5 Laughable DC Villain Costumes That No One Takes Seriously

DC Comics created the guidelines for what it means to be a superhero or supervillain, and what attire is appropriate for each role. DC has always excelled at creating memorable villain costumes that are both colorful and menacing. Some of these dastardly outfits have become so iconic that they’ve stayed largely the same for decades, while others have undergone major upgrades to adapt to the times. Of course, when crafting hundreds, if not thousands, of costumes for DC Comics’ most wanted, a few laughable duds will slip through. These terrible costumes have made their DC villains complete jokes of the company.

For supervillains, a costume can display their powers, gimmicks, and motivations. Sometimes a villain with a lot of destructive and narrative potential gets bogged down by their poor fashion choices. Meanwhile, some bad costumes can emphasize how bad of an idea the character was in the first place.

5) Brain Storm

Axel Storm, aka Brain Storm, was a brilliant scientist who, upon discovering a type of metal that attracts stellar energy, crafted a helmet that boosts his brain’s capabilities to new heights. This enhanced power granted him incredible abilities, including teleportation, mind control, energy construct creation, energy projection, and molecular manipulation. With just a thought, Brain Storm could bring the Justice League to their knees. It’s just a shame that his helmet looks like a giant silver traffic cone on his head. The helmet makes Brain Storm look less like an all-powerful mastermind and more like a mustache-twirling gnome. The rest of his outfit isn’t much better, with a bland purple-and-blue color scheme and a pair of excessively large shoulder blades that seem to do nothing but obstruct Brain Storm’s vision. Brain Storm is the textbook example of how a villain’s fashion sense can determine whether they’re seen as a menacing evildoer or a C-List clown.

4) Eraser

Batman has had his fair share of colorful villains with iconic costumes, but the Eraser’s outfit is remembered for all the wrong reasons. When Leonard Fiasco was a boy, he’d get picked on for constantly needing to erase his incorrect answers on his schoolwork. This mild inconvenience somehow motivated him to become the supervillain the Eraser, who took designing his costume way too literally. His entire gimmick is that he uses the eraser on the top of his helmet to remove evidence from crime scenes. The helmet in question is shaped like an eraser head with two cartoonish round eyeholes. Eraser’s entire costume is meant to resemble a number two pencil: a yellow suit with black lines. To complete the outfit, Eraser wears ridiculously long, absurdly sharp black shoes to resemble the lead tip of a pencil. If Eraser ever wanted to be taken seriously by Gotham’s criminal underworld, he should have erased this costume design and tried again.

3) Crazy Quilt

Paul Dekker, aka Crazy Quilt, used to be a talented artist, but you’d never guess that from his eyesore of a getup. After being blinded by a gunshot, Dekker underwent an experimental surgery to restore his vision. While the operation was successful, it left him able to see only bright, vivid colors, which drove him mad. As the Batman villain Crazy Quilt, his costume is just as random and visually unpleasing as the bright colors that torture his vision. Crazy Quilt’s suit is a distracting patchwork of mismatched, colorful shapes with no pattern or flow, making it painful to look at. He’s also wearing a helmet that shoots bright colors that hypnotize or blind people, but it looks like he just stuck LED lights to his head. Overall, Crazy Quilt’s costume is a colorful embarrassment that looks like it was stitched together by an amateur artist instead of the renowned painter he claims to be.

2) Polka Dot Man

It probably won’t come as a shock to anyone, but polka dots aren’t an intimidating gimmick for a Batman villain. Abner Krill tried his hand at being a criminal mastermind by developing a suit that could house numerous concealed weapons. These weapons range from buzzsaws to flying saucers. As his lamentable name suggests, these concealed items take the form of rainbow-colored polka dots scattered across the suit. The mix of the pure-white suit with the dozens of colorful dots all over his body makes Polka Dot Man look like a walking game of Twister. He also sports a bizarre set of goofy goggles that only adds to his incredibly strange, nonsensical fashion choice. Polka Dot Man was clearly nuts if he ever thought that such a silly costume would make him look menacing to Batman. This costume alone made Polka Dot Man the laughingstock of Gotham’s criminal underworld and crowned him as one of the Dark Knight’s most pathetic supervillains of all time.

1) Codpiece

I’ve heard of insecure men trying to compensate, but Codpiece is just ridiculous. The Doom Patrol villain Codpiece got his start when a girl he asked out rejected him because he wasn’t big enough. She meant his height, but Codpiece took her comment very differently. To start his criminal career, Codpiece outfitted himself in an ugly orange-and-dark-blue suit with lots of random buttons and wires. He also wears an extremely goofy and phallic-shaped helmet. Of course, none of these other design features come close to the absurd device that earned Codpiece his name. Strapped to his crotch is a giant cannon that he uses to commit crimes and attack people. This poorly placed cannon comes with a multitude of ammo, including lasers, sonic blasts, a drill, and even a retractable boxing glove. Codpiece is the definition of a one-joke visual gag who immediately wore out his welcome. With a costume that begs to be censored, Codpiece should’ve thrown this suit in the trash.

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