MysterioMysterio is a Marvel Comics supervillain whose greatest weapon was never strength. He first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #13, dated June 1964, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. He became one of Spider-Man's most enduring enemies…
Mephisto (Marvel Comics)Mephisto first appeared in Silver Surfer #3, cover dated December 1968. Writer Stan Lee and penciler John Buscema created him for Marvel Comics. They modeled him on Mephistopheles, the demon of the Faust legend, who is sometimes called…
Quicksilver (Marvel Comics)Quicksilver, the Marvel Comics speedster whose real name is Pietro Django Maximoff, first appeared in The X-Men #4, dated March 1964. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him. He can move and think at extreme speeds, and that second half of the…
DeadpoolDeadpool, the masked mercenary of Marvel Comics, once ended a storyline by breaking out of his own book and into the real world. There he confronted the writers and artists who were making the comic, and he turned to the reader with a…
Bucky BarnesBucky Barnes is a Marvel Comics hero whose fans once turned his death into a rule of the genre. The saying went that in comics, "No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben." For many years, Bucky was the first name on that…
Kang the ConquerorKang the Conqueror, the Marvel Comics supervillain whose birth name is Nathaniel Richards, first appeared in Fantastic Four #19, dated October 1963. In that issue he wore the crown of a pharaoh and went by Rama-Tut. He was a criminal from…
Kingpin (character)The Kingpin first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #50, cover-dated July 1967, at a moment when Peter Parker had quit being Spider-Man. Stan Lee had a particular idea for the new villain. He wanted a man who ran organized crime the way a…
Juggernaut (character)Juggernaut, the Marvel Comics villain whose real name is Cain Marko, made his debut in X-Men #12, dated July 1965, without ever showing his face. For most of that issue he was an unseen force tearing through the X-Men's headquarters.…
Tombstone (character)Tombstone is a Marvel Comics crime boss whose face was built to resemble the grave marker he is named after. Writer Gerry Conway chose the name first. He then gave the character albinism and squared-off features so the finished drawing…