What makes a good Sup Forums rogues gallery?

What makes a good Sup Forums rogues gallery?

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>connection to hero
>have "part" of a hero (usually a shadow archetype in some way)
>good/memorable designs
>variety yet something that groups them all together in a couple overarching categories (ie aliens but why they are evil and powers are different, or classic batman villains are mostly mentally ill but different kinds)

and most important
>good story

A diverse set of abilities/gimmicks, interesting motivations/interactions with the hero, but mostly good writing to back them up

Spider-man and Batman almost got the same villains.

I going to expect Spider-man going to fight a marvel version of Ras al ghul Or Batman fighting the dc version of Doctor octopus.

diversity, not in skin color but in powers and what they represent (like crime lords to supervillain and every thing else)

it's all about the clothes. snappy dressers.

If a superhero had an average joe blow human as a villain with a great story, it'd be a great villain.

Shoving in the "big bad" of the superhero and writing a shit story makes for a waste of time and probably a handful of retcons so people forget about it.

If you look at DC's best rogues-- Batman's, Flash's, Wonder Woman's --on an individual basis, they're not actually all that interesting. Batman's are just a detective newspaper strip's gimmicky gangsters, Flash's are just themed bank-robbers, Wonder Woman's are just whatever crazy thing Marston or Kanigher could come up with to put on the cover. What makes them good is mostly just how they've been built upon over the years.

However, the one superhero whose rogues gallery transcends that is Superman's. Bizarro, Mxyzptlk, Brainiac, and the Phantom Zone criminals basically created supervillains as we know them today. Instead of crooks and robbers they're all bizarre sci-fi concepts with their own strange origin.

>Spider-man and Batman almost got the same villains.

Explain yourself

Each villain has at least 3-4 good stories in them.

>DC's best rogues
>Wonder Woman's

>implying Superman has the best or most memorable Rogues

You're deluded

>basically created supervillains as we know them today
you're gonna need to back that up friendo

Flash's villains look like chill motherfuckers.

I don't understand why you seem to be proud of being a casual.

Batman's Doc ock would be Huge Strange

Iron Man vs. Armor Adventures is a good case study for difference between a good rogue gallery and a bad one. Normal Iron Man has two main types of villains: guys in armor and random shit leftover from the silver age like Mandarin and Whiplash. AA split the difference by nearly every villain a variation of "guy in a suit", but gave them all different enough designs and gimmicks that it never felt like they were recycling the same idea. Even characters like Crimson Dynamo got heavily reworked to be more than "Russian guy in Iron Man Armor".

So you're gonna fall back on the classic "anyone who disagrees with me is a casual" strategy?

>Huge Strange

Is that what they called him in college?

>SUPER-Gorilla Good

wut.

>Huge Strange

Mysterio=Scarecrow
Green Goblin=Joker
Sandman=Clayface
Maggia=Falcone family
Lizard=Killer Croc
Kaine Parker=Jason Todd
Shriek=Harley Quinn

Before Superman, heroes mostly fought gangsters, robbers, corrupt businessmen, and of course Nazi soldiers and spies.

Superman did too, but eventually moved to fighting aliens, monsters, magic creatures, mad scientists, and mythological figures, which lead directly to the types of supervillains we've seen ever since.

Look at some Golden Age villains: Icicle (ice-themed gangster), Solomon Grundy (zombie gangster), Joker (joke-themed gangster), Fiddler (music-themed robber), etc.

Now look at Superman's villains in the early 50's: Brainiac (an alien), Bizarro (a mirror-universe Superman), Mr. Mxyzptlk (an extra-dimensional magician), Titano (giant monster), etc.

Though we still had gimmicky and superpowered criminals going into the 60's the more creative sci-fi style was what the JLA and Avengers used to create their villains to this very day. Characters like Reverse Flash, Grodd, Kanjar Ro, Sinestro, Despero, Starro, the Kree and Skrulls, Thanos, and even Kirby's cosmic characters draw on the sci-fi tradition that Superman brought to comics in the early 50's.

one thing i really like about all of these guys is that unlike batman's rouges (who are a bunch of crazy, sometimes down right childish, neurotic loonies) or superman's rouges (who all kind of meld into "alien weirdoes and luthor"), or even spiderman's rouges (who for the most part are petty thieves or maniacs with superpowers) these actually feel like adult professionals, like i can actually see these guys not getting lost on the cops and robbers game, like at the end of the day they can take off the suit and go on with their lives because this whole superhero thing is just a silly game.
but it goes beyond that, out of the superviallins out there, they are the guys who have to put up with the flash, the motherfucking flash, superman's villains are usually on his same powerlevel, but these are just normal people so they actually have to get clever about it, they dont rely JUST on their superpower, they have to actually outsmart the flash at every turn.
ON TOP OF ALL THAT, there is a real strong sense of unity in them, more than anywhere else, any other rouge gallery will team up ocasionally but its always a game of who can stab the other in the back first, these guys actually have a copacetic organization going on.
they feel like they are the guys who take it the most seriously AND also the least seriously.

Yeah, there's cheetah, and ares, and... egg fu?

He says while ignoring shitty Batman villains like White Rabbit and Kite Man

>spiderman's rouges (who for the most part are petty thieves or maniacs with superpowers)
I can only think of Sandman. Most of Spidey's enemies are genetic mutations and soviets.

Yeah but Batman has way more than two good rogues.

>Kite Man
>Shitty.

Yes, King, Kite Man is shitty.

Ok, you're leaving out a bunch of Batman's biggest villains in favor of the ones that hapen to fit. What about Bane? What about Poison Ivy, Two-Face, Riddler, Freeze, Mad Hatter, Penguin, or Ventriloquist?

the shocker, the rhino, the enforcers, hammerhead, the green goblin, carnage, the vulture, hydro
they are all either psychos or robbers who are too stupid to use their powers in any really clever ways

Green Goblin is not The Joker. Stop this meme

Of the people you listed only Shocker is a thief and only Green Goblin and Carnage are psychos.

Rhino is a Soviet
Enforcers are mercenaries
Hammerhead is a gangster
Vulture is a petty bitch who wants revenge for getting ripped off
And Hydro-man wants revenge on Spider-Man for turning him into a living blob.

Penguin = King pin
Venom = Bane
Two-face = Harry
Ventriloquist = Mr. Negative
Electro = mr. freeze
Poison ivy = spider-queen
chameleon = riddler (that will be stretch)

Would Mad Hatter be Judas then?

The man hatter is already a redundant villain.

And Judas isnt?

You got a point user.

The only exceptions, of course, are Reverse Flash, who's a psychopath obsessed with Flash, and Grodd, who's a power-hungry warlord.

I think Yahtzee said it best when he said Batman has the best villains because they're all reflections of Batman.
>Two-Face, his duality
>Scarecrow, his use of fear
>Poison Ivy, his, uhhhmm....shapely buttocks

And Abra Kadabra, who is yet another psychopath obsessed with Flash.
Also three are like three different Reverse Flash,

>What makes them good is mostly just how they've been built upon over the years.

That's the true secret to what makes a rogues gallery great.

If you look at the strongest rogues galleries, they're always on series where the same handful of villains gets passed on from one writer to the next. Every writer adds their own little changes and embellishments to the villains, and usually those changes don't stick, but when they do, they become a part of the villain from then on and make that villain a stronger character going forward. It's like survival of the fittest, where the good ideas revitalize the character while the bad ideas just fade away.

But if you look at the weakest rogues galleries, they tend to be on series where every writer makes up an entire new set of villains instead of using any of the old villains from previous writers. Nobody ever gets built up, so nobody ever gets the chance to become memorable. Returning to the genetics metaphor, the villains are comparable to a stagnant population. They cannot adapt or change because writers never use them. If you're not growing, you're dying.

Every reverse-flash is the rogue of a different flash, and each has their own schtick.

>Every reverse-flash is the rogue of a different flash
Professor Zoom was both a Barry and Wally rouge.

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of that cartoon, but I did like how there was some variety to the villains. They even made a Doctor Doom that was a more fitting nemesis to Iron Man than the F4 ever were, even if Doom's hatred of Richards is one of his most notable traits.

Every villain needs to either be a reflection of the hero or his exact opposite or paradoxically both.

Naw, see him in like issue 5 or so of the current Batman ongoing, dude is swole as fuck.

Strong "meh" on that. I still believe the french pulp antagonist Fantômas is the first proper supervillain, at least going back as far as I can tell.

atlasobscura.com/articles/the-criminal-history-of-fantomas-frances-favorite-fictional-villain

>Created in 1911, he is a gentleman criminal who perpetrates gruesome, elaborate crimes with no clear motivation. He hangs a victim inside a church bell so that when it rings blood rains on the congregation below. He attempts to kill Juve, the detective on his trail, by trapping the man in a room that slowly fills with sand. He skins a victim and makes gloves from the dead man’s hands in order to leave the corpse’s fingerprints all over the scene of a new crime.

Seriously, this was literally a century before Death of the Family but somehow just as fucking bonkers. If any relic of the pulp era needs a revival, it's Fantômas.

I've been getting back into Payday 2, and this has actually been on my mind. The Payday gang is basically a "real world" version of the Rogues, a colorful gang of characters who at the end of the day are just professional career criminals who are mostly just in it for the money. If it weren't for their lack of any real powers, the Payday gang would actually make great supervillains for that reason alone.

Poison Ivy represents his repressed sexuality

Not really, he was only a Wally rogue because of the "Nemesis vs. Sidekick" dynamic. Wally's reverse is Zolomon.

Batman lacks a repressed sexuality. Poison Ivy isn't a representation, she's a mirror. Manufactured persona using sexuality as a tool to manipulate; Poison Ivy's femme fatale versus Bruce Wayne's irreverent playboy.

Hugo Strange is usually depicted as ripped as hell in comics as a parallel to his obsession with Batman.

I bought this comic from a yard sale back in the day. It's the contrast of colours and powers in the villains that made it look appealing. Still one of my favourite covers.

>he was only a Wally rogue because of the "Nemesis vs. Sidekick" dynamic
And?, he is still a reverse flash and he still fought Wally twice, that's enough to classify and a Wally rouge.

By that metric Joker is a Flash rogue and Poison Ivy is a Superman rogue.

Superman has a pretty mediocre rogues gallery. Only a few like Mxyzptlk, Bizzaro, Luthor stand out. Metallo, Titano, Terra man are fodder. Brainiac is one note.

Captain Marvel did it before Superman. Superman owes it big time to the big red cheese since silver age Superman borrowed a lot from him.

Would Spidey's Al' Ghul be Morlun?

every member should parallel or reverse the hero's shtick in some way, with as little overlap as possible.

Yeah, everyone knows Hobgoblin is the Joker.

Superman does have some of the best rogues in comics. Luthor, Brainiac, Zod, Mxy, Bizzaro, Doomsday. These are all well known and loved villains. Most heroes are lucky to get two villains anyone gives a shit about

There aren't many people who give two shits about more than a few of Superman's rogues.

That's more than most hero's. Only Batman, Flash and Spider-man have more that people care about. Unless you wanna count entire teams

In practice most people only care about a few of a hero's rogues in general. If you asked people to name their three favorite Batman villains I'd put money on 75% of people listing Joker and Harley for two of them.

I honestly never knew about Braniac or Mxy until fairly recently when I was watching the Animated Series. I knew Lex Luthor from the movies and only know Doomsday from the Death of Superman publicity stunt. No clue who Zod is. That being said, Bizarro is the only villian of his I find entertaining, when he's written as just misinterpreting the situation.

>No clue who Zod is

He's been in two movies user. One of them was actually good

>One of then was actually good
No wonder you think Superman has a great rogues gallery.

Who has better then, Aquaman, iron man , hulk ? Nobody cares about their villains except for one or two

>Aquaman

Black man who hates white fish. His brother.

>iron man

red Russian guy, his evil business, captain marvel, magic Chinese guy, beers.

>hulk

Red hulk, yellow hulk, blue hulk, Black hulk, hulk, Green sinestro, Green fish face. The wrecking crew

I feel the U foes have potential

I should know better than to question Adam West Batman, but why are Joker and Penguin wearing domino masks? They're in full costume. What identity are they trying to protect?

Batman, Spider-Man, X-men, Fantastic Four. Public opinion doesn't even matter in how good a rogues gallery is. Superman is a A lister, so off course he'll have a more famous rogues gallery.

Joker didn't have an entire arc dedicated to Flash dealing with him, Professor Zoom did, and was also major antagonist in Rouge Wars which was the conclusion to Johns run, making him more relevant than most of the rouges Wally faced during his run.

>X-men, Fantastic Four.

Those are teams, user and FF4 is a stretch. They have Doom and Galactus. Nobody gives a fuck about the others

Hard to say. Has to have a good gimmick and good stories. Batman has dozens of great villains but most of the heroes only have a few. Even the A listers.
I'm a WWfag but I have to agree with laughing vegita, Wondy has the least amount of great villains.

>Electro = mr. freeze

...How the fuck do you ever get this?

Elemental villains.

Molecule Man (when he's actually being a villain), Klaw, Mole Man, Annihilus, Blastaar, Diablo, Terrax, and Namor (who people blatantly give a shit about) say hi.

Mr. Freeze isn't even an elemental villain, he just have freeze-guns and a handicap that requires him to wear a suit, and he sure as fuck doesn't share his temperament or motivation with Electro.

A variety of fun but flawed characters, fleshed out beyond "I wanna be evil"

The problem with Diana is that, unlike most heroes, she isn't afraid to put her villains down for good.
It's why she has so few mortal enemies. She's on her third Cheetah and it feels like she has some kind of soft spot for Giganta no matter how much of a cunt she can be.
But everyone else is either some kind of Greek myth come to life that always proves super difficult to kill forever, or some poor bastard on the receiving end of a well deserved neck snapping.

Although for the life of me, I can't figure out why she suffers Doctor Psycho to continue living.
Maybe someone on DC's editorial is from the future, saw how popular Peter Dinklage was going to become, and kept the character around in hopes he'd play him in a Wonder Woman film.

That seems kind of lazy, though.
Even if you want to count Freeze as an elemental villain (He's not), the two don't even share an element.
It's like saying Shocker and Kite Man are the same character because both of them are regularly shit on by writers are treated like walking punchlines.

>All that crap

He's right, nobody gives a fuck about those losers.

>The problem with Diana is that, unlike most heroes, she isn't afraid to put her villains down for good.
Hello Geoff Johns. How's life, you hack? Having fun hiring your cronies for the ambitious and revolutionizing Rebirth?

Iron Man has The Ghost, who is great and ourguy.

To fit thematically into the setting.

I feel like Powerpuff Girls (and maybe Kim Possible) manage to have good rogues galleries without needing deep thematic connections or decades of lore to build upon.

>Draken
>Shego
>Monkeyfist
>The dad and his homo son
>The stuffed animal lady
>Fish guy
>Scottish guy
That's about all I can remember

I keep hearing this all the time, but Diana actually rarely kills important characters.
>Dinklage as Dr. Psycho
Now I actually want this

people keep conflating Kingdom Come and Injustice with the main continuity

>there will never be a crossover between Fantomas and the Shadow
Can you fucking imagine these two going at each other ?

A Sup Forumsgues gallery?

Sup Forums
"Sup Forums"
Sup Forums

Allies are /tg/ and /m/ I think I hope

tumblr too, obviously

Also
>lizard=croc
Fucking idiots. Lizard is clearly manbat.

The most important aspects are distinct visuals, ability to make the villains compelling in some aspect, and their relationship towards the hero (whether it's antagonistic, tragic, or even indifferent).

For me, some good rogues galleries are
>Spider-Man
>Batman
>Flash
>Darkwing Duck
>Howard The Duck
>King Fu Panda (movies)
>Dick Tracey
>Captain America
>Fantastic Four
>Superman

It's all about creating an aspect of the villains that make them stand out to the viewer/reader. The more of a spectrum they hit, the better the gallery in most cases.

Design and presenting a challange is all that matters. Take Spider-man, what the fuck do Goblins, Rhino's, Electricity, stage magicians, etc have to do with spiders? And most are fairly one note. However Ditko's incredible design work (which he doesnt get nearly enough credit for) and (especially in the Ditko/Lee run) the fact they regularly pose a threat the Peter and force him to think elevates them into one of the best.

Honestly, I'd prefer Fantômas versus Batman: the world's greatest detective versus the world's greatest criminal. Two masters of terror, pitting their wits against each other in the most elaborate game of cat and mouse possible.

She kills one guy in Kingdom Come and everyone forgets that her actions in the story are contextualized.

>teleports behind him, pssh nothing personal
>"he left me no choice"

God, Kingdom Come is awful. I mean, yeah, Alex Ross's art is fantastic, but the writing is just absolute dogshit.

>Distinguishing characteristics
>Ease of comparison and contrast with the hero
>Strong writing
>An actual aim in life
>Being good at motivating the heroes to act against them
>Being vile enough to hate, yet interesting enough to crave more