10 Lame Comic Book Villains (Who Are Actually Incredibly Powerful)

Comic books villains are some of the most fearsome, terrifying, and diverse characters in all of fiction by virtue of comics being a unique medium where pretty much anything can, and has, worked.

To see proof of this phenomenon, consider the fact that the most popular and frightening supervillains are a super-sane clown with multiple backstories, a purple genocidal alien nihilist with a bedazzled glove, and, of course, a handsome trickster god with adult-onset daddy issues and a strange fixation on goat-horned helmets.

But for every good comic book villain, there are ten or more that were created to fill time before the big guns could come back. And these criminals were usually the lamest, most pathetic looking, sounding, and acting characters that comics ever bothered to offer readers.

They were mostly played for laughs, but once in a while these joke-villains were handed far more power than even they realized at the time. In a different timeline or reality, they could have been considered real threats to the heroes with their incredible abilities, but were instead waylaid as comic foils.

Just how lame is Doctor Spectro? When heroes want to make fun of lame villains, they compare them to him. Green Arrow even once stated that he had the worst costume of any criminal ever, and he wasn’t wrong. Spectro is so pathetic that his origin story ended with him being accidentally killed by tension wire. This was latter retconned into being a government conspiracy in an attempt to make him seem more interesting. It didn't work.

Though a common enemy of Captain Atom, Doctor Spectro has made a smattering of appearances in other titles, often ending with his utter humiliation and ridicule for his ludicrous costume and moniker. He was finally put out of his misery by Superboy Prime during the events of Infinite Crisis.

However, this was only revealed in the novelization, as he wasn’t important enough to be killed off in the comics proper.

All of this is a true shame as his powers are actually quite impressive. By manipulating light energy, Doctor Spectro can control the emotions of those around him by shinign different colored beams on them. He can make his opponents too depressed to fight, embolden his minions with artificial courage, or incite chaos by making a crowd of people envious of one another. There are limitless applications for this ability, it just happened to be in the hands of a very unimaginative villain.