5 Reasons The Joker Isn't The Greatest Comic Book Villain

3. He Only Really Bothers One Hero

Okay, so this isn't strictly the case. He has bothered - and indeed killed other heroes (the Jason Todd version of Robin, for example) - but it's all with only one man in mind (Batman, of course). Truly great villains have bigger ambitions and are threats to entire teams of heroes and the universe as a whole. Even when Joker became all-powerful in the Emperor Joker storyline, he focused most of his cosmic abilities on torturing and killing Batman every single day. In other words, even when he's got the power to do whatever he wants, he barely knows what to do with it (not on the same level as certain other characters, anyway). Thanos, Doctor Doom, Kang the Conqueror, Darkseid, Apocalypse, Loki, Gorilla Grodd and Brainiac - for example - are a few villains whose schemes regularly cause trouble for entire teams of superheroes and some of those characters, when in possession of real power (such as the Infinity Gauntlet, the Power Cosmic or the Heart of the Universe), don't just focus the majority of their attention on one man, because they're bigger than that. Joker can cause - and indeed has caused - trouble for other heroes, but other villains do it better.