
Comics[]
- Pictured above: The Joker is not just DC's premier Complete Monster, but the Complete Monster as far as comic books go (along with Red Skull over in Marvel comics). An absolutely hilarious yet completely and utterly psychotic Monster Clown, the Joker has committed an impossibly large amount of atrocities over the years in his never-ending war with the Caped Crusader, all because the Joker wants to indulge in what his sick sense of humor deems "funny". He has gone out of his way to hurt Batman by going after the people he loves, infamously beating second Robin Jason Todd nearly to death with a lead pipe and finishing him off with a time-bomb that also killed Jason's mother, along with leaving former Batgirl Barbara Gordon crippled for life by shooting her in the spine with the added bonus of trying to drive her father insane by psychologically breaking him, and murdering the poor commissioner's second wife Sarah. Hardly limited to the Bat family, he has also sold nukes to terrorists, tried to let loose Joker toxin in the atmosphere in order to poison the world due to a health scare, and tried to emotionally crush all of Gotham by murdering its newborn babies along with all sorts of other terrifying schemes. And in a truly horrific Superman storyline where he was able to get access to reality-warping godlike power by stealing it from Mr. Mxyzptlk, he proceeded to transform the world into a hellish landscape where he attempted to wipe out all existence, drove Batman insane by torturing him to death and bringing him back to life over and over again, as well as devouring all of China's inhabitants. And while he does have a girlfriend in the lovable psychopathic ditz Harley Quinn, he does not love her at all, only keeping her around for his personal entertainment and would constantly abuse her in different ways as well as make multiple attempts on her life. While the Joker has also been characterized over the years as a harmless prankster and an obnoxious goofball, it's disturbingly in-character for him as due to his insanity, he's able to bounce between all sorts of roles and alignments like a pinball with Complete Monster being his default, and favorite, setting.
- Roman Sionis a.k.a Black Mask is a crazed, sadistic, and violent-tempered man who is one of Gotham's most dangerous and feared crime lords, He tortured Robin Stephanie Brown with a power drill and other similar tools which almost killed her. But that doesn’t include the horrific lengths he's gone with trying to kill his arch-enemy Catwoman. After Catwoman ruined a heroin and diamond exchange Sionis was conducting with the Russian mob, he was furious and decided that he was going to make her life hell before he killed her. Black Mask ended up finding out her secret identity as Selina Kyle and decided to target her loved ones by bombing a community center she funded, torturing several friends of hers including her surrogate daughter Holly, and finishing it up by driving her sister Maggie nearly insane by butchering her husband in front of her and force-feeding her his eyeballs. And once Catwoman allowed herself to be tortured to death in her comatose sister's place in exchange for Black Mask taking her to a hospital, he had no intention on keeping his promise. Ultimately, the normally averse-to-killing Catwoman ended up putting a bullet in his head when the two crossed paths again. Unfortunately for Catwoman, Black Mask wouldn't stay dead since he was revived as one of Nekron's Black Lantern corps members. After hunting down Catwoman with the intention of murdering her in order to avenge his death, he ended up realizing that she wasn't producing the fearful emotion he wanted, so he decided to kidnap her now severely mentally ill sister as a way to get to her. The fate he had planned for them? The same way he drove Maggie mad while killing her husband: he was going to butcher Maggie and force-feed Catwoman her eyeballs. And the worst thing about this is that Black Mask didn't even need to go this far, any kind of emotional response is good enough for a Black Lantern to collect in order to help with Nekron's return. Black Mask wanted the satisfaction of completely and utterly breaking his arch-enemy.
- Victor Zsasz, a Serial Killer who carves a tally on his body for each person he's killed. To illustrate how prolific he is, one has to look no further than the amount of tallies on his skin. He attempts to justify this by saying that that life is meaningless and he is liberating others from this meaninglessness. However, the guy takes a lot of obvious pleasure from killing and even admits to Batman at one point that he chooses to kill meaning that at heart, he knows that he's a monster and is proud of that fact. Having no standards makes him very sadistic, and his methods of murder are just plain horrific. A great example of Victor at his worst? There was a time where he kidnapped a bunch of runaway and orphaned children, and had them fight each other to the death in gladiator-style matches that can be gambled on by Zsasz's fellow criminals. The last kid standing would have to face Zsasz himself, a battle that the final kid would have absolutely no chance of winning.
- Abattoir, real name Arnold Etkar, born Arnold Etchison, is a psychotic Serial Killer who mainly targets family members, believing them to be evil, and believes he will eat their souls. By the time of his first appearance, he has already killed 19 family members, and was broken out of prison and hired by his cousin, a mayoral candidate, to kill the cousin's wife, as the two were in the midst of a bitter divorce. In his next appearance, as part of a ritual he believes will grant him great power, Abattoir and associates kill numerous doves and cows—along with some people who are in the way—before blowing up the Gotham Bridge as a train is crossing; if not for Batman, thousands would have been killed. Despite being captured yet again, Abattoir is one of the residents of Arkham Asylum who are broken out by Bane. He kills a family of 5, and goes after his cousin Graham. Graham and 12 orphans are on a bus going camping, but Abattoir hijacks the bus, planning to kill Graham and the orphans. Batman saves them, but Abattoir escapes, kidnapping the child of Clayface III and Lady Clayface to force them to help him. Abattoir eventually kidnaps Graham, and places him in a sadistic Death Trap: Graham is placed lightly over a bed of spikes, but every hour a weight drops on Graham's body, pushing him farther onto the spikes. Abattoir is found by Jean-Paul Valley (as Batman), but left to die, which in turn leaves Graham to suffer an agonizing, hours-long Cruel and Unusual Death.
- Deacon Joseph Blackfire is a demented Knight Templar of a cult leader who believes humanity is a lost cause and deserves to be purged. Establishing his cult by kidnapping, torturing, and brainwashing homeless people into becoming his followers, Blackfire uses them to begin butchering criminals across Gotham, from entire crime gangs to petty pickpockets. Brainwashing Batman into assisting him, Blackfire assassinates numerous politicians across the city and kills dozens of police officers and soldiers before seizing control of Gotham City. Blackfire then allows crime and anarchy to run rampant throughout the streets, along with holding mass lynchings and executions regularly and displaying the bodies for all to see. Claiming to be immortal, Blackfire regularly bathes in a huge cauldron of human blood, having used the blood of hundreds of innocents for his baths. When confronted by Batman, Blackfire tries to force him to kill him in order to make himself a martyr and convince his followers to carry on his human-purging quest. Whether he is truly thousands of years old or just a petty con man is left ambiguous, but regardless, Deacon Joseph Blackfire was a narcissistic and misanthropic psychopath who stood out as one of the few villains Batman nearly killed due to his depravity.
- And Batman is hardly the only Bat Family member who throws down with these types of villains: his protege Tim Drake has the Brazilian assassin Vitoria a.k.a the Wanderer as his most loathsome opponent to date. While she was once an innocent little girl, that all changed when a group of men attacked her and chased her into a pit full of highly venomous Brazilian Wandering Spiders. Instead of dying however, she gained the ability to kill anyone with one touch thanks to absorbing the spider's venom, and kills her pursuers once she discovers her powers. While their deaths were justifiable, everything that followed wasn't: Vitoria grew addicted to killing and murdered her own mother before going on an enormous killing spree through South America where she gleefully murdered anyone she wanted. In the present day, Wanderer leads a band of assassins called the Spider's Council in an assault on the League of Assassins and kills tons of people, both assassins and innocent bystanders purely for sport. And when she kills the man who rescued her, she decides that heroes would make for far funner prey and moves on to killing them instead.
- Batwoman also faces off with a Complete Monster in the form of Maro Ito, the vicious second in command of the Medusa organization. A warlock whose powers are based on belief, Maro conjures up famous killers from urban legends such as Bloody Mary and Ashoth by forcing people to channel them through horrific methods of torture and unethical surgery. The most vile example of his powers in action however is the creation of Gotham's Weeping Woman by drowning the children of a woman named Maria. When she committed suicide from the resulting grief, he turned her into the famous ghost and forces her to kidnap and kill countless children much like the legend dictates. And since belief in the ghost is strong in Gotham's barrio, Maria is trapped in this role indefinitely.
- White Eyes of Batman: Dead White is the absolute leader of the supremacist Bavarian Brotherhood in Gotham. A steroid-abusing brute of a man who fancies himself the avenger of Adolf Hitler, White Eyes proceeds a wave of crime violence, arms dealings, and murders through Gotham to unsettle the nation before unveiling his real goal; destroying key points all over America to throw the country into chaos and allow him to take over as supreme dictator, before spreading out to the rest of the world with intention of erasing all of the “mud-races” from the planet. In preparation for this, White Eyes keeps a gallery of enslaved minorities and forces them into grueling and inevitably fatal work for months at a time in an abandoned gold mine, executes his own minions for reasons as varied as simple failure to simply use them as test subjects for his weapons, and kidnaps a young woman named Beth, intending to use her as “breeding stock” and attempting to rape her out of frustration once his base is infiltrated by Batman. Once his plan is toppled, White Eyes simply elects to abandon the rest of his men and blow up the capitol himself, murdering his most trusted henchman once he refuses to abandon the others and taking an entire family hostage to deter Batman from pursuing him.
- William X. Malady of Batman: The Ultimate Evil is a wicked sociopath who makes a profit off of the lives of children. Originally the leader of a child pornography ring ran out of Gotham City, Malady fled the country after having the benevolent Thomas and Martha Wayne gunned down for investigating his crimes. Taking up residence in the foreign country of Udon Khai, Malady immediately installs a private military group that he uses to regularly kidnap innocent children from poor villagers, killing any who attempt to stop them, then uses the children as sex slaves until they wear out from exhaustion, at which point Malady either kills them or simply lets them drop dead. Having subjected hundreds of children to this horrific fate while simultaneously paying pedophiles worldwide to send him videotapes of themselves raping children for him to sell on the black market, Malady has instituted an initiation protocal for his group where, if one wishes to gain access to organization, they must rape a child on film. When Rhama Bgyn, leader of the rebels who fight against Malady's tyranny, has him at gunpoint, Malady pathetically begs for his life and disgustingly offers to "replace" Rhama's late cousin, who died because of Malady. A disturbingly realistic villain who, despite his lack of a gimmick or powers, stands out as one of the most monstrous villains Batman has faced, William X. Malady is described in the perfect manner by Rhama himself: "You are no man. You are a demon! A peddler of children! YOU STEAL CHILDHOOD ITSELF!"
- Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller: Police Commissioner Gillian Loeb is the ringleader behind Gotham's entire criminal underworld, enabling murder sprees, drug peddling, and human trafficking in order to gain power and line his pockets. Frequently bribing politicians and other crooked cops to further his control over the city, Loeb establishes himself as corrupt during a hostage situation, when he tries to have a mental patient shot despite knowing that he'll be killing a baby in the process. Having Jim Gordon beaten into submission for trying to stop crime, while chasing after the Batman, Loeb has a supposedly abandoned apartment firebombed only to act apathetic when he finds it actually filled with homeless people. With his empire collapsing, Loeb tries to kill Gordon's pregnant wife Ann to spite him.
- Gotham Central's "Motive" arc: Harlan Combs is a yuppie who bought the costume and equipment of C-list supervillain Firebug, hoping to attain the ultimate adrenaline rush. Using the Firebug costume, Combs set various buildings in Gotham aflame, including apartment complexes occupied by dozens of people and a baby, hoping to make a name for himself through blood and ash. When his teenage babysitter found his suit, Combs beat her to death and staged it to look like a kidnapping, later trying to burn the girl's homeless friend alive to tie up loose ends. When caught, the spiteful Combs tries to set the arresting officers and entire GCPD building on fire to escape.
- Punchline is a stark contrast to the sympathetic Harley Quinn. Unlike Harley Quinn, who turned evil because of the Joker, Punchline was already a psychotic woman long before meeting the Clown Prince, who had multiple people murdered for petty reasons, deciding to abandon her morals after she was told that she could be anyone that she wanted. After meeting the Joker by chance during a field trip to the Gotham news studio, she decided that she wanted to follow his example, gassing countless people in an effort to replicate his Joker venom. When she and the Joker finally meet again, she gasses her college dean when he calls out for acting like the Joker was her hero and agrees to help him blow up a children's hospital. What makes Punchline truly evil is her complete refusal to own up to what she did. She acted like she was a sympathetic pawn of the Joker, that the Joker manipulated her into being evil, and that she cared about the teacher that the Joker killed. And unlike Harley, who genuinely loved the Joker, Punchline does not truly love the Joker at all and is perfectly willing to murder him if he displeases her enough. Managing to rival the Joker himself in evil, Punchline makes it crystal clear to the audience that females are not more innocent.
Live Action Films[]
- Batman (1989 Film): Though Jack Napier/The Joker may not have been quite so gritty in his approach as other versions of the character, the sheer scope of his reign of terror puts him on more or less the same level as his counterpart in The Dark Knight. Even before his transformation, Jack Napier was outright horrible: he was the one who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents, and if his accomplice hadn't yelled at him to get out of there, it's very likely the psycho would have killed young Bruce as well. From that to present day. For starters, he intends to poison all the Gothamites with Smylex Gas for no other reason than his own amusement, has three mob bosses killed (with him even joking about their deaths, at least one of which qualified under Nightmare Fuel, where he electrocutes him with enough voltage to turn him into a charred skeleton after claiming that shaking his hand will be the end of it if he refuses to agree with the Joker). He also horrifically disfigures Alicia Hunt and is also implied to have thrown her off a building later on in the film under the guise of suicide to free himself for Vicki Vale ("You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs!"). Gasses an art gallery full of people to death just to have some "alone time" with Vicki Vale and puts the components of Smylex into different cosmetics to cause random city-wide deaths just to make the people panic. He even cold-bloodedly guns down his best and only friend, Bob the Goon, simply to vent his anger over Batman ruining the above attempt to gas everyone at the parade.
- The Dark Knight Saga: The Joker manages to be both a Complete Monster AND a Magnificent Bastard. At the start of the film, he has several of his minions commit what seems to be your standard bank robbery... until you realize that he also had his minions kill each other off to keep most of the money for themselves after their accomplices did their job, also disguising himself as one of their comrades. Right after that, he kills the bus driver, leaving himself with all the money. Even the bank manager, implied to be part of the mob, is quite horrified at the complete decadence of this criminal behavior, remarking that most criminals before them at least had honor and respect for their comrades. Then, the Joker starts exploiting the mob's desire to be rid of Batman, casually murdering henchmen, politicians and policemen to force Batman to unmask himself. He explicitly states that this is just an excuse. Despite implying at first that he wants payment for his services from the mob, he doesn't care one bit for money, even going so far as to burn his half of the mob's money that he earned by retrieving it, causing even the Chechen mafioso to be frightened at the implications of this, thus making it quite clear that the Joker most likely instigated the backstab-chain earlier solely for the amusement of watching his thugs kill each other for money. Even the Mob finds this a tad overkill. All the while, the Joker states how he's simply out to be give Gotham a "better class of criminal". This being the Joker, he doesn’t stop there; he also makes the accountant attempting to unmask Batman a target, blows up a hospital, attempts a Prisoner’s Dilemma Scenario to get a boatload of civilians and, well, prisoners to blow each other up, and is the driving force behind Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face. The Joker's entire goal is really to show that anyone and everyone can and will become a Complete Monster if they're pushed far enough (or even if they are given the chance). He's proven wrong. And you know what? He still doesn't learn, nor does he seem to care all that much. As long as he's done his damage and spread chaos...
Live Action TV[]
- Gotham:
- Jerome Valeska, in his first appearance, ends up in Arkham Asylum for murdering his mother, in his words, for being a "nagging drunken whore". When interrogated, he laughs it off as if it were a joke. When he and several other inmates are recruited into the Maniax gang by Theo Galavan, Jerome functions as the de facto leader, announcing their presence by throwing several hostages off a roof. Later, he attempts to set a bus full of high school cheerleaders on fire; shoots up the GCPD station, personally killing Commissioner Essen; and kills one of his own men for cracking a joke he was about to make. Jerome later kills his father, then poses as a magician to hold a children's hospital charity hostage, killing the deputy mayor. He plans to kill thirteen-year-old Bruce Wayne, threatening his butler Alfred to draw him out. When he gets his hands on Bruce, he begins to slowly slit his throat in the following standoff. Following his death, Jerome had a cult that embraced his ideology. Shortly after his resurrection, Jerome has Dwight, the leader of said cult, strapped to a bomb as Jerome didn't like Dwight using Jerome's face when he thought the resurrection had failed, and announces his return to the city, encouraging his followers to spread death and chaos, then detonating the bomb. In the chaos, Jerome intends to finish killing Bruce, before deciding to do something special to kill him. Jerome takes Bruce to a sadistic theme park where innocent people are tortured and killed in twisted carnival games, forcing Bruce to watch and stapling his arm, before preparing the main event; to blast Bruce with a cannon in front of his followers. He takes over Arkham and teams up with Jervis Tetch and Jonathan Crane to form the Legion of Horribles, the latter of which he commissions to create the Joker Venom, before deciding to use it on Gotham and, when it fails, tells Gordon that his legacy will go on before killing himself. As a last act of evil, he delivers a package of Joker Venom to his twin brother Jeremiah, which turns him into Gotham's most infamous villain to carry on his brother's malevolent spirit. A maniacal psychopath who believes in chaos for the sake of chaos, Jerome was a criminal that has given Gotham scars like none other, and it was simply after just one bad day.
- Dr. Francis Dulmacher AKA the Dollmaker is soft spoken surgeon who works with rich clients and mastermind of human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting for his experiments. He takes them to his facility on a private island where he keeps them hostage with his hired thugs, who he'd often send to carry out his abductions. Early in the season, he sends two of his lackies to abduct street children to such a fate, using charity as a lure. When his plan is exposed and the children are sent into protective care, he tries to have his lackies hijack the convoy. Partway through the season, crime boss Fish Mooney finds herself in Dulmacher's clutches, he intends to take her eye, and later shows what happens to those who fail or cross him; he shows her his former lackies disasembled and reassembled with female parts.
- Professor Hugo Strange is the Big Bad of the latter half of Season 2. Originally partners with Thomas Wayne in the Pinewood Farms project, a project meant to find cures to afflicted citizens' illnesses, Strange took advantage of Wayne's trustfulness to perform horrifying experiments on the patients. When Wayne discovers Strange's actions and closes the project, Strange has him and his wife gunned down in front of their son, Bruce Wayne. Partnering with the Court of Owls, Strange becomes the head of Arkham Asylum, where he continues his torturous experiments on the defenseless patients, resulting in many of them going even more insane and being transformed into monstrous creatures, and, to keep said experiments under his thumb, Strange regularly subjects them to painful mental torture. Discovering the secret to bringing the dead back to life, Strange begins reviving dead criminals, all of which come back as raving lunatics who kill numerous innocents, which Strange happily assists them in while convincing them they are his "children". When Bruce Wayne and James Gordon continue to investigate him, Strange subjects them both to mentally stressful interrogations before trying to kill them, along with Selina Kyle, the latter for no reason other than annoyance. On the Court of Owls' orders, Strange tries to detonate a nuclear device that could possibly kill thousands of people, for no apparent reason other than fear for his own life. A cold sociopath who committed his atrocities simply to see if he could, Hugo Strange showed no concern for any of his victims, and is ultimately revealed to be responsible for nearly all of Gotham City's inevitable chaos with his monstrous experiments.
- Lazlo Valentin, AKA Professor Pyg, from season 4, is a sadistic hitman known for copying the MO of multiple serial killers. He arrives in Gotham and makes himself known to the GCPD by killing many of its cops in various brutal ways, which include slashing some with a cleaver; having one blown up by a grenade; and having many get shot by a machine gun. He later kills six homeless people, bakes them into meat pies, and forces the Gotham socialites to eat said pies. Upon being caught and sent to Arkham Asylum, he viciously kills an inmate for interrupting his music leisure, and kills multiple staff while escaping the Asylum. He then kills crime boss Carmine Falcone on Sofia Falcone's behest, and attempts to kill Commissioner James Gordon himself before Sofia shoots him.
- Jeremiah Valeska is the aforementioned Jerome's seemingly orderly twin brother and a powerful but suspicious businessman. According to Jerome, Jeremiah is just as bad as he is and plans to make him his heir; when seemingly Driven to Madness by a special gas, Jeremiah states it did nothing but alter his appearance, and that he intends to usurp Jerome's legacy to gratify his own ego; Jeremiah starts off with a plan to detonate powerful bombs all over Gotham, before incinerating his new followers after he fails, and has his lover Ecco shoot herself to prove her loyalty. Jeremiah later teams up with Ra's Al-Ghul to destroy all the bridges out of Gotham and turn the city into a lawless despot. Obsessed with Bruce Wayne, Jeremiah does anything to become the center of his world, including shooting Selina Kyle; torturing a decoy of Alfred to self-mutilate; attempting to recreate the night of the Wayne murders with brainwashed victims, before trying to use Jim and Leslie as a substitute; and attempting to unleash chemicals onto the city to ruin it beyond repair. Emerging as The Joker ten years later, Jeremiah eventually kills Ecco, stating they'll be others like her, before kidnapping and trying to drop Jim Gordon's young daughter into a vat of chemicals.
Animated Films[]
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:
- Part 1: The Mutant Leader is a vicious gang boss who uses his "mutants" to terrorize Gotham City for the sheer sake of violence. Having his mutant gang commit all sorts of massacres, slayings and crimes across Gotham, the Mutant Leader eventually has his men begin kidnapping young children for ransom, then brutally murder the kids even when the ransoms are paid. The Mutant Leader's ultimate plan is to march on Gotham and kill countless people in a quest to decapitate Commissioner James Gordon and parade his head through the streets. When captured by the Batman, the Leader responds by ordering his mutants to raze the entirety of Gotham to the ground while he personally tears out the throat of the city's mayor when he tries to negotiate peace talks with the Leader.
- Part 2: The Joker was catatonic for a decade until Batman returned, which snapped him out of it and resulted in Joker going on a massive killing spree. Joker kills his therapist with a broken coffee mug and then kills a studio audience at a talk show with poisonous gas. He then tries to sell poisoned cotton candy to kids at an amusement park. After Batman foils that scheme, Joker takes a gun and begins to shoot random civilians at the amusement park. After Batman defeats Joker in combat, Joker commits suicide and attempts to frame Batman for his death.
- Batman: Year One: Police Commissioner Gillian Loeb is the ringleader behind Gotham's entire criminal underworld, enabling murder sprees, drug peddling, and human trafficking in order to gain power and line his pockets. Frequently bribing politicians and other crooked cops to further his control over the city, Loeb establishes himself as corrupt during a hostage situation, when he tries to have a mental patient shot despite knowing that he'll be killing a baby in the process. Having Jim Gordon beaten into submission for trying to stop crime, while chasing after the Batman, Loeb has a supposedly abandoned apartment firebombed only to act apathetic when he finds it actually filled with drunken homeless people. Loeb later threatens Gordon's pregnant wife in an attempt to blackmail him into obedience.
- Batman: The Long Halloween: The Joker, unwilling to let the mysterious Holiday Killer replace him as Gotham's most notorious criminal, escapes from Arkham Asylum to conduct his own reign of terror. Beating Harvey Dent in his own house and threatening to murder his wife, the Joker goes on a killing spree through Gotham, targeting members of the mob to show he won't tolerate interlopers. The Joker caps off his rampage by hijacking a plane and attempting to fatally gas everyone in Times Square, hoping to kill Holiday and as many people as possible in the process.
- The Joker from Batman: Under the Red Hood is once again presented as an Ax Crazy Psychopath. He beats Batman's young sidekick Jason Todd with a crowbar, leaves him broken and battered in a warehouse and then proceeds to blow up the warehouse. Later in the film, Joker kills four of fellow Complete Monster Black Mask's mooks for no reason, after Black Mask (very reluctantly) freed Joker from Arkham. Joker then attempts to kill both the Red Hood's and Black Mask's gangs by covering them with gasoline and using a lighter to try to set them on fire. And throughout the movie, Joker never stops taunting Batman about Jason Todd's death.
- In Batman: Gotham By Gaslight, Jack the Ripper, true identity Commissioner James Gordon is a psychotic Knight Templar and Serial Killer who believes in ridding Gotham of the 'filth' of the streets; especially women. Kicking off a murder spree where he hunts down and slaughters numerous innocent women on the streets, the Ripper later tracks down and kills the kindhearted nun Sister Leslie. When he learns Dr. Hugo Strange has discovered his identity, the Ripper ambushes Strange and throws him to his own asylum's patients who tear Strange apart. The Ripper then murders an old woman to frame Bruce Wayne for his crimes and when Selina Kyle tries to prove his innocence, targets her as well. Not even the Ripper's family is safe from him, as he regularly tortures his wife by burning her to 'burn the sin away,' until she has utterly lost her mind. Utterly consumed by misogynistic fervor and a fanatic devotion to bloodshed, the Ripper showcases the true evil on Gotham's streets hides within a human being.
- Batman: Soul of the Dragon: The Great Nāga is an ancient, powerful demon desiring to lead his fellow Nāgas to spread death and destruction across the world. Influencing the Kobra cult to perform sacrifices in order to free himself, the Great Nāga abandons Jeffrey Burr to perish upon being freed instead of using him as an Avatar, as he planned to use Richard Dragon as a vessel instead. Brutally beating down Batman, Lady Shiva, Richard Dragon, and Bronze Tiger, the Great Nāga openly desires to lay waste upon Earth and tries to take over Richard Dragon's body by force.
- Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham:
- Ra's al Ghul is a dark priest and a servant of an Outer God, Iog-Sotha. Uncovering the secrets of the ancient Serpents, Ra's desired to unleash Iog-Sotha upon the world, which would have resulted in the planet's destruction. Spreading a horde of reptiles across Gotham, Ra's had the brainwashed Grendon killed, using his remains to create Poison Ivy, whom he used to painfully mutate Harvey Dent into "The Door". Performing a ritual to release Iog-Sotha, Ra's turned into a monster to kill Bruce Wayne, before using his last strength to keep the portal open to ensure that Iog-Sotha will cross over to Earth and annihilate humanity.
- Talia al Ghul is the last remaining member of the Cult of Ghul, who wants to help her father destroy the world. Killing Kirk Langstrom and leaving his corpse in Wayne Manor to manipulate Bruce Wayne to locate the Testament of Ghul for her, Talia also painfully murdered Professor Munford by having a Djinn to devour him from the inside. Sending Killer Croc to retrieve Grendon, which resulted in him brutally tearing apart Dick Grayson, Talia resurrected her father and assisted him in his rituals, openly desiring to cause the end of humanity out of fanaticism.
- Superman/Batman: Public Enemies: Lex Luthor is much worse than his comic counterpart. After an economic recession in the United States Lex Luthor rises up to be president. He recruited a few heroes to his side specifically, Captain Atom, Katana, Black Lightning, Power Girl, Starfire, and Major Force. He would manage to pull the United States out of the depression and the economy began to thrive again, though this was done solely to stroke his ego. The United States government would discover a massive Kryptonite meteor hurtling toward Earth. Instead of asking superheroes for aid, Luthor decides to destroy it with nuclear missiles, so he can get all the credit for himself. He also arranges a meeting with Superman to prevent him getting in the way. The meeting goes badly and Superman and Metallo get into a fight. Major Force ends up killing Metallo and Lex Luthor uses this murder to frame Superman and place a massive bounty on him. Angry at the failure to stop the meteor he decided to instead let it crash on earth so that he can rule over anyone that survives it. Batman and Superman break into Luthor's base disguised as Captain Marvel and Hawkman to retrieve the data on the meteor's radiation. Batman forces him to give them, the files, but Lex Luthor thinks quickly and orders his computer to delete all the files, in his mind dooming the world in the process. Amanda Waller betrays him, however, and gives Batman and Superman a hard drive containing the information needed to stop the meteor, so he continues to try and stop them.
- Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons: Starro is an alien parasite that ended up trapped in space, where it grew to a massive size and began desiring domination over the universe. Taking control of nearly all superheroes on Earth, Starro sent its offspring to take over the minds of every human they can find, as it planned to drain the life out of the entire planet and then move to repeat the process on other worlds. Furious at Jon Kent and Damian Wayne for attacking it, Starro ordered the possessed heroes to kill them.
- In Batman: Bad Blood, Talia al Ghul, the new leader of the League of Assassins, is a Control Freak of the highest order. Her ultimate plan is is to use Bruce Wayne's technology to brainwash the world leaders attending his tech summit, in order to expand the League of Assassins' influence over the planet, which would result in much bloodshed. Talia assembles a team of villains under the command of The Heretic, the adult clone of her and Bruce's Child by Rape Damian Wayne, and orders them to capture Bruce so his mind could be broken with Mad Hatter's machine; Mad Hatter has been forced to cooperate by means on an Explosive Leash. Later, Talia sends Heretic to attack Wayne Enterprises in order to steal technology necessary for her plan, near-fatally wounding Lucius Fox in the assault. When Heretic breaks down and begs for Talia to love him as a mother, and wishing to have Damian's memories, she shoots him in the head for disobeying her orders regarding Damian. As the brainwashing is taking place, she orders a mind-controlled Bruce to shoot Dick Grayson and their son Damian dead, coldly proclaiming that she and Bruce could always "make more".
- Batman vs. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, based on the comic book series of similiar name, has these three examples.
- The Shredder, the leader of the Foot Clan, aligns himself with Ra's Al-Ghul in order to obtain immortality from the Lazarus Pit by agreeing to build a machine that could spread the mutagen across Gotham City, invading various corporations and killing the staff who happened to be there and stealing technology. The Shredder was able to nearly complete the machine, only failing to acquire the Cloud Seeder when Batman intervenes, in which the Shredder beats him half to death before fleeing. Changing their plans, the Shredder breaks into Arkham Asylum with Ra's and murders all the security guards and breaks all the inmates out, but not before obtaining Joker's Joker Venom and giving him the mutagen to mutate the inmates and distract Batman and the Turtles. After Ra's hired The Penguin to successfully steal the Cloud Seeder, the Shredder kills all of Penguin's henchmen and threatening to kill him as well when he demanded a payment. The Shredder reveals that after he obtains immortality, he will kill Ra's Al-Ghul and take over the League of Assassins, then use the Joker Venom/Mutagen hybrid, which mutates people into psychotic violent mutants, himself.
- Ra's Al-Ghul, the leader of the League of Assassins, lacks his redeeming qualities as a Well-Intentioned Extremist that cares for his family from the comics in favor of being a ruthless madman obsessed with chaos and conquest, even showing how little he cares about his allies; he sacrifices one to be mutated by the mutagen, stating that he has plenty more if he died from the effects. Making a deal with the Shredder for his mutagen and to build the aforementioned machine in exchange for the Lazarus Pit, Ra's over the time becomes less faithful and impressed by his partner's efforts and creates a back-up plan in which they give the Joker the mutagen to mutate the inmates of Arkham Asylum to use as a distraction for Batman and the Turtles while they work on the machine. Ra's combines the mutagen with Joker Venom to create a psychotropic variation of the mutagen that not only mutates people but turns them violent and homicidal, and wishes to spray this over Gotham City to create chaos and destruction and wishes to repeat the process across the world and bathe it in blood and fire.
- The Joker, the psychopathic Clown Prince of Crime, is released from his prison by Ra's Al-Ghul and the Shredder and is given the mutagen in exchange for his Joker Venom formula. The Joker then uses the mutagen to mutate all of the inmates in order to distract Batman and the Turtles while Ra's and the Shredder complete their plans. These events led to Leonardo being psychologically torture by the Scarecrow with his Fear Toxin and injecting Batman with the Mutagen/Joker Venom hybrid leading to him become a psychotic version of Man-Bat and almost kills his allies, including his son Damien. While an Arc Villain in comparison to the two Big Bads of the film, Joker still proves he's a depraved and sadistic psychopath.
- Justice League: Gods And Monsters Chronicles: Harley Quinn, as she appears in the "Twisted" short, stands in stark contrast to her mainstream portrayal. A vile, psychopathic Serial Killer known in this reality as simply The Harlequin, Harley abducts civilians before mutilating and killing them, making "toys" out of their mangled corpses. When Batman rescues a teenage girl Harley kidnapped, Harley attempts to kill them both. During their fight, Batman comes across a makeshift "family" of the people Harley has murdered, including a young boy.
Animated TV Shows[]
- Batman: The Animated Series:
- The Joker. His first appearance in "Christmas with the Joker" has him unleashing a reign of terror on Gotham in the form of a festively decorated tank rampaging through the city streets, derailing a train with the mother of one of his hostages on it and letting a giant cannon fire randomly into the city, doing untold damage. Joker's second appearance, "The Last Laugh", had him unleashing laughing gas across all of Gotham which would eventually render everyone exposed to it permanently insane, and the Joker did this all so he could go on a crime spree and conduct relatively minor robberies with impunity. In "Joker's Favor", he psychologically tortures a man for years, threatens to kill his family, and finally tries to blow him up, all for yelling at him when the Joker cut him off in traffic. In "Be A Clown", he disguised himself as a birthday clown for Mayor Hill's birthday party so he could put a dynamite stick onto the birthday cake as revenge for Hill's attempt at comparing the Joker with Batman, which would have most likely resulted in a lot of deaths, and in "The Laughing Fish", he commences with a killing spree of specified targets all because he's angry that he can't copyright Gotham's supply of fish that his Joker venom contaminated.
- There was also his fine work in Mask of the Phantasm, including the murder of his former boss, Sal Valestra, and after he came to him for help. Bad move, Sallie. There's also attacking Arthur Reeves in his office, giving him a heavy and near-lethal dose of Joker Toxin. His pre-bleach self, hired gun Jack Napier, was no saint, killing Carl Beaumont, thus ruining his daughter Andrea's life, Bruce Wayne's happiness, and setting the whole movie, and Batman's career, into motion.
- He finally and indisputably crosses the line in Return of the Joker, when he tortures Tim Drake so badly he becomes a younger version of the Joker. By the time the Joker goes down, a good chunk of Gotham has been obliterated, most likely killing hundreds. As Bruce Wayne says there in regards to Terry's question as to whether Joker was the worst of his Rogues Gallery; "It wasn't a popularity contest. He was a psychopath. A monster."
- Joker's treatment of his girlfriend, Harley Quinn, needs mentioning. "Mad Love" showcases his worst treatment of her, especially his reaction to her in-motion plan to kill Batman. He screams at her, hits her so hard she flies halfway across the room, and almost kills her by throwing her out of a several-stories high window. Why? Because HE wants to be the one who kills Batman! He then sends her a rose and a fake note of apology while she's recovering in Arkham. Even the Bat feels sorry for Harley in this episode and taunts the Joker with the knowledge that she came closer to succeeding at killing him than the Joker ever has. It's no wonder she disapproved of her grandchildren's path.
- In the Game Boy game based on the series, Joker plots to smuggle a bunch of teddy bears containing bombs filled with Joker Venom into Gotham to have them go off and kill many people, openly telling Batman about his plan in advance so as to lure Batman in an attempt to kill him. The Joker later shoots the Batplane out of the sky in an attempt to kill Batman and Robin, not caring about potential collateral deaths caused by the crash.
- The Sewer King in "The Underdwellers" kidnapped children to use as slave labor and steal things from him. He trained them to be severely photophobic and afraid of adults. He also scares them with his trained crocodiles and makes it forbidden for the children to make a sound, punishing them by shoving them into a tiny little room with bright lights without food or water for hours - and sometimes, he does it on a whim, even to a kid who managed not to utter a peep despite the extreme scare tactics. Sewer King was one of the few villains Batman had seriously considered killing on the spot, which says quite a lot.
- In the episode "Showdown", which was mostly an extended flashback to Arizona, 1883, we meet Arkady Duvall, Ra's Al Ghul's then-lieutenant and also his son, voiced by none other than Malcolm McDowell. When we begin, Jonah Hex has tracked him across twelve states "on account of what [he had] done to [a] girl back east", and a barmaid at the beginning of the story tells Hex "He hurt one of my girls real bad." They don't go into detail, but he at the very least violently assaulted them. When we first meet the man in person, he's whipping one of Ra's workman for slacking, when all the poor guy was doing was trying to pick up something he'd dropped. He comes across as insufferably smug and arrogant, with a huge sense of entitlement, and it's clear that Ra's does not approve of his actions and is only putting up with him because he's his son and so he can keep an eye on him. When Hex is caught spying on them, Duvall orders the workers to lower him head first into a vat of molten lead, but Ra's intervenes. By the end of the flashback, Hex has captured Duvall and turned him into the authorities and Ra's has washed his hands of him and left him to his fate. When the man who thinks killing 90% of the world's population in order to restore ecological balance is a good idea wants nothing more to do with you, you must be on this list.
- Grant Walker, from "Deep Freeze", is a seemingly affable theme park mogul who seeks only to prolong his life by way of Mr. Freeze's ice technology, but in truth harbors much darker intentions. Kidnapping Freeze and using his comatose wife as a bargaining chip to convince Freeze to give Walker his icy, undying condition, Walker soon enough reveals his plan to use a massive freeze cannon to plunge the entire world into a new Ice Age for years. Walker hopes to kill off all of humanity except for his "chosen few", then repopulate the planet with his own Garden of Eden, and though his plan is foiled, Walker returns in The Batman Adventures, where he kidnaps several scientists to cure himself of a lethal condition, planning to kill them all and then restart his scheme to wipe out humankind.
- The Joker. His first appearance in "Christmas with the Joker" has him unleashing a reign of terror on Gotham in the form of a festively decorated tank rampaging through the city streets, derailing a train with the mother of one of his hostages on it and letting a giant cannon fire randomly into the city, doing untold damage. Joker's second appearance, "The Last Laugh", had him unleashing laughing gas across all of Gotham which would eventually render everyone exposed to it permanently insane, and the Joker did this all so he could go on a crime spree and conduct relatively minor robberies with impunity. In "Joker's Favor", he psychologically tortures a man for years, threatens to kill his family, and finally tries to blow him up, all for yelling at him when the Joker cut him off in traffic. In "Be A Clown", he disguised himself as a birthday clown for Mayor Hill's birthday party so he could put a dynamite stick onto the birthday cake as revenge for Hill's attempt at comparing the Joker with Batman, which would have most likely resulted in a lot of deaths, and in "The Laughing Fish", he commences with a killing spree of specified targets all because he's angry that he can't copyright Gotham's supply of fish that his Joker venom contaminated.
- Batman Beyond:
- Derek Powers, AKA Blight, is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and the Arch Enemy of Terry McGinnis. In order to test his latest chemical weapon, Powers purposefully infected Harry Tully, a member of his staff, with it. When Tully leaks the information to Terry’s father, Warren, Powers had Warren murdered to cover it up. Later, Powers sold the weapon to a Kaznian diplomat who wanted to wipe out resistance on his border. To promote his product, Powers showed the diplomat pictures of Tully’s gradual death at the hands of the chemical. Other crimes include committing industrial sabotage, exiling his son Paxton and causing Paxton to be corrupt and treacherous like him, and polluting the ocean by dumping radioactive waste into it. He played a part in Mr. Freeze's tragic demise as well; he used Freeze as a guinea pig to cure his own condition and when Freeze wanted revenge, Blight brutally crippled Freeze with his radiation. He’s also responsible for the creation of the super villain, Shriek, who he hired to assassinate Bruce Wayne for getting in the way of his plans to bulldoze Gotham's historical district for profit. There's also his response to Terry's use of You Killed My Father as a hint to Batman's real identity:
- If the fact that he killed the protagonist's father to keep anyone from finding out he was using the original Batman's family's company to make some flipping effective biological weaponry didn't already seal his status by the end of the first episode, there's also the way Blight says that line. He says it so casually, it makes you think about some of the other heinous stuff he's done that we HAVEN'T seen. He'd also just demanded to know who Batman is and why he keeps hounding him and sounds frustrated at being given such a useless piece of information.
- And then there's his first act upon becoming Blight. Not only does he effectively destroy any chance for Mr Freeze to live a normal life, he casually tricks him into believing his new girlfriend (who genuinely loved him and wanted to help him) had been using him, resulting in her death.
- Dr. David Wheeler, from Season 2's "The Last Resort", is a corrupt child psychologist who uses his rehabilitation "ranch" for teenagers as a moneymaking scheme and to satisfy his controlling personality. Wheeler manipulates parents to send their children to his ranch for even minor pranks, then treats the children like prisoners who Wheeler deprives of sleep, verbally and psychologically abuses, and even refuses to let go to the bathroom for punishments. Wheeler throws any teenagers who step out of line into "ISO"—short for isolation—cells that deprive them of sight and sound for long periods to mentally break them down, with one boy shown to be left a vacant shell for days following a trip to ISO. When Terry tries to expose Wheeler's crimes, Wheeler plans to throw him in ISO, then murder the boy to keep him quiet.
- In the "10,000 Clowns" arc of the comic book, Dana Tan's brother, Douglas Tan, is a disturbed youth obsessed with The Joker and his carnage, and dedicates himself to proving the fundamental meaningless of life and becoming the Joker's own Superior Successor. Fashioning himself "the Joker King", Douglas drugs dozens of Jokerz from around the nation into becoming suicide bombers, using them to wreak havoc across Gotham and cause thousands of deaths in an attempt to destroy the city, murdering his own best friend on a random whim just before the destruction starts. Douglas eventually decides to murder his entire family too, attempting to kill his comatose father in the hospital and only hesitating when his sister steps in the way—before deciding without another second of hesitation to kill her too.
- The Batman:
- The Joker. Once a man who wanted to make people laugh, he fell into a vat of chemicals and became an insane, murderous Monster Clown and Batman's Arch Enemy. Devoid of any empathy, Joker commits crimes he views as "jokes" at the expense of Gotham. Terrible things he's done include poisoning people with his deadly laughing gas; putting people in various death traps; torturing Detective Ethan Bennett for hours and causing Bennett's mutation into Clayface; impersonating Batman and gassing people for minor crimes; using Bane's venom to go on a rampage; attempting to drop a teenage boy into a vat of chemicals; frequently mistreating his henchmen and his girlfriend Harley Quinn, as well as abandoning them to be arrested or even to die; and filling the abandoned tunnels and mine shafts beneath Gotham with miles of dynamite to collapse the city. That he manages to qualify despite being toned down to all get-out is a testament to how twisted a character Joker is.
- Professor Hugo Strange is an amoral psychiatrist who slowly graduates to one of the most wicked villains Batman ever faced. His stint as a psychiatrist ending after he toyed with his patients' well-being just out of curiosity, notably curing Arnold Wesker of his split personality Scarface only to break his mind again and drive him to nearly killing himself, Strange became a full-fledged supervillain when he created D.A.V.E (Digitally Enhanced Villain Emulator), a machine that ran on data of all of Gotham's worst villains and acted out to become Gotham's "ultimate criminal mastermind", putting the city and many human lives in jeopardy, which Strange intended so that he could observe how Batman responded and possibly figure out his true identity. Strange later infected Batman with a hallucinogen that made him attempt to transform the entire population of Gotham into zombies under Strange's control. In his grandest moment of depravity, Strange, having gone pure Mad Scientist, allied himself with the alien race known as the Joining, selling out humanity to be destroyed by the Joining and assisting the aliens in incapacitating the Justice League in order to steal their powers, all for nothing more than the promise of ultimate knowledge of the universe. As corrupt as they come, Hugo Strange repeatedly showed himself to be among the very worst of Gotham City's criminals.
- Black Mask is a thoroughly nasty crime boss who controls several crime syndicates in Gotham City, meaning that he's had influence in who-knows-how-many acts of villainy that have gone on in the show. He also Would Hurt a Child, as he demonstrates with Robin and Batgirl. When he passes the You Have Failed Me sentence to his Number 1 henchman, he shoots him dead and demonstrates a We Have Reserves mentality by telling another member of his gang "You're my new Number 1!"
- Tony Zucco in this show is portrayed as one of the most cold-blooded and heartless individuals in Gotham City. He not only arranged for Robin's parents to be killed because they couldn't pay him the amount of money he wanted, but when he has Batman at his mercy, he ties him to a wall and starts throwing knives at that wall for fun. During this, Zucco admits to having killed his own father with chilling causality - according to him, he and his father used to always practice knife-throwing together, and when asked by Batman about what became of his father, he sums it up with "Well one day...I missed." Oh, and to top it off, he's voiced by Mark Hamill.
- Beware The Batman: Anarky is Batman's Arch Enemy and the most recurring villain in the series. An utter madman who views himself and Batman as two kings on a chess board, one representing order and peace, the other chaos and destruction, Anarky commits all of his crimes out of a pathological love for attention and a sheer enjoyment for being evil. In his first appearance, Anarky grants two petty crooks high-tech weaponry before sending them on a rampage through Gotham, after which he rigs two gondolas filled with people to explode unless Batman can stop them in time. Later, Anarky pits Batman and the League of Assassins against each other as part of a plan to unleash a lethal plague onto all of Gotham, and attempts to bomb a populated park filled with police officers while trying to frame Batman. In the end of the series, Anarky makes corrupting District Attorney Harvey Dent into evil his personal pet project, and successfully drives Dent to institute martial law in Gotham while threatening the lives of all those who stand in his way. In the sequel tie-in comic, Anarky unlocks every door in Gotham City for a single night, then tries to spur all of the citizens into a panic-induced riot that he hopes will tear Gotham apart in the ultimate display of chaos. Though soft spoken and eerily polite, Anarky is the most wicked foe Batman faced in the series, having no empathy, no mercy, and no motive at all except his basic whims.
- DC Super Hero Girls (2019): In "#NightmareInGotham", The Joker is a teenaged supervillain and Batman's Arch Enemy. Desiring to give Gotham its scariest Halloween, Joker breaks out of Arkham Reform School, killing one of the guards in the process, and manipulates the Super Hero Girls into releasing 3 dangerous villains, before luring them to Gotham to have them cause massive destruction and mayhem throughout the city, endangering many innocent lives in the process. Fearing that someone will outdo his efforts in the future, Joker attempts to destroy all of Gotham with a bomb, killing everyone in it, just so that no one can ever one-up him again.
- Batman: Caped Crusader (2024):
- Detective Arnold Flass is one of the many dorrupt cops at the Gotham City Police Department, and proves himself far worse than his partner Harvey Bullock. After trying to track down Catwoman to stop her thievery, Flass tries to kill her in cold blood solely because he found her annoying. When the GCPD is tasked with capturing Batman, upon being told that a costumed freak is what would lure him out, Flass releases the dangerous Firebug from his cell and lets him loose on the Eastside Flats so that he'll cause a fire and lure out Batman, endangering numerous innocents in the process. Once he and Bullock corner Firebug in the burning building, Flass provokes Bullock into shooting and killing Firebug by mentioning how he'll talk about how they let him escape. In the Season 1 finale, Flass, after being tasked to bring Harvey Dent to Rupert Thorne, leads a group of Thorne's men to the docks when Harvey escapes him and Bullock with the full intent of killing him and Barbara Gordon. Eventually cornering the two of them, Flass prepares to shoot Barbara and kills Harvey when the latter takes the shot for her, before preparing to shoot and kill Barbara to clean up all loose ends.
- Oswalda "the Penguin" Cobblepot portrays herself as a charming member of high society when in truth she's a ruthless crime boss vying for control of Gotham's criminal underbelly. Having secretly obtained a military-grade cannon, the Penguin has been using it to destroy various buildings owned by rival crime boss Rupert Thorne and killing everyone inside. The Penguin also regularly has men locked in boxes and thrown into the ocean to drown, which she uses to execute her own "favorite" son Aaron due to believing him to be a rat. When she discovers her other son Ronnie was the rat, she quickly orders his death as well, before taking aim at the GCPD station with her cannon to destroy the whole building, just to kill Ronnie.
Video Games[]
- Batman Arkhamverse:
- Surprising no one, The Joker is naturally one of these, committing one atrocity after another throughout the games while cackling madly and cracking jokes at the same time.
- During his first canonical appearance in Batman: Arkham Origins he plans to cast Gotham into chaos and establish himself as the top dog among the city's criminal underworld. He forces young crime lord Roman Sionis a.k.a Black Mask to kill his beloved girlfriend, then has him hauled off and tortured while he disguises himself as the influential gangster and hires eight dangerous assassins to hunt down Batman which puts a lot of civilians in danger due to their violent antics. Not wanting to miss out on the fun himself, the Joker also took an active role in the chaos as he abducts Blackgate Prison's warden and endlessly tortures him and threatens his family with death until he lowers the prison's security then proceeds to slaughter dozens of staff members for the sake of killing one man, the corrupt police commissioner Loeb who he wanted out of the way purely because he knew Loeb's death would cause a massive power vacuum. He also has several buildings rigged to explode and attacks a bank and slaughters most of its staff as other side-activities he had planned. However, once Batman foils his plans to destroy the buildings he had rigged yet saves his life anyway, he grows a psychotic, unhealthy obsession with him and decides that Batman is the one person in Gotham who he can rely on to play his sadistic games with. At the game's climax, he takes over Blackgate Prison and attempts to force Batman into killing either himself or Bane by hooking Bane up to a heart monitor which would power up the electric chair he was sitting in, and had the prison rigged to explode if Batman tried to remove the monitor as a way to force Batman into breaking his one rule.
- During the DTV animated film Batman: Assault on Arkham, Joker gets his hands on a nuclear bomb and tries to annihilate half of Gotham City with it. And once again, he engages in usual Joker activity such as abusing Harley and slaughtering people for fun.
- During the events of Batman: Arkham Asylum he lets lose all the dangerous psychopaths and sadistic Blackgate prisoners locked up in the Asylum and traps the staff there, causing most of the guards, doctors, and other innocent civilians to be brutally murdered by all the escaped crazies which would ultimately put all of their blood on his hands. His plan in the game is to get his hands on a special formula called "Titan" which would give him an army of roided-up monsters to take down Gotham City and Batman himself, with the added bonus of trying to bring Batman down to his level and drive him insane from all the havoc he wreaks on the island. Throughout the night it's revealed that he had Bane set up to be tortured and have his powerful drug Venom forcibly siphoned out of his body, he talks freely about being abusive towards his loyal and lovestruck henchwoman Harley Quinn and offers to let his men rape her as a prize for bringing in Batman, injects Poison Ivy and her plants with Titan in order to cause her to go on a dangerous rampage on the island putting even more innocent lives in danger, and then finishes it all up in the climax when he tries to turn Commissioner Gordon into a Titan-fueled monstrosity. It's also worth noting that his Bad Boss tendencies really show in this game, as he has multiple moments where he could alert his mooks to Batman's presence whenever they can't see him, but simply finds it funnier to sit back and watch them all get the stuffing beat out of them, even leaving a couple of his henchmen to die in rooms filled with Joker Toxin simply for not escaping fast enough.
- In Batman: Arkham City the final game before his death at the end, he realizes that he's dying due to Titan poisoning and decides have samples of his poisoned blood shipped to Gotham's hospitals which would put thousands of lives in danger, and poisons Batman as well by putting some of his blood in him so he can take the Caped Crusader down with him should he not find a cure in time. It's been revealed that in order to find a cure, he's been having doctors kidnapped and dragged over to his headquarters and has been punishing them for their failures by brutally executing them until he kidnaps Mr. Freeze's beloved wife Nora in order to get force him to create a cure for him, and ends the night's festivities by murdering Batman's on and off again lover Talia Al-Ghul and joking about it for the pleasure of pissing him off.}} It's also worth noting that most of his henchmen are absolutely thrilled by the fact that he could possibly die due to his sickness because they're all sick of working for an unpredictable lunatic who is not only intolerant of failure, but also big on killing mooks of his out of the blue for his own amusement! Fittingly, his monstrous nature ends up being the death of him as he loses his cure by attempting to murder a now-cured Batman for it and instead causes him to lose his grip and drop it, accidentally destroying it and leaving it as a shattered, useless mess. But despite all the terrible things he had pulled not only that night, but all the years back to when he and Batman first met, Batman reveals that he still would have cured him anyway, a fact that Joker can only laugh at as he finally dies for good.
- And even in Arkham Knight, the game that takes place after his death, the Joker still manages to return as a hallucination that continues to torment the drug-induced Batman to the point of insanity from beyond the grave. Thankfully, he is finally stopped for good when Scarecrow injected Batman with fear toxin at the very moment Joker had completely taken over Batman's psyche, cause him to get scared when faced with his own worst fear of becoming forgotten and irrelevant, protecting Batman from further psychological harm and allowing him to lock the Joker away forever in the deepest depths of his subconscious.
- If Joker hadn't had such a monopoly on the title of Complete Monster, Oswald Cobblepot a.k.a the Penguin would have it since he is also a truly vile man. While the guy is mostly a ruthless, though polite and occasionally helpful enemy of Batman in the comics, this version of him is a nasty, sadistic, and all around disgusting murderer and torturer. All around his museum hideout are display cases where he leaves the corpses of his victims in, and they all have recorded messages that go into detail about how he killed them and why he did it. While it may not seem like a big deal due to a lot of them being criminals, it's hard to say that they really deserve to die in such awful ways like being baked in a hot oven or being worked on with crowbars and blowtorches. And Penguin just doesn't have rivals to his criminal empire or street thugs who got on his bad side on display, he also has Mr. Freeze subjected to this fate and has plans to do this to Bruce Wayne who for all he knows is simply a rich boy whose ancestors were more successful than his! And in Mr. Freeze's case, he wants him out of the way so he can't cure the Joker. This would be understandable, but the Penguin is needlessly sadistic about it: not only is Mr. Freeze kept alive in his display case, but it's a custom-made one that acts as a microwave to fry the poor guy alive in it! And if Penguin's case couldn't be made any worse, he's also a cop killer and has a group of undercover police officers subjected to fates such as being drowned, fed to his pet shark Tiny, and being left to slowly freeze to death. And just in case you didn't hate the little Fat Bastard enough, right before the boss fights with him and Solomon Grundy, he tortures a cop over the museum's intercom by freezing his hand with Freeze's gun and shatters it off with a hammer all the while laughing at his screams and describing the pain that he's putting the guy through. Not to mention that like with the Joker, Penguin is also a Bad Boss extraordinaire who constantly threatens his lackeys with a slow death should they fail him, and goes as far as to laugh at a group of henchmen he strands on Joker's territory by blowing up several bridges that led there while saying that they may as well take as many of the clown's henchmen with them before they die.
- His brief scene in Assault on Arkham shows that he can show respect for people such as Deadshot, but not for his personality so much as he respects his skills as an assassin who doesn't botch jobs. Having respect from him ultimately means nothing since he flies into a rage and tries to have Deadshot and the rest of the Suicide Squad killed within seconds after noticing Harley Quinn among the group as she and Joker have gotten under his skin on more than one occasion, only stopping when Deadshot points out that his reputation would be ruined for it, which Penguin needs in order to be as successful as he is. And while he lets them live, he flat out tells Deadshot that he's dead if they ever cross paths again.
- Edward Nygma, born Edward Nashton, is an egomaniacal Evil Genius determined to prove his superior intellect no matter how many people must die. First appearing as Enigma, he collects blackmail material on Gotham City officials, intending to release it to cause widespread death and destruction. When Batman interferes, Enigma christens himself the Riddler and begins placing civilians in torture rooms that eventually kill them if they don't outsmart him. In the lead-up to the Joker's breakout from Arkham, Riddler tricks an unsuspecting ArkhamCare.com user into weakening the Asylum's security, directly leading to Joker murdering over 100 people; he then kills several people to set himself up in Arkham City, captures everyone in the church to place in his traps, and puts anyone else in bombs that blow up if they stop walking. To fill the power vacuum after Joker's death, Riddler begins a master plan that leads to Mr. Freeze almost killing thousands of people; Mad Hatter taking dozens as mind-controlled slaves; Vicki Vale's cameraman Phil Chester being dismembered; and Robin being locked in a Mechanical Guardian that Riddler controls as it massacres everyone it comes across on its way to Gotham's most populated areas. Even at his most pathetic during Scarecrow's attack, Riddler places a bomb around Catwoman's neck and several inside the brains of thugs. An ego-driven narcissist who can't let anyone else win, Riddler kills countless people and threatens even more in the name of protecting his fragile ego and outsmarting Batman by any means necessary.
- The Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane, is a Mad Scientist dedicated to the study of fear. First appearing in Arkham Asylum, he participates in Joker's plan to take over the titular asylum and attempts to Mind Rape Batman several times with his fear toxin. Upon his final defeat, he threatens to contaminate Gotham's water supply with the toxin simply to spite Batman. Scarecrow returns in Arkham Knight as the Big Bad. This time around, he takes advantage of the power vacuum created by Joker's death and unites all the remaining villains against Batman. After a demonstration of his newest fear toxin causes a diner full of people to rip each other apart, Gotham is evacuated, allowing Scarecrow to take over a chemical plant and manufacture a fear bomb powerful enough to take out the eastern seaboard. He even gleefully speculates that the toxin will carry on the air across the county, creating a "nation of fear." Foiled in this, he steals a superweapon called the Cloudburst and uses it to drive all of Gotham temporarily mad with fear. He also has Barbara Gordon kidnapped and leads Batman to believe that his toxin caused her to kill herself. He then manipulates Commissioner Gordon into betraying Batman, and, after the Commissioner goes against orders and seemingly kills him, Scarecrow forces Jim to watch as he drops the still-living Barbara off of a building. In the end, he captures Batman and forces Gordon to unmask him on live TV. He then plans on letting Batman go so he can watch as Gotham is torn apart and everyone he loves is hunted down and killed. All of this was done to completely destroy the myth of the Batman as a savior, and force everyone to experience true fear by destroying their symbol of hope. Arguably, Scarecrow ended up proving to be every bit as evil and heinous as Joker, while also being far more destructive.
- Victor Zsasz from the first two games is a creepy little man who is obsessed with killing innocent people and slashes a tally-mark onto his skin for every life he takes, and he has a lot of tallies. While Batman is able to stop most of his crimes before Zsasz can add more tallies to his skin, the intention is still present in the horrifying ways he tries to kill people. In the first game, you first find him having escaped captivity torturing a security guard with electric shocks, creepily threatening to fry him if Batman intervenes. Later on, he's holding Dr. Young at knife-point while taking what's heavily hinted to be sexual pleasure from the thought of ending her life. He's also been to work on other victims as you can find a couple of groups of dead Arkham staff members who are posed in life-like situations. In the second game, he's one of the inmates stuck in Arkham City and spends his time calling various phone booths around the city and kills the unfortunate schmucks who answer them. With Batman however, he makes him run all around the city looking for various phones that Zsasz is calling, giving him a small amount of time to answer them with three hostage's lives on the line should he fail. Here, he tries to justify himself through discussing his Freudian Excuse by talking about how he found that life is meaningless due to losing his parents and squandering away his fortune by gambling, and that he's trying to save people by "liberating" them from their perceived pointless existences. However, upon entering his hideout it's very clear that he really does take a sick pleasure in this due to the fact that he's menacing two of his hostages and creepily telling them about how slowly he's going to kill them, and has already killed the third hostage despite telling Batman that he wouldn't as long as Batman played by the rules. While not one of Batman's bigger foes, he's still among the most terrifying.
- Julian Gregory Day, aka the Calendar Man, is a soft-spoken psychopath who commits crimes during and based on holidays. In Arkham City, he boasts about a sizeable rap sheet over the years, from murdering his parents and potential lovers to laying siege to maternity wards and poisoning entire gangs working for him, Day kicks off his next spree in the Arkham Knight tie-in comic by murdering dozens of people in stores across Gotham on holidays. Later capturing Batman, Day forces him to fight monsters continuously for an entire week while using an infant as a hostage, before revealing he has poisoned over 300 people in Gotham—-many of whom are children and toddlers—hoping for Batman to tire himself into exhaustion and allow Day to strike the killing blow. Day ultimately flings the hostage infant off a ledge to enable his own escape, successfully evading capture and ending his current spree solely to bask in Batman's coming defeat at the hands of Scarecrow.
- Arkham City: Professor Hugo Strange is a different sort of monster than The Joker and Penguin. While those two enjoy killing for fun, Strange is a perfect example of a Knight Templar who goes to horrific extents in order to accomplish his goals, which he believes to be necessary but are laced with unethical selfishness and egomania. A psychiatrist with an unhealthy obsession with punishing the wicked and wanting to become Batman's successor as Gotham's savior, Strange approached Arkham warden Quincy Sharp and agreed to help him win the election for mayor of Gotham City through his "friends in high places" which in reality was Ra's Al Ghul and his League of Assassins, on the condition that Quincy had to look the other way while he had free reign at Arkham Asylum. Taking an interest in inmate Jervis Tetch's hypnotism skills, he took advantage of the mentally ill man and had him help in hypnotizing Quincy into believing that he was possessed by the spirit of Amadeus Arkham, which combined with the schizophrenia Sharp tried to hide, caused him to snap and commit all sorts of atrocities such as violently torturing the inmates to death in the name of "cleaning the filth of Gotham". He rewarded Tetch by giving him "Alices" (innocent assistants) that Tetch would kill and quite possibly rape. After Sharp won the election and became mayor, he allowed Strange to set up Arkham City, which he would basically wall off a section of Gotham and use it as an enormous prison blockade in which to toss in any of Gotham's criminals, whether they belong in Arkham or Blackgate Prison, and have them live in awful living conditions while they tear each other apart. While some of the criminals who end up in Arkham City arguably deserve it, Strange also has innocent people who opposed his views tossed into the city as well, leaving them to fend for themselves against the various terrifying murderers, rapists, and cannibals imprisoned there. And let's not forget that HE is ultimately why the Penguin is able to torture those undercover cops Commissioner Gordon sent in: he personally ratted them out because he didn't like them snooping in his business as revealed in his taped interviews with Penguin. While he appears to treat his TYGER guards well, they are actually brainwashed slaves who were made loyal to Strange through hypnotism and torture methods such as electroshock therapy, and any who resisted the brainwashing were forcibly lobotomized and tossed into Arkham Asylum's holding cells where they were now reduced to animalistic, screaming savages with no resemblance of human thought anymore. And to top it all off, he decided to proceed with the very controversial "Protocol Ten", an event where he has his TYGER guards in helicopters slaughter every last inmate in the City, the ultimate step for him to cleanse Arkham's filth and ascend as Ra's Al Ghul's heir. Even worse, he reveals that he has plans to establish these kinds of facilities in other areas such as Metropolis and Keystone City as well! While Ra's thinks this is a necessary thing to do in order to make the world a better place, Strange is clearly obsessed with his psychotic ego and wants to be figuratively immortalized in history for his actions, not at all caring about trampling over anyone who gets in the way of his lust for power and glory, and shows no regret whatsoever when watching the carnage that is caused by Protocol 10, claiming that it's a glorious sight.
- From the Batman: Arkham Origins DLC Cold, Cold Heart, we have Ferris Boyle who is even worse than he was in the award winning Batman: The Animated Series episode Heart of Ice from which this DLC is based off of. While appearing to be a kind-hearted philanthropist on the surface, Boyle is really an unethical sociopath who is using his company's legitimate businesses as a front while secretly developing dangerous and highly illegal cryogenic weaponry to be sold on the black market. Hiring the meek cryogenist Victor Fries to do the job for him, he agreed to provide funding for curing Victor's Ill Girl wife Nora's terminal disease. However, Boyle had no intention of actually keeping his word which Fries found out and instead decided to find a cure for Nora himself. When he found this out, Boyle was furious and went to confiscate Nora, going as far as to beat Fries to death despite the fact that Fries was still helping make weapons for him! After leaving Fries near death, Boyle tried to finish him off with a cryogenic weapon, but instead caused the accident that permanently disfigured Fries and made it to where he can't survive outside of sub-zero temperatures. Having caught other members of his staff in the blast, Boyle left them all to die in an attempt to cover his ass, which backfired spectacularly when Fries survived and came after him decked out in power armor and a cryo-cannon as the newly christened villain Mr. Freeze. At the DLC's climax when Batman has defeated Freeze and saves Boyle from his wrath, the slimy bastard freezes Batman and leaves him to his death due to him finding out the truth behind his illicit activites, then proceeds to brutally beat Freeze to death while promising that he'd keep him alive just long enough so he could force him to watch his wife die. While Boyle was already a monster in the original episode, he's much worse here thanks to his newfound sadistic streak that wasn't present in the animated series where he was more of a colossal Asshole Victim, which makes punching the son of a bitch out so much sweeter.
- Arkham Knight:
- Garfield Lynns, better known as Firefly, stands out among Batman's lesser foes due to his wanton sadism, bottomless avarice, and the psychotic lengths he will go to get his desired results. When Joker puts out a $50 million bounty on Batman, Firefly goes an entirely different route than his fellow assassins, leading an attack on the Gotham Pioneer Bridge and endangering hundreds of people. Taking nearly a dozen people hostage, Firefly uses them as bait to lure in Batman and various squads of the GCPD, planning to blow up the bridge once they are all gathered so as to kill them all. Even when Batman informs Firefly that the bounty is called off, the assassin continues his attempted mass murder just for fun. A decade later, Firefly returns to mass murder by trying to burn alive over a dozen firefighters, leaving them to be tortured and killed by gangs after that fails, and then plans to set Gotham aflame one building at a time until all that is left are ashes of building and citizen alike.
- Simon Stagg is a depraved businessman who turned his philanthropic company into an arms and drug dealing enterprise to satisfy his own greed. As of Arkham Knight, Stagg began kidnapping countless people who "wouldn't be missed" and subjecting them to torturous experiments to develop chemical weapons that he then sold off to militaries around the world, profiting from war and death. After allying with Scarecrow, Stagg secretly uses his Fear Toxin to torture dozens of people, keeping them alive and pumped with Fear Toxin for weeks on end to drive them mad, hoping to then sell the Toxin as a new bioweapon for more profit. When Stagg's lifelong co-worker Alex Sartorius tries to expose his evil, Stagg turns him into another experiment, and even after being beaten, Stagg nearly allows Scarecrow to kill millions of people just to evade blame for his own crimes.
- Surprising no one, The Joker is naturally one of these, committing one atrocity after another throughout the games while cackling madly and cracking jokes at the same time.
- Injustice series: The Joker is unsurprisingly quite a nasty piece of work, especially the version of him in the Injustice universe. He dies very early on in the game, but what he does is more than enough to establish himself as this trope. The prequel comic Injustice: Year Zero first shows how horrible he was. After Batman leaves Gotham The Joker goes on a killing rampage killing several guards and prisoners to get out of Arkham. He breaks another inmate named Andre out of jail to get a supposed power of a god he talked about but he refuses to say anything. So the Joker threatens to kill his grandson after he was revealed to him, this causes Andrew to cooperate and tell The Joker everything. He ends up teaming up with Black Manta to get the powerful object. After he does, he ends up killing Andre and takes a Justice Society member Alan Scott. Throughout the rest of the story, he uses various means to kill every single one of the Justice Society members, as well as using his powers to force them to kill each other or themselves in Jay’s case. He then attempts to blow up the hall of justice to kill the entire league, but after a big battle he is eventually stopped loses his newly gained powers. However, Batman as he usually does refuses to kill him. The battle also gave Joker the idea to use Lois as a way of proving that he can be turned evil. In Injustice: Gods Among Us, he put a detonator inside of a pregnant Lois Lane that would cause a nuclear bomb he planted in Metropolis to go off once her heart stopped beating, then he hit Superman with some of the Scarecrow's fear gas laced with kryptonite. This caused Superman to hallucinate Lois as his dreaded foe Doomsday and, as a result, he killed her and the baby by flying her into space, as well as unintentionally setting off the detonator, killing millions of people in the process. Why did Joker do this to him, you ask? He viewed Superman as an easier target than his regular nemesis Batman, and he even taunts Superman about this to his face after being locked up. And that's not all, he even said that he had plans to top this after he makes his inevitable escape... which doesn't happen, thankfully, due to Superman ripping his heart right out his chest. This ends up turning Superman into a cruel tyrant hellbent on oppressing the people of Earth in order to snuff out all crime, making Joker the Bigger Bad of Injustice.
- The Joker is the true Big Bad and the ultimate mastermind behind all the evil in Batman: Vengeance. Faking his death to keep suspicion off himself, Joker manipulates the supervillains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy into committing various crimes, from flash freezing a factory of workers to implanting carnivorous plants iside innocents to blackmail them, and usss the ensuing chaos to initiate his own scheme. Joker plans to pump Joker Gas and the highly flammable substance Promethium into Gotham City's sewers, then giddily watch as millions of innocents choke on their own laughter as they burn alive. Even when beaten, Joker attempts to fling himself to his death, hoping to both torment Batman and immortalize himself as the greatest nightmare in Gotham's history.
- Batman: The Telltale Series:
- Mayor Hamilton Hill, the corrupt Mayor of Gotham City during the episodes "Realm of Shadows" and "Children of Arkham" in Season One, was a member of the Gotham Criminal Triumvirate alongside the corrupt Thomas Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises, and Carmine Falcone, mobster of the Falcone Crime Family. Back in the day, Hill was responsible for working with Thomas Wayne in drugging innocent civilians, such as Esther Cobblepot, to have them sent to Arkham Asylum indefinitely so they can take away their land and profit. However, when Thomas's wife Martha threatened to expose Thomas if he didn't quit working with Hill and Falcone, Hill hired an assassin named Joe Chill to kill both Thomas and Martha, leaving their son, Bruce Wayne, orphaned. At the time of the game, Hill works with the Children of Arkham to gain incriminating evidence against the Wayne family so as to financially harm Harvey Dent's campaign to keep the power he already has. If Bruce visits Hill as himself, the latter gives him more information about his family as well as Thomas's cufflinks, but only if he agrees to help him and because he could still be useful to him for funding his campaign. Eventually, after being infected with a drug that reveals his darkest desires by Lady Arkham herself, Hill publicly announces his plan to kill all the poor civilians of Gotham City through incineration, and, when cornered by the Penguin, lies to him about his reasons for Thomas Wayne's death to save his own skin.
- John & Patricia Vale are abusive foster-parents who are motivated only by getting extra money through government stipends from Gotham Social Services. To this end, they adopted the orphan Victoria Arkham, whose parents were murdered by Thomas Wayne, before subjecting her through Cold-Blooded Torture, beating her bloody with belts and shackles in their Torture Cellar beneath the basement of their house until she was driven mad, with Vicki at one point trying to climb up the wall to escape. After she leaves when old enough, John and Patricia adopt another child, this time a boy, and also subject him to the same horrific torture they inflicted on Vicki. Even after the Vales are killed by Vicki out of revenge after she became the terrorist Lady Arkham, their actions impact their victims even after death, with Vicki torturing Alfred the same way she was tortured by the Vales and their adoptive son being left traumatized by the abuse he was forced to endure.
- In the video game of Batman Begins, Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow, is made considerably worse than his film counterpart. Helping Ra's Al-Ghul by developing the gas needed for his plan, Scarecrow tests it out on innocent people, having them driven insane and using them as attack dogs. Scarecrow shows no concern when many of his men are infected by the gas and holds the brother of one of his men hostage. When Batman reaches his lair, Scarecrow tries to leave his patients to burn to death. When Ra's starts his plan to release the gas into Gotham, Scarecrow tries to lower the bridge to allow the first few people to be infected into the city to start tearing it apart.
Other[]
- Batman: The Audio Adventures:
- The Joker is a "mass murderer and malignant psychopath" who has been plaguing Gotham for 5 years, and looks to make his biggest splash yet on Valentine's Day. A cruel sadist who once poisoned the children of a police sergeant, then tricked the man into ensuring his kids didn't get the antidote in time to save their lives, the Joker has killed hundreds, if not thousands of people throughout Gotham, his schemes always designed to achieve the highest body count possible. Mentally torturing dozens of people into his loyal slaves and coaxing a boy to poison his own parents in the present, Joker takes an entire bus of passengers hostage and maims several of them, then reveals his newest scheme is to flood Gotham with a "Love Potion" that will drive the millions of citizens insane with homicidal lust, and tests the potion by shoving a woman into it and driving her mad. Though utterly convinced he was "created" by a fall into chemicals, Joker is revealed by Batman to have always been a violent, murderous criminal who enjoyed hurting others For the Evulz, and all the chemicals did was give him a "novelty".
- Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin, is a smug crime boss with a love for Disproportionate Retribution. Having ran crime throughout Gotham for a long while, throughout which he regularly assassinates those he dislikes, Penguin was responsible for the creation of fellow villain Two-Face when he had attorney Harvey Dent's face sprayed with acid as punishment for Harvey seeking to arrest him. Further driving Harvey to madness by taunting him into firefights and nearly bombing a pier he owns to kill dozens of civilians, Penguin breaks Harvey into fully embracing Two-Face and becoming his ally. He also holds Stoveplate Sullivan's daughter hostage and freezes her pet kitten alive, threatens to feed a senator's infant child to one of his birds, and promises to force one of his minions to choose which of his own family members will die if the minion fails at accomplishing a ridiculous task, despite Penguin knowing that it is impossible. A petty bully underneath his veneer of affability, Penguin greatly enjoys threatening the loved ones of those who earn his ire.
- Batman, Prince's "Partyman" and "Bat Dance" music videos: In the first video, the titular "Partyman" is the mysterious "guest of honor" who hosts a party where hundreds attend, played by Prince dressed up as The Joker. Pretending to be a comedic, fun-loving host, it is then revealed he has been poisoning the drinks, and he watches with sadistic glee as his victims slowly die from the poison. Giving the police the slip, he is chased down by Batman in the following "Bat Dance" and when his gunfire misses and the Caped Crusader has caught him, he drops a bomb upon the area in a last attempt to avoid capture.