DC Comics 7 Pettiest Villains, Ranked

DC Comics has a lot of great villains, and many of them have legitimate reasons for their turn to evil. For some people, like Deadshot and Deathstroke, it is a job, and they kill people for the highest bidder. For others, like Captain Cold and the Trickster, they are just thieves who decided this was a way to get money thanks to their skills or powers. There are also other, more tragic villains who are evil because of no fault of their own, like Solomon Grundy and Killer Croc, and others who are just pure evil, like Darkseid. However, the petty villains are often the most entertaining because they are bad just because they feel slighted or hold a never-ending grudge for one reason or another.

Here is a look at seven of the most petty villains in DC Comics history.

7) Cheetah

Every version of Cheetah has been pretty petty in their antagonistic relationship with Wonder Woman, but none was as petty as the original Cheetah, Priscilla Rich. This woman was a debutante who was asked to introduce Wonder Woman at a charity event. This was a huge moment for Priscilla, and when she took the stage to introduce the heroine, no one cheered for her arrival, but they just started chanting for Wonder Woman.

When Priscilla went backstage, she was angry and began to envision herself as a villain known as the Cheetah who would get revenge on Wonder Woman for stealing the spotlight. It was all delusional, but her hatred of Wonder Woman was born when people just wouldn’t cheer for her, and this hatred led her to want to kill Wonder Woman, taking the petty jealousy to the extreme.

6) Clayface

There are some versions of Clayface who are tragic villains who deserve sympathy and possible redemption. Then, there is the original Clayface, an actor named Basil Karlo. Clayface was one of Batman’s earliest villains, debuting in Detective Comics #40 in 1940. Unlike the other versions of Clayface that became superpowered and could morph their body into clay, this was just a serial killer.

The petty thing was that he only started killing people because he was jealous that a movie studio was making a remake of his classic horror movie without inviting him back to star in it. Because he was angry that the new Dread Castle movie was being made without him, he started killing the cast and crew of the remake. He then swore revenge on Batman when he discovered his schemes and stopped him.

5) Larfleeze

Larfleeze is a Lantern character who is motivated solely by extreme greed. He is the Orange Lantern, and he is the only wielder of the Orange Light of Greed because he is unwilling to share anything with anyone else, not even the power of the Orange Lantern Corps, which he demands to keep to himself. In fact, he kills anyone who might heed the call to ensure he is the only one.

Larfleeze takes it even one step further. He has a motto that what is his is his, and what is anyone else’s is also his, and he has an almost childlike need to keep everything he finds for himself. However, if people leave Larfleeze alone and let him remain where he is without attempting to take anything from him, he mostly leaves everyone alone. However, his main goal of keeping everything for himself is a petty attitude that keeps him from ever becoming a hero.

4) Joker

Joker is a villain who is often just the idea of anarchy and contempt for destroying the status quo. However, when breaking things down to the simplest ideas, Joker is an extremely petty villain. He has tried to destroy the Batman family more than once, and his reason for doing so was extremely petty. He wanted Batman for himself and felt that having a family and friends took Batman’s attention away from him.

The sillier the stories, the more petty Jpoker becomes, as well. If someone doesn’t laugh at his jokes, he kills them. Joker used his Joker Gas to poison fish to look like him, and he then tried to copyright it to collect royalties on it. When the official said no, he started killing them. He had a rival in Batman: Cacophony, who disrespected him, so he blew up a school full of children just to kill one of his relatives. He killed the mayor on Christmas just so people would be too sad to celebrate the holiday.

3) Black Manta

Black Manta is Aquaman’s deadliest enemy, and he won’t let the King of the Seas forget it. In fact, Black Manta calls himself a “professional hater,” and he prefers to spend his every waking moment trying to find a way to ruin Aquaman’s life over any other pursuit. Aquaman killed his father by accident, so he has a reason to hate him, but he has taken his hatred to the extreme more than once. Black Manta murdered Aquaman’s baby boy by suffocating him in an air bubble, and that alone was the worst thing that any villain ever did to a superhero.

Even though killing the baby should have been enough for revenge, it wasn’t, and Black Manta just kept trying to hurt Aquaman, even though nothing he could ever do could top that. It is so bad that Manta doesn’t even always remember his dad or why he hates Aquaman. Once, when he thought Aquaman was dead, he rehabilitated and got a job. When he learned Aquaman was alive again, he killed everyone he worked with and returned to his Black Manta role.

2) Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor has become someone who is a hero in his own mind, but in reality, he is a petty villain who can’t let his hatred of Superman die down enough to do the right thing most of the time. Luthor could save the world if he put his mind to it, but his small-minded, petty hatred will never allow him to reach that level. The funniest part was how it all started in the Silver Age timeline.

The origin story took place in Adventure Comics #2761 in 1960, when it showed Lex Luthor and Superboy as teenagers. Luthor was a genius then, and he found an antidote for Kryptonite, but accidentally caught his lab on fire. He called for Superboy to help him, and when Superboy blew out the fire, it sprayed the chemicals onto Luthor’s head, and he went bald. He blamed Superboy for making him bald, and that is why he became a villain. This is what led Lex Luthor to become DC’s evilest villain.

1) Reverse Flash

The pettiest villain in DC Comics is also the pettiest one in all of comic books, and no one else is even close. Reverse Flash is Eobard Thawne, who was Flash’s biggest fan in the future. However, when Flash told him that “every second is a gift,” Eobard put people’s lives in danger to save them, only to have Flash stop him and arrest him. When he was released, he traveled through time to show Flash he was rehabilitated and saw Flash tell Wally West the same thing. Taking this as a slight, Reverse-Flash took it upon himself to destroy Barry Allen’s life.

What happened next was the thing of legend. He traveled back in time and used super speed to push Barry down a flight of stairs. He moved Barry’s hand as a child to miss catching a baseball in a game. He stole his homework and hid his school books. He took Barry’s childhood best friend and used shockwaves to remove him from the timeline so Barry would be friendless. He opened Barry’s door so his dog would get out and get hit by a car. Of course, he also killed Barry’s mom and framed his dad.

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