10 Most Evil Batman Villains

It's not just the Joker...

Joker Arkham Asylum Serious House Serious Earth
DC Comics

Batman might not be DC's darkest hero, but you'd struggle to find a worse place in the publisher's universe than Gotham City. The east coast's urban dystopia is home to more freaks and monsters than most other comic book cities put together, and while they're usually all a riot to read about, sometimes their evil can get a bit overwhelming - both for the Dark Knight, and for us readers.

There are the usual suspects that everyone tends to focus on, and while most tend to rank Batman's rogues based on how compelling they are as characters, there's something simple and slightly more terrifying in ranking them based on how straight up nasty they are.

Naturally, as the medium progressed from the Silver Age of Comics and into the Bronze and Modern Ages from the seventies onwards, so too did the Caped Crusader's antagonists. They got more inventive, more tenacious, and often more deadly.

They test Batman to his limits, both in terms of how resourceful they are, and in terms of how far they can push the vigilante's 'no killing' rule to the extreme. At the same time they can also test readers, enacting all sorts of horrid schemes to prove that Gotham is, well and truly, DC's most disturbing city...

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Content Producer/Presenter
Content Producer/Presenter

Resident movie guy at WhatCulture who used to be Comics Editor. Thinks John Carpenter is the best. Likes Hellboy a lot. Can usually be found talking about Dad Movies on his Twitter at @EwanRuinsThings.