10 Times Comics Made Terrible Villains Great

Doctor Destiny is not the worst villain on this list. He was an early Justice League enemy and managed to give the team a fair run for their money. However, in an age where new bad guys would show up constantly, he didn’t stand out. He lacked any real motivation and his ability to control dreams was only used for some half-baked plan involving replacing superheroes and hoping no-one would notice.

John Dee was just another face in a villainous crowd until he was reinvented in Neil Gaiman’s masterpiece The Sandman. The series retconned his powers as being derived from a stolen artefact belonging to Morpheus, the personification of dreams, and that by trying to stop him using it, the Justice League had accidentally made him unable to dream.

This drove Dee mad and caused him to start wasting away until he looked inhuman, skin stretched so thinly across his face he no-longer needed a skull mask to look nightmarish. In a chilling story, he took an entire restaurant hostage and submitted them to a series of horrific tortures, before ordering them to kill each other.

Perhaps even worse, the story ended with Doctor Destiny getting exactly what he wanted, his ability to dream restored.