10 Times Comic Book Villains Became Heroes (In A Big Way)

2. Sandman

Sandman Avengers
Marvel Comics / Paul Ryan

It's truly one of the great big Marvel injustices that Sandman didn't get to stay a superhero. In a way, it's a microcosm of the biggest problems that have affected Marvel's Spidey books over the last three decades. Characters went from evolving over a period of years, to existing in a weird temporal quagmire where everything eventually goes back to business as usual.

Still, that doesn't make Sandman's initial arc any less compelling. The character evolved from a villain of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four into an actual Avenger. Sandman! An Avenger! One of the greatest Silver Age Marvel villains ended up becoming one of the best Marvel heroes, and it's something that's not spoken about nearly enough.

But what set Sandman off on this path towards Avengers membership? Well, it was a couple of things. First was the character's unfortunate run-in with Hydro-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #217, which saw the two merge into the being known as Mud-Thing. The incident scarred Sandman, and following a heart-to-heart with the Thing, he decided to go straight.

A couple of team-ups with Spider-Man later, and Sandman eventually ended up joining Silver Sable's Wild Pack, and then the Avengers. Too bad the Wizard had to go ahead and ruin it by bringing back Sandman's old persona a few years later.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.