Complete Monster/DC and Vertigo



""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, spoken through the mouths of one billion slaves

A list of Complete Monsters in DC and Vertigo Comics.


 * Batman has quite a few of these characters in his Rogues Gallery.
 * Many depictions (especially modern ones) of The Joker fall into Complete Monster territory. Like all comic book characters who've been used as long as he has, this depends on the writer (and, to some extent, the actor in adaptations, with Heath Ledger's take the cruelest of the lot). The Joker tends to bounce around between Harmless Villain, Complete Monster, and Magnificent Bastard like a pinball. He epitomizes the trope Laughably Evil. What's so effective about the presentation is how he can go from one end of the spectrum to the other without batting an eye. The Joker crippled Batgirl purely by accident: it didn't matter to him who he shot. He tortures her and humiliates her, all while her father is forced to watch. Later, he tells Batman an old joke. To him, there's no difference. JLA: Rock of Ages confirms that Joker is coo-coo-ca-ca bananas--Martian Manhunter near goes insane trying to see a structure from the Joker's perspective in an attempt to find the Worlogog and comes within a hair of suffering an aneurysm attempting to keep Joker sane long enough to get the Worlogog away from him.
 * Roman Sionis a.k.a Black Mask is a crazed, sadistic, and violent-tempered man who is one of Gotham's most dangerous and feared crime lords for a damned good reason. After all, Cold-Blooded Torture is the guy's hobby, one famous example would be his torture of fourth Robin Stephanie Brown with a power drill and other similar tools which almost killed her. That being said, that's almost nothing compared to the horrific lengths he's gone with trying to kill his arch-enemy Catwoman. After Catwoman ruined a heroin and diamond exchange Sionis was conducting with the Russian mob, he was furious and decided that he was going to make her life hell before he killed her. Black Mask ended up finding out her secret identity as Selina Kyle and decided to target her loved ones by bombing a community center she funded, torturing several friends of hers including her surrogate daughter Holly, and finishing it up by driving her sister Maggie nearly insane by butchering her husband in front of her and FORCE-FEEDING HER HIS EYEBALLS. And once Catwoman allowed herself to be tortured to death in her comatose sister's place in exchange for Black Mask taking her to a hospital, he had no intention on keeping his promise and tried to kill Maggie anyway. After all of this, it's absolutely no surprise that the normally averse-to-killing Catwoman ended up putting a bullet in the sick bastard's head when the two crossed paths again.
 * Unfortunately for Catwoman, Black Mask wouldn't stay dead since he was revived as one of Nekron's Black Lantern corps members during the Blackest Night arc. After hunting down Catwoman with the intention of murdering her in order to avenge his death, he ended up realizing that she wasn't producing the fearful emotion he wanted, so he decided to kidnap her now severely mentally ill sister as a way to get to her. The fate he had planned for them? The same way he drove Maggie mad while killing her husband: he was going to butcher Maggie and force-feed Catwoman her eyeballs. And the worst thing about this is that Black Mask didn't even need to go this far, any kind of emotional response is good enough for a Black Lantern to collect in order to help with Nekron's return. Black Mask wanted the satisfaction of completely and utterly breaking his arch-enemy, and it's very hard to suppress a cheer as Poison Ivy traps him in a giant plant that would painfully dissolve him to death with acid, a Fate Worse Than Death par excellence given that his Black Lantern ring will keep bringing him back to life only for him to painfully and slowly die again and again for as long as the Blackest Night lasts.
 * Victor Zsasz (pictured here), a Serial Killer who carves a tally on his body for each person he's killed. His skin is covered in tallies. He attempts to justify this, however, by saying that that life is meaningless, and he is liberating others from this meaninglessness. However, the guy takes a lot of obvious pleasure from killing and even admits to Batman at one point that he chooses to kill meaning that at heart, he knows that he's a monster and is proud of that fact. Having no standards makes him very sadistic, and his methods of murder are just plain horrific. A great example of Victor at his worst? There was a time where he kidnapped a bunch of runaway and orphaned children, and had them fight each other to the death in gladiator-style matches that can be gambled on by Zsasz's fellow criminals. The last kid standing would have to face Zsasz himself, a battle that the final kid would have absolutely no chance of winning.
 * Minor villain Professor Pyg is a truly sick bastard completely disconnected with reality, whose crimes include lobotomy, selling drugs containing a fatal virus, skinning people and animals alive, torture, mutilation, enabling of mass murder, and an attempt to "convert" all of Gotham City with his virus in order to make them "perfect" like him.
 * His ultimate plan is even worse. He's placing a drug into food for 'nutrition runs' that attacks empathy. It'll only affect children...so children would grow up to be conscienceless monsters. Just like him.  Some other misdeeds he has committed: slashing a girl's face in such a way that the scars are impossible to sew up because she once called him "Four-Eyes".  The guy is the black hole causing the Moral Event Horizon.
 * Major Force, the Evil Counterpart of Captain Atom. The guy is responsible for one of the most infamous Stuffed Into the Fridge incidents in comics (the Trope Namer, in fact). He murdered Kyle Rayner's girlfriend and stuffed her body in a refrigerator for Kyle to find. His idea of a joke? Pretending to do the same thing with Kyle's mother by putting what looked like her severed head in an oven. He's the worst possible person to choose for a military experiment that turns humans into powerful immortal Energy Beings. He is so crazy, he RIPS OFF Major Liberty's (his ally and fellow government cape) arm and beats him to death with it because, to quote: "We don't need two majors on this team!" Then again, the guy who nominated him for the experiment, General Wade Eiling, was a pretty big bastard too, though a magnificent one.
 * The current run of Green Lantern Corps has two:
 * The first is Mongul II, Overlord, Jr. at its finest. Dedicated to aping his equally unpleasant father in every aspect, he began his villainous career by punching his own sister's head off to sever any of those pesky family ties that tend to hold villains back. He also enslaved a benevolent Hive Queen to produce mind-screwing plants for him, and when she put her foot down, he threatened to burn her billions of children to ashes and force her to eat them. The subsequent karmic payback was both a Crowning Moment of Awesome and an Awesome Moment of Crowning, as it earns the Hive Queen a Green Lantern Ring.
 * The second is Diro Yat, father of Green Lantern Sodam Yat. How do you discourage your son from hanging out with the wrong crowd? Well, if you're Diro Yat, you have the offending friend taxidermied, then Mind Rape your son into believing his friend was trying to kill him. Did we mention that the only reason the friend was offensive was that he was of a different alien species? He's also fond of Cold-Blooded Torture and having people burned alive, and, as of the current arc, is . What's worse is that Diro's attitude is shared by most of his fellow Daxamites. Sodam is the only Daxamite seen so far who doesn't display violent xenophobia. The entire planet is so bad that Sodam seriously considered letting the Sinestro Corps tear the planet apart.
 * In Emerald Warriors, Sodam has been freed from Daxam's sun and found a group of Daxamites who have taken his example to heart. He has also discovered that his father is leading a faction to hunt him down and toss him back in the sun so the Daxamites can have superpowers.
 * Mongul and Diro Yat hardly have a monopoly on Complete Monsterdom in the Green Lantern series. While some of the Sinestro Corps may have a Freudian Excuse or some quirk that keeps them from being irredeemably monstrous, a lot of them are just plain vile. You have Kilowog's Evil Counterpart Arkillo, a cannibalistic savage who once ate a Red Lantern's wife; Romat-Ru, a Serial Killer with a body count of thousands of children and is seen as one of the vilest beings of his sector; and Despotellis, a sentient virus that wiped out most of its own sector and killed Kyle Rayner's mother. Interestingly, Kryb is a subversion - despite that fact that she kills parents and steals their children, she cares for and treats them as her own. Considering who Sinestro is, it can be quite jarring to find so many Complete Monsters in his Corps.
 * Superman has faced a few of these:
 * Reactron is a Psycho for Hire with a xenophobic hatred for Kryptonians who has expressed the desire to rape a de-powered Supergirl. It was in the New Krypton storyline where Reactron really crossed the line. Having been rebuilt by Lex Luthor into a cyborg with a Gold Kryptonite heart, Reactron invades New Krypton alongside Metallo, depowering a killing numerous Kryptonians, threatening to rape Supergirl, and then murdering her father, Zor-El, in front of her by giving him radiation sickness. Tasked by General Lane with eliminating Supergirl, Flamebird, and Nightwing, Reactron murdered all the soldiers assigned to help him when they expressed doubts about the mission, and did his best to slowly torture Supergirl and Flamebird to death, all while gloating about how fighting two such attractive girls was a dream come true. Captured and tortured by Supergirl's mother, Alura, Reactron waited until Supergirl came to free him from the torture chamber to reveal that his capture had been a set up and that Luthor had transformed him into a living bomb. Detonating himself with a smile, Reactron gives a serene look as he incinerates Alura, the city of Kandor, and the entire planet of New Krypton, killing over ninety percent of the population in a single fell swoop. A lech, a bully, and a thug at his core, Reactron is a study in just how horrific it can be when somebody like that gets their hands on real power, and has done more to hurt Supergirl than any of her other adversaries, killing her father, her mother, and her entire race in a matter of weeks.
 * The first post-Crisis version of Zod was from an Alternate Universe, where he and his equally bloodthirsty allies had already nearly killed everyone on that universe's Earth and planned to find a way to the mainstream universe to do the same; they were so unrepentantly evil that, after they were defeated,.
 * Brainiac has counted since his first appearances in the 1960s. When you force Silver Age Superman, perhaps DC's ultimate boy scout, to resort to lethal force, you know you are a monster. His crimes over the years have ranged from shrinking cities and planets for his private collection, coldly slaughtering thousands in a quest to destroy the "Master Programmer" and become God, and brainjacking Luthor, leading to the deaths of Lex, Lana Lang, and Jimmy Olsen in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?? And that's just Pre-Crisis. Since then, he has fed on human spinal fluid, possessed countless victims and destroyed their minds in the process, exploited the Imperiex War in an attempt to rewrite the fabric of the universe, tried to destroy New Krypton, and, most recently, gone in for planetary destruction and city collection in a big way. He has never shown any remorse, his presence in a story inevitably signals that the bodycount is about to rise, and he has been a genuine physical threat to Superman since the early days when his Deflector Shields made him untouchable.
 * Lex Luthor can slide into this, Depending on the Writer. This is a guy who murdered his parents for start-up capital, cured his sister's degenerative disease then gave it back to her just to prove a point, killed his wife so he alone would have his daughter's affections, then gave said daughter to Brainiac in exchange for more technology, and who genetically engineered a woman he fell in love with, then forced her on a suicide mission against Superman. All of this is completely justified in his mind. If that isn't enough, his actions in Fifty Two cement his monstrous nature. He can occasionally pull off a Magnificent Bastard routine, but it never lasts. There is a reason Lex is on the short list of people Superman truly hates.
 * Darkseid is evil incarnate. His sole wish is to turn all of existence and its inhabitants into essentially an extension of himself and his evil mind. That said, the fact that he's sane, knows exactly what he's doing and has no problem with it makes him even more monstrous. At the very least, should you agree to become his loyal servant, he'll let you live...should you not screw up. Except, even if you don't screw up, he may not let you live when you complete your task.
 * Mongul from the famous Bronze Age story For The Man Who Has Everything is just as loathsome as his equally revolting son mentioned above. To wit, the guy ambushed Superman on his birthday and trapped him in a dream world with a plant known as the Black Mercy. Superman's dream is that of a Krypton that never blew up, where he can spend his days with his wife and child in a peaceful utopia. However, Superman senses that something in this world is amiss and escapes by sacrificing his heart's true desire, which completely mind rapes the poor guy and causes him to attack Mongul in a murderous rage (Which is really saying something given that Superman is very opposed to killing). Mongul comments on this by saying that the sensation Superman must have felt from removing the Black Mercy must have been like ripping off his own arm, a truly disturbing line that perfectly cements how damn sadistic he is. He's also shown to be a misogynist, laughing about how inferior women are to him as he's violently beating Wonder Woman to death. Once Jason Todd of all people traps him with the Black Mercy, we get to see the kind of world that Mongul finds ideal: he imagines himself as the ruler of a bloodied, war-torn, hellish looking planet overseeing all the chaos in the galaxy.
 * Doomsday, the monster famous for once killing Superman, lives for nothing but destroying, killing, and generally causing suffering by eliminating life. His Establishing Character Moment of crushing a small bird to death and laughing with glee was intended to show that this beast was more than just a mindless brute: he was pure evil.
 * Wonder Woman:
 * Dr. Psycho...oh God, Dr. Psycho. He's a rapist, a misogynist, a sadist, and a mass murderer. He has no redeeming features and his only real motive in life is to make as many people suffer as possible. And it's implied he's been like this since he was a child, suggesting he really is just pure evil by nature. Psycho once mass-mind-controlled dozens of people at once in a riot and used the opportunity to turn them into cannibals. The Nightmare Fuel and Squick part is under the spoiler:  Really, he's probably the DCU's answer to Red Skull in terms of being THE single most despicable individual in his universe. Darkseid, Black Mask, Vandal Savage, Junior, Mongul II, even The Joker - he surpasses them all.
 * Vandal Savage practically invented evil as a human concept. Over the millennia, he has done everything in the book and then some, having been some of the most vicious and depraved men in history, in addition to being one of THE most efficient manipulators in the DCU. He has billions of bodies to his name, and judging by some of his offspring (Grendel...holy shit, just Grendel), he's responsible for the existence of various other horrible monsters. No wonder his daughter Scandal is as fucked up as she is; even then, though, she absolutely despises her father and wants nothing to do with him, with anything related to him usually acting as a Berserk Button. Most of his fellow villains either despise him or are fucking terrified of him. Usually both. In short, he's probably the absolute most despicable being in the DCU. The man has no redeeming qualities. There are others who approach his level of atrocity (Doctor Psycho, Junior, Black Mask, Professor Zoom), but none of them have done it as thoroughly or for as long as he.
 * The villain Genocide from Wonder Woman is this, seeing as she's  body, merged with the soil of the sites of 5 mass genocides (Rwanda, Cambodia, Auschwitz, Logor Jasenovac, and Darfur) and without anything resembling human compassion. Her first act is torturing a fellow villain, then she goes on a rampage in a mall and steals Diana's lasso after stringing her up and nearly killing her, before going on to curbstomp the Justice League and mentally torture a Green Lantern while turning Donna Troy against Diana because of her psychic effect on everything. And then she tortures one of Diana's friends mostly for shits and giggles. Even Diana was shocked at what just being around Genocide made her do, she's that much of a monster.
 * Doctor Poison II has only had a few appearances, but has made up for that with the sheer ugliness of the crimes she commits. The granddaughter of a Japanese war criminal, she has continued her grandmother's research, creating new toxins and diseases with which to infect the world. Kidnapping a man named Richard Agoras, Doctor Poison subjected him to lengthy torture and experimentation, ultimately using the Pandora Virus to mutate him into a hideous monster, and unleashing him on Wonder Woman. When captured following this incident, Doctor Poison unleashed the Pandora Virus into the atmosphere, endangering millions of lives. Escaping custody, Poison joined Queen Clea's new Villainy Incorporated, and helped to overrun the nation of Skartaris, requesting that any prisoners they took be turned over to her for further use in her experiments. Obsessed with producing the perfect toxic agents and little else, and making her appearance as horrible as possible in order to maximise fear in her victims, Doctor Poison is as bad as a Mad Scientist can get.
 * Secret Six
 * Junior may have a Freudian Excuse, being heavily implied to have been molested by her father, Ragdoll Sr., as a child, but the things that she does make her extremely difficult to feel warm for. She's raped men and women alike, tortures people to death (including a priest) and enjoys using such torture implements as bricks and scissors to murder people. Before she kills people, she forces them to choose whether they die or their family dies. If they choose to die, she kills them. But if they say they want their friends and family to die, she tape-records them saying it, butchers them anyway and leaves the body for the friends and family to find, along with a recording of the victim begging her to kill their family instead of them.
 * Ragdoll Sr. was quite the monster in his own right. He started off as a Golden Age Flash villain with the power to be unusually flexible. In the 1990s Starman series, he was re-imagined as a Manson-esque cult leader who masterminded a killing spree and forced the Golden Age Starman, Green Lantern, and Flash to kill him. He came back and started up another cult (who he got bored with and blew up) and eventually got what he deserved in an Injustice Society heist storyline. Oh, and as mentioned before, he molested his daughter and beat his sons. And oh yes, when Ragdoll Sr. met his now adult son, he tried to violently murder him.
 * Mr. Smyth, the villain of the "Depths" story arc, looks to be this as well. In addition to running a massive slave trade operation, the way he "disciplines" his workers is to have his assassins butcher and murder the people around the disobedient slave, while forcing them to watch. Also, he thinks slavery is the greatest thing ever and will fix all the world's problems and wants every nation to have it via lottery.
 * His "pet" Grendel is even worse. He has a taste for human flesh, savors the thought of slowly murdering EVERYONE, and his reaction to Catman glancing at him in a way he doesn't like? He threatens to rape his son. Catman's son is an infant. If ANYONE can find Grendel anything other than sickening and repulsive in a "Someone cut this bastard up and feed him to rabid dogs" kind of way, they should seek immediate counseling.
 * Dwarfstar is a crazy, misogynistic serial killer. His first words to Bane upon joining the Six are a question of how many women he's killed. Sure, Cheshire is bad, but Dwarfstar is completely and utterly repugnant even when compared to her. Given the team's current membership, however (an immortal, immensely strong banshee, a sociopathic female assassin, and a giantess), he probably won't be alive much longer. Bane takes an instant dislike to him. After failing to kill Ryan Choi after so long, he hired Deathstroke's Titans team to kill Choi. And he wanted the miniature corpse in a matchbox for a trophy, which he received with a big shit-eating smile on his face. For that, Giganta beat him with his own belt so badly that it broke every bone in his body. Unfortunately, based on the latest issue of Titans, he's still clinging to life in a Louisiana hospital. He told Ray Palmer that it was Deathstroke who murdered Ryan, and Ray pointed out that Slade probably won't take kindly to this development.
 * Most Shazam villains are difficult to take seriously. That can't be said of Mister Mind, a two-inch long parasitic worm from Venus. As his people'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 the human race, 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. Motivated by nothing more than anger at Captain Marvel for embarassing him, Mind is as bad as The Big Red Cheese's Rogues Gallery can get.
 * Crossing Midnight gave us Lord Aratsu, one of the most powerful Kami alive, the God of Swords. He is also a vicious, usurping, tyrannical megalomaniac who considers it his right to steal a girl named Toshi from her parents and twin brother because their father prayed at his shrine before her birth. When she refuses to become his slave after Aratsu brutally murdered the family dog he dismembers her mother to use her life to force Toshi's hand. Once Toshi agrees to serve him, Aratsu repairs her mother, but doesn't even bother to mend her soul, leaving her an empty shell and fully susceptible to hungry, soul eating imps. Once Toshi is his slave, Aratsu uses his swords to cut away her past and future, leaving her to exist in only a moment in time. Should she ever displease him, he would allow time to lapse and her to vanish. Aratsu's cruelty is revealed as the story goes on: he gained his power by treachery and murder, having severed his predecessor's memory and condemned him to exile on earth. A violent egomaniac, he also kills any who do not give him the blind worship he feels he's entitled to. While many Kami are alien creatures, Aratsu is an all too familiar and understandable being, and eclipses any human, dragon, demon or Kami in the story with his evil. By the time the rebellion against his rule rolls around, he has no compunction sending the amnesiac Toshi to kill her own brother.
 * Dr. Arthur Light was retconned into a complete monster in the Identity Crisis crossover. He was Hand Waved from a goofy Harmless Villain into a serial rapist who violently raped the completely innocent Sue Dibny, just because he was a petty asshole who wanted to torment the heroes by brutalizing their loved ones. Just before he received his very Karmic Death at the hands of The Spectre, he was in the process of raping a group of teenage girls who he had dressed up as the Teen Titans.
 * Felix Faust puts the "Evil" back into Evil Sorcerer. Selling his own infant son's soul in a bid for power, killing little girls in another bid for power, defiling the remains of a hero to manipulate a widower into helping him escape imprisonment, raping the widower's resurrected wife...he's done all of that and probably worse. Even Neron, the DC Universe's equivalent to the Devil himself, was disgusted by this guy.
 * Preacher (Comic Book)
 * Marie L'Angell and her loyal henchmen Jody and TC, quite possibly the three most evil and twisted creatures to walk (well, roll) the series (and for a veritable monster island like Preacher (Comic Book), that's saying a lot). Perhaps the most satisfying thing about the All in The Family Story Arc is seeing these three vermin get their well-deserved Karmic Deaths. Marie L'Angell is the terrifying grandmother of protagonist Jesse Custer. She takes "controlling" to a new level and views her own family as tools rather than people. Her usual punishment of her grandson Jesse was locking him into an airtight coffin with an air hose and letting him wallow in his own shit and piss for a week. Then, she attempted to kill her daughter Christina for trying to stop it. But the worst of Marie's cruelties is her obsession with "hardening" Jesse by destroying all his non-family ties, including his puppy dog, his girlfriend, and his childhood friend. And his own father.
 * Jody is generally the instrument of this. Unlike Marie, however, Jody makes no pretense that he doesn't enjoy what he does. We see what a total scumbag he is when he blows Jesse's father's brains out right in front of him and then sneers "fucking crybaby" at a tearful Jesse. When Jesse's dog tries to be friendly to Jody, Jody nails its head to a post and then brutally beats Jesse into submission for it. Years later, Jody forces Jesse to cry 'uncle' while twisting his arm so bad the bone snaps out. In the present times, Jody pulls a repeat again when he shoots Tulip in the head at Marie's request. While Jesse watches. With that smug, superior expression all the while. Later, when Marie finally orders Jesse's death, Jody isn't content with just killing him, oh no. He has to break and humiliate him and make him beg first. When Jesse finally strangles Jody to death, Jody is too twisted to feel anything but pride that his abuses turned Jesse into a killer.
 * Dr. Destiny in the pages of Sandman, transforms from a standard, somewhat campy supervillain into a nightmare inducing lunatic. When first seen Destiny comes across as a harmless, even somewhat pitiable, man. This impression goes out the window when he, for no real reason, casually murders the woman who had given him a ride, made pleasant small talk with him, and given him a coat. Once the good doctor regains the Materioptikon, a ruby used by Morpheus to create reality from the fabric of dreams, Destiny shows off just how bad he truly is. Sitting in a diner, over a twenty-four period Destiny begins steadily driving the establishment's patrons and employees mad. He makes them have sex with each other, mutilate themselves, and torture and kill each other. At one point he gives them their minds back and when they demand to know why he's doing this to them, he responds, "Because I can." By the time he's finished all of the diner's inhabitants are dead. All while this was going on, Dr. Destiny was using the power of the ruby to drive everyone on the planet mad. One disturbing instance had him making a kids' show host tell his viewers to slice open their wrists. When Morpheus asks Destiny what his goal is now, Destiny replies that at first he wanted to rule but now he wants to destroy the world and dance in the wreckage.
 * Swamp Thing has Anton Arcane,
 * Fables reimagines Hansel as a Holier Than Thou Jerkass who tortures and kills women for implied sexual gratification (starting with the witch that tried to eat them), up to and including his own sister. Cue the resident Action Girl...
 * Hellblazer, by the nature of the series, has plenty of many varieties for John Constantine to take on.
 * The First of the Fallen: It's said when Lucifer was cast into hell, the First was already at the bottom. Far more depraved, violent and sadistic than the Morningstar, the First is introduced as a trader in souls who John bests in a battle of wits. The First promptly devotes all energy to vengeance to destroy John in every way, shape and form while destroying his friends and loved ones and condemning a city to an orgy of blood and violence simply for his own amusement. The First shows no loyalty to allies and frequently destroys them, in one instance changing demon lord Nergal into a mortal to torture him simply for amusement. In his cruelest act, the First captured the soul of John's innocent sister and played upon her love for her hell bound husband to manipulate her into staying in hell to split the torture between them.
 * The serial killer known as The Family Man was the first human being John Constantine ever killed. The Family Man was an old man with a penchant for happy families. Upon locating them, with a mother, father, and children, he would murder them by lacerating their bodies and ending by slashing their throats. Having murdered his own parents as a child, the Family Man had a habit of leaving no witnesses with his victims including John's estranged father. The Family Man remains one of the most evil and disturbing villains in Hellblazer's annals.
 * Joshua Wright, John's Evil Counterpart, was an unscrupulous magician with no compunction about rape, manipulation or murder. Wright seduced John Constantine's former lover Isabelle Bracknell, and made her his Scarlet Woman, a woman he could practice all his magic through. When he got bored of her, Wright would drive her to the lowest depths for a laugh, forcing her through painful body modification, got her pregnant to make her get an abortion and have the aborted fetus implanted under her skin, and had her prostitute herself. In his own words, he was merely amusing himself at this point. When he got tired of her, he murdered her with a hammer. When confronted by John, Wright shows no remorse, gloating "that's what magic's all about, innit? Fucking someone. One way or another."
 * The Unwritten: Pullman, the most visible member of the Ancient Conspiracy is a sadistic murderer who kills multiple people with relish; this includes a little girl he smothered to death with a pillow. At times he goes out of his way to kill when he has absolutely no reason to execute the victims. Pullman admits his hatred for storytellers and goes out of his way to make such targets deaths as painful as possible. Seven thousand years old, Pullman has had time to wrack up an impressive count of misdeeds, including when he was travelling with Gilgamesh himself, and raped or killed a woman that he sneered he 'used as cattle ought to be' when confronted. Pullman is ultimately revealed as attempting to say the Leviathan, the creature behind all stories, in order to achieve his own death, as his own story as Cain, the first murderer, will not allow him to die. however, he has no intention of dying alone, and when he's dealt with deathblow by the heroes, he gloats to hero Tom at 'dragging his bitch' with him, having murdered Tom's girlfriend before receiving the final blow.
 * Transmetropolitan features The Smiler. In a world nearly without ethics, he goes above and beyond the call of evil. If you want a rundown, he has his campaign coordinator publicly assassinated to win sympathy for himself after his campaign went into the gutter; he has his family killed in an "accident" to again win sympathy; he has a member of his State Sec pull a sniper spree on civilians so that no one would notice the freak storm brewing nearby, a storm that causes massive damage and loss of life, all so he could wipe the evidence against him from existence (and that was a fool's errand as Spider kept his own private records, meaning that the Smiler did what he did for nothing); he has a peaceful protest of college students riddled with bullets at the first opportunity of "I thought he was pulling a gun"; he allows the brutal murderers of an innocent kid to go free and orders the cops to butcher all of the protesters as soon as violence was initiated (and it was done so by the murderers) and then (briefly) used his power to prevent the media from even acknowledging the riot and the slaughter of innocent civilians from happening!. This man would make Satan cringe, and this is just the incidents that immediately come to mind. And just to add insult to injury, he also masturbates into the American flag whenever he's stressed.
 * Tao from the Wildstorm Universe, was one of the few who predicted The End of the World as We Know It, and what did he do? He Brainwashed the two most powerful beings on Earth and turned them into being his sex-slaves just to make sure they would not try to push the Reset Button. And that's not even the worst thing he ever did...
 * Prometheus started out as a Magnificent Bastard in his initial appearance when created by Grant Morrison. He then went on to suffer severe Villain Decay in most of his follow-up appearances...until JLA: Cry for Justice. In his grand return after years of limbo (after a special one-shot used Final Crisis to retcon all of the non Morrison/Villain Decay stories involving he character as being an impostor), he unleashed a wave of chaos, carnage, and torture on the heroes of the DCU that rivaled even the worst Big Bad in the worst Crisis.  Why? Because as a kid, his criminal parents were shot in front of him by the police. The series may have been incredibly criticized, but there's no denying that Prometheus is easily one of the most monstrous characters in the DCU.
 * Aquaman's Arch Enemy Black Manta, the guy who killed Aquaman's young son. Even after Aquaman restored his humanity and cured his autism, Black Manta still stabbed him in the back while boasting to him that, deep down, in his heart of hearts, Manta is just a murderous bastard who wants to see Aquaman die slowly and painfully -- just like his son.
 * His animated Captain Ersatz in the form of Devil Ray was even worse. While Black Manta has some genuine Magnificent Bastard moments, Devil Ray is a bloodthirsty psychopath who loves nothing more than slaughtering everyone in sight, often making sure that they die slowly and in excruciating pain. His dialogue with a Deadman-possessed Wonder Woman firmly cements this.
 * The Flash has a Complete Monster of an Arch-Nemesis in Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash. It was long clear that he was a Smug Snake with no regard for human life, and he was responsible for murdering Barry Allen's wife and eventually driving Barry to kill him to save a life. But with recent revelations in the new "Flash" series, there's no going back for Thawne.  It's also implied that he, possibly along with Darkseid turning Batman into a Chrono Omega bomb after Final Crisis, has screwed up time with his shit. The Flashpoint event seems to show it even further. The kicker? It's out of pure selfishness. Not out of sadism, conquest, or lust for destruction, but because he's a selfish man who plans to get what he wants at the expense of everyone else. And editing his own history will no doubt make him even worse.
 * Grodd. Take a gorilla. Now make him ungodly strong, superhumanly smart, and give him exceptionally strong psionic abilities. Sound frightening? Now make him a homicidally violent, megalomaniacal, and completely unrepentant sociopath. Yeah, not good. His most well-known feat was being the one who kickstarted Hunter Zolomon's Start of Darkness into Zoom by severely injuring him and leaving him crippled. His reputation for having both a short fuse and an incredible propensity for manipulation has made him one of the villains whom all the other villains hate and often fear, with the ones who are willing to work with him on their own volition being few and far between. And he is a racist. His attitude towards human beings is weirdly offensive. It gets worse in Flashpoint. See, the Grodd of Earth-1 is a sociopathic, megalomaniacal prick who treats everyone as a means to an end. The Flashpoint Grodd? He's a genocidal maniac who conquered and slaughtered most of Africa because he was bored. His supremely callous, egocentric behavior towards the few survivors of his run firmly cements his status as a total bastard.
 * At first, Superboy-Prime simply comes across as a whiny bitch who wants the DC universe to go back to the way he wanted it to be. However, as Infinite Crisis goes on, he slowly becomes mad with power and begins killing characters left and right, his genocide being practically unstoppable  He does have some excuse, though. After his whole world, including his adoptive parents and girlfriend, was destroyed, he chose not to go for the new one in order to help and defeat the Big Bad and, as a result, was stranded in pocket dimension for years (maybe decades). And then Prime finds out that said new universe is worse than all that died so it could live...in the beginning, he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist whose goal was to create a better world. His being bullied at school also explains why he started to beat up Connor, who had been a huge Jerkass for quite some time. He also seems to be pretty pissed off at the DC writers for making him one of these after his universe is restored, as not even his parents will accept him now. This last point.
 * Alexander Luthor is higher in regards to vileness and with less so-called excuse. This bastard causes ALL the pain and suffering that precedes the story in order to justify his goal to Golden Age Superman. He manipulates Superman into thinking bringing Earth-2 back will save Lois Lane's life when he knows damn well it won't, even though Superman and Lois have been like parents for him. He betrays people like Pariah and Power Girl without a shred of remorse, is a big factor in Superboy-Prime's descent into madness, and actually pushes Batman to nearly SHOOT him when he almost kills Nightwing. His death at the hands of Lex Luthor and the Joker was more than deserved. This just goes to further prove what The Question said in Justice League Unlimited: "No matter what world he may call home, Luthor is Luthor."
 * American Vampire: Skinner Sweet. Ax Crazy, Chaotic Evil...and  Even before he became a vampire, he was far more psychotic than most Wild West outlaws ever were. The European vampire covens also qualify on this, but Skinner's crazier and more powerful. If leading a band of rapist murderers in the Old West isn't enough, out of nothing but spite, Skinner sent a poisoned bottle of wine to his nemesis Sheriff Book's wife under the pretense it was from Book himself. After becoming a vampire, Sweet went on a savage rampage in his old town, slaughtering everyone he could find and making colorful...arrangements with the corpses. He then infected Book with vampirism to degrade him further. If that's not enough, decades later, Sweet double crosses a vampire partner of his and all his allies solely because he just "has to be the only one left standing", and when that fails, injects one ally's pregnant wife with his blood to infect her baby. Why does he do it? In his words: "Why the Hell not?"
 * Dracula is an ancient, pure evil monster. The creator of the evil, and racist Carpathian vampire strain, Dracula dominated his progeny into launching genocidal warfare against other species of vampires, exterminating many who simply wanted to live in peace. After being bound and imprisoned by the vampire hunting Vassals of the Morning Star, Dracula was occasionally able to reach out, twisting the minds of mortals into homicidal insanity, often forcing them to murder their loved ones. When he encounters the leader of the Vassals, Linden Hobbes, who was one such victim, Dracula brutally attempts to dismember him, mocking him all the while with a vision of Hobbes' dead son attacking him. The reason? It's just too much fun not to kill him that way.


 * Martian Manhunter
 * Commander Blanx appeared only twice in the 1970s but he made up for limited appearances with not rage, or hate, but pure, cold-blooded sociopathy. For reasons known only to himself, Blanx restarted the war between the Pole Dwellers (Pale/White Martians) and the Desert Dwellers (Green Martians). Meeting J'onn J'onnz in single combat, Blanx was victorious through cheating, having one of his henchmen suckerpunch J'onn from behind; he then exiled J'onn to the desert. Following J'onn's teleporation to Earth, Blanx followed his foe there and tried to kill him, not out of hatred, but because "You're a cool one J'onn. I'll sleep better when you're gone." His invasion resulted in numerous human deaths and required the entire JLA to defeat. Years later, J'onn returned to Mars to discover that Blanx had completely destroyed it, using the Blue Flame that provided the planet's fire to set the entire planet ablaze. When asked why, Blanx revealed that he did it for money: an offworld mining corporation had offered to buy Mars, but would only sell it to Blanx if he was last remaining Martian. Blanx did them one better, killing not only every Martian, but Mars itself, engineering a Class 6 apocalypse out of sheer greed and apathy. In terms of utter soullessness, no Martian Manhunter villain has ever surpassed him.
 * J'onn's first enemy (in current continuity), his own brother Malefic, was probably one of the worst. Malefic engineered a psychic plague that incinerated the rest of the Green Martian race out of nothing but spite and envy at being the only Green Martian without telepathy. The reason he's not a telepath? He committed Mind Rape, an unthinkable crime in Green Martian society, and was punished by having his psychic powers and memory stripped away. So Malefic committed genocide on his own race over a punishment that he wholly deserved. As if this wasn't enough, Malefic was so hellbent on ruining J'onn's life after the latter defeated him that he followed him to Earth and murdered Karen Smith, J'onn's (as Detective John Jones) partner on the police force. This was the last straw for J'onn and he threw Malefic into the sun. The saddest part about all of this is that J'onn was the only person who was ever sympathetic to Malefic because they were brothers.
 * Teen Titans: Trigon The Terrible is the devil incarnate. A demonic overlord who rules an empire where countless souls are kept in horrible bondage, with those who dare to resist (and 'resistance' can be defined as 'don't do as ordered quick enough) are ruthlessly exterminated, Trigon wishes to extend his dominion to earth and for that end, disguised himself as a handsome human being to impregnate a woman named Arella, revealing his true form and taunting her after. After invading earth, Trigon dominates the soul of his daughter Raven and corrupts her into a monster, forcing her to attack her own world and friends. Trigon's brutality extends to exterminating entire worlds simply to make a lesson. With no redeeming features whatsoever, Trigon is the most terrifying and powerful foe the Teen Titans ever faced
 * Nekron, the Big Bad of Blackest Night, manages to slip into Complete Monster territory. The deciding point is when he turns the resurrected heroes into Black Lanterns, which lead to And I Must Scream: these Black Lanterns aren't truly dead, and instead are forced against their will to torment and kill those closest to them (unlike the other Black Lanterns, who are twisted mimics of the reanimated persons). As an Eldritch Abomination, he would be Above Good and Evil and thus exempt from Monsterdom, if it weren't for the fact that he actively schemed and plotted to increase his personal power at the expense of other beings. He's not as emotionless as he thinks... Interestingly, he seems to have become one of these by accident; Blackest Night writer Geoff Johns repeatedly stressed in interviews that Nekron is a fundamental force of the universe too alien to define by human morality. Let's just say the fans disagree.
 * Krona's arrogance led to the creation of entropy / evil etc., but if that was just a result of him holding the Idiot Ball, the stuff he did after that put him well across the Moral Event Horizon. War of the Green Lanterns retconned him into being the one who was behind the Manhunter's annihilating a sector, but we had seem him do far, far worse long before we learnt that, and at the absolute apex of his villainy he was callously destroying entire universes because he thought he could do better. The most chilling thing about him is that he can commit mass murder on a multiversal scale with zero compunction, and believe he was completely in the right to do so.
 * Brightest Day
 * D'kay D'razz, the 2nd Green Martian in existence, was an amoral Mad Scientist back in the day and only got worse after being psychically and physically isolated from her race as punishment for her crimes. To cope with being alone on Earth, she killed a woman and stole her identity, sealed her memories of her true self away, and started a family. When she sensed J'onn's revival, her true memories returned. The first thing she did after remembering everything was to graphically murder her husband and kids. She is obsessed with the idea of reviving the Green Martian race with J'onn and nearly killed Miss Martian, whom she saw as competition for J'onn. D'kay's monstrous nature is reflected in her physical appearance; thanks to her mental instability and violent nature, her shapeshifting has a distinct Lovecraftian flavor to it. Then it turns out.
 * Deathstorm, the Black Lantern Firestorm. An inhuman super-powered zombie, you'd assume Deathstorm is completely devoid of emotion. Only, while most Black Lanterns are content with getting a strong enough emotional response, he manages to go about even the most menial of tasks actively, with sadistic glee. Add to this possessing all the immense powers of Firestorm (along with the ability to transmute organic material), and you've got what the Entity has dubbed the greatest threat to its existence. His transgressions include, among other things, murdering Jason Rusch's girlfriend Gehenna by transmuting her into salt, using information unwillingly plucked from Jason's mind (except he already knew how to and just wanted to screw with Jason) before slowly ripping out her heart, kidnapping Professor Stein and Jason's dad in the hopes of goading Ronnie and Jason into triggering a new Big Bang, and, finally,  While his Totally Radical speech pattern and one-liners have given him a bit of an amusing streak, he's crossed the line far too many times to be considered anything other than a Complete Monster. It's clearly implied that Deathstorm's actions were enough to fully charge the Black Lantern Battery from the sheer amounts of rage/grief/fear he caused. Is it any wonder that he became
 * You know Lono from 100 Bullets? Try to find one redeeming trait about him. Come on, just one. Rapist, killer, no empathy for anyone...Why, yes, he has fans. In his 2nd talking appearance in the series, he tracks down the guy who took his money from him, kills him and takes back what was his. He also He also has a hell smile from the shadows that would make the devil feel a chill go up his spine.
 * Scalped features Mr. Brass, the Torture Technician of the Hmong gangsters. He is a short, mild-mannered man with one arm who's also a terrifying sadist. When introduced, Mr. Brass informs a prisoner he never asks a question twice and has him 'pick a number', one through ten. The man selects a number which turns out to be the body part Brass removes. Brass proceeds to remove his eye before even asking a question. Brass spends his time torturing his way through the residents of the reservation, largely for his own pleasure. How brass satisfies his 'peculiarities' (he has a penchant for raping and murdering teen prostitutes, male and female) disgusts even the ruthless mob boss Lincoln Red Crow. In the gritty, dark Black and Gray Morality world that is Scalped's Rez, Brass is the worst the world has to offer.
 * William "Billy" Hayes, better known as Harm from the initially light-hearted comic series Young Justice was a teenage supervillain who was also a complete sociopath. Adopted by loving parents, Harm initially terrified his adoptive younger sister Greta and her fears were proven right when Harm murdered her in her bathtub to seal a demonic pact and give himself super powers. 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, for sheer spite, forced his father to throw himself into one of the fire-pits of Apokolips while Harm possessed him to kill them.