10 Comics Where You Couldn’t Help But Root For The Villain
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy... who you also kinda root for.
When you read a comic book, who do you find yourself rooting for? It's almost always the guy in the cape, right? With the cool gadgets and one-liners? Batman; Superman; Spider-Man; The Avengers; after all, they have their names on a bunch of books for a reason, surely?
Well, it's not always that simple. As Dexter, Breaking Bad, the Punisher and countless others have proven across decades of TV, cinema and comic books, audiences love to hate a good bad guy.
Whether it's a deliberate choice on the writer's part, complete accident, or one just happens to go for the underdog, some audiences can't help but find themselves relating to the villain of the piece. We now live in a society where Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his performance as the Joker - people just can't get enough of a good baddie.
Here we run through ten comic books where we found ourselves rooting for the villain of the piece - either through design, accident or pure sympathy. Not that we condone any of the acts of villainy portrayed herein... but sometimes, well, it is fun to watch.
And let's face it, those heroic types could do with taking down a peg or two.
10. The Joker - Batman: White Knight
What if the Joker, but sane? So posits Sean Murphy's White Knight. Set in an alternate universe where the Batman has finally gone off the deep end, losing the support of Gotham, the Bat-family and the GCPD, an unlikely contender rises to face this public enemy. Yes, the Joker, with the help of an experimental new medical treatment to cure his madness.
Released from Arkham, the once Clown Prince of Crime re-invents himself as a politician, campaigning against the brutality of the Batman and drawing public attention to the collateral damage in his never-ending war against crime. And you know what, he's kind of right.
That readers find themselves rooting for the Joker and Harley is kind of the point, but Murphy works in the grey areas - with a Batman who isn't really irredeemable, and a Joker who isn't truly good (or... is he?) In White Knight, Murphy achieves a Joker who readers can root for in his plot against the Batman - all without bashing us over the head with the fact that we Live In A Society.