The best Marvel Comics heroes are the ones who somehow believe they are the heroes in their own stories. Most Marvel heroes are just villains who want to rob banks, undertake terrorist actions, or want to take over the world for nefarious reasons. These are generic thieves, conquerors, and dictators. However, there are more interesting villains when looking at the more conflicted ones. These are villains who hurt people, become as evil as they can be, but they did everything from a point where they believed they were saving the world and doing the right thing. They mistakenly think they are the hero and the superheroes are the villains.
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Here is a look at seven Marvel Comics villains who believed they were the heroes, and some of them even turned into heroes over the years, despite their terrible actions.
7) Maximus
If there is one group of characters that is hard to portray in Marvel Comics (and the MCU), it is the Inhumans. This is because it is hard for normal readers to get behind a Royal Family that lives in a society that forces classist rule and pushes its weakest and downtrodden people into roles as basically enslaved workers to keep their society running. Meanwhile, the Royal Family lives at the top, with the best in food and living conditions, and few worries.
That makes Maximus right in many of his conflicts with his brother, Black Bolt, the King of Attilan. Maximus wanted to free the Alpha Primitives, the slave caste in Attilan that does all the hard work so the Inhumans can live in luxury. Yes, Maximus is mad, and he has more of a thirst for power than he actually cares about the poor in his community, but his idea of freeing the enslaved makes him the hero in his story, whereas Black Bolt comes across as an uncaring dictator.
6) Galactus
Galactus is seen as a villain by most societies. The Shi’ar Empire tried to put Reed Richards on trial just for the sin of saving Galactus’s life. Most people see Galactus as a mass murderer, slaughtering entire civilizations as he feeds on a planet, extinguishing all life there. He has tried to destroy Earth more than once, and the heroes all teamed up to defeat this “villain” every time he has tried.
However, in reality, Galactus is not a villain. Instead, Halactus is a force of nature who has existed since the start of time. Like the Phoenix Force, Galactus is someone who destroys worlds to maintain a cosmic balance, so while he kills billions of people while feeding, he is not doing it for evil purposes. It should also be noted that he is a check against the Celestials, consuming planets in which the Celestial embryos gestate. His fate is to one day give back more to the universe than he ever took while feeding. He is not only a force of nature, but he is a hero whose countless atrocities keep the universe, as a whole, alive.
5) Red Hulk
The main villain in the upcoming 2026 Marvel event series Armageddon appears to be none other than Red Hulk. From his start in Marvel Comics, Thunderbolt Ross has been problematic. He has persistently hunted down the Hulk to kill, all with the United States government on his side. He used his rank as a respected military general to do some terrible things, and he rarely faced repercussions because the U.S. considered him the good guy.
Once Ross became the Red Hulk, he continued to do what he had always done, but this time, he didn’t find the same respect and leeway he did as a military general. Instead, the government finally saw how unhinged he was, but through it all, Ross sees himself as the hero. Now that he has decided to “liberate” Latveria at all costs, and the U.S. wants nothing to do with that, he is becoming a villain, but one who still feels he is the only one doing the right thing.
4) Boliver Trask
Boliver Trask helped create one of the most dangerous things in the Marvel Comics universe. He was the mastermind behind the Sentinels. As it was shown in Days of Future Past, these Sentinels would destroy the world, kill legitimate heroes, and enslave both humans and mutants. Trask even envisioned the Sentinels as hunting down mutants, making him a clear villain, but he believed he was protecting humans.
Trask had the basic human trait of being a bigoted racist and hating anyone who wasn’t like him. In Marvel, this meant mutants. In his mind, all mutants were a threat, and he created the Sentinels to protect normal humans from these “abominations.” Trask, like all bigots, was a terrible person with almost no redeeming qualities, but in his own mind, he was the hero.
3) Killmonger
While the Black Panther MCU movie really slammed this message home, Killmonger in the comics also thinks he is the hero in this story. In the movies, it was shown with a new origin story where Black Panther’s father killed his dad (T’Chaka’s brother) and left him an orphan, making him believe he had as much right to the throne as his cousin. This wasn’t the case in the comics, but Killmonger still believed he was doing what was neccesary to stand up for the oppressed people in Wakanda.
While Black Panther is an honorable king, he rules Wakanda as a dictator and keeps his people held down as their ruler, where his way goes no matter what anyone who lives there believes. Killmonger believes he is the only person strong enough to hold Wakanda accountable for its actions as an isolationalist nation, and he has always seen himself as the hero who should overthrow his oppressors.
2) Magneto
There might not be a better example of a Marvel Comics villain who always thought of himself as a hero than Magneto. While he has been a “hero” for a long time now, working with the X-Men instead of against them, he spent decades as one of Marvel Comics’ most dangerous terrorist villains. However, there are many people, both in the Marvel Universe and who read Marvel Comics, who will admit that Magneto was right much of the time.
Magneto had every reason to hate and distrust humans. Professor X always preached tolerance and had the X-Men fight as heroes to win over the public. Magneto knew humans, as a whole, would never accept mutants. While Magneto went at it the wrong way, he was right, because every time humans get the chance, they hurt mutants every single time. Magneto was right about humans and mutants, and he was right to prepare mutants to fight back.
1) Doctor Doom
Doctor Doom has an arrogance level that is unmatched by almost anyone. He has always believed that he is the only person capbable of saving the world, and the facat that he has done it more than once makes it hard to disporve that. While superheroes like Captain America and Iron Man were fighting each other as the world came to an end, Doctor Doom found a way to save the universe and create a new world in his image. While the comics showed heroes fighting for their freedom in Secret Wars, Doctor Doom honestly saved them all and was the hero.
In One World Under Doom, every hero wanted to stop Doctor Doom after he named himself the emperor of the world. What he did was out of arrogance and conceit, but Doctor Doom stopped all wars, ended all conflict, and created world peace, although without freedom. There were even people everywhere who preferred this to the way the world was. Doom eventually fell, but even in the end, he felt he was the only one who did anything to make the world a better place.
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