There’s a reason characters like Superman and Batman have been fighting crime for nearly ninety years, and that’s because people love them. Whether they love what the heroes stand for, empathize with their endless desire to fight evil on all fronts, or just think they’re cool, comic book characters persist because people care about them. Of course, not everyone loves heroes. There are some people whose entire existence is based around the opposite, living only to enact the most pure, petty revenge possible against heroes who they wrongfully despite with all of their being. Often, these characters end up being the best villains, and at the very least, the sheer, unadulterated hatred is so much fun to watch unfold. So with that, let’s look at ten of the biggest haters ever put to comic books, heck, ever put to fiction.
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10) Venom
Venom is the original petty ex. When they bonded for the first time, Eddie Brock and the symbiote each had their own reasons to hate their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The symbiote had just been forcibly ripped off of Peter when, from its perspective, it had only been trying to help the Web-Slinger. Eddie, meanwhile, was just pettily blaming Spider-Man instead of acknowledging how he ruined his own life. When they bonded their hatred only multiplied, and they made it their mission to ruin Spider-Man’s life no matter what. They tripped up Spider-Man at every point, tried to muder him on innumerable occasions, and stalked Mary Jane to the point of giving her PTSD whenever looking at Peter’s black suit. The two eventually mellowed out and are good friends with Spidey now, but seriously, they were petty monsters back in the day, and neither one had good reasons to hate him half as much as they did.
9) Kingpin
Wilson Fisk hates Daredevil with every fiber of his being, and that’s not a question. Daredevil and Daredevil: Born Again do a fantastic job of showing just how far the Kingpin of crime is willing to go to ruin Matt Murdock’s life, but he’s even more hardcore about it in the comics. The best example is of course the “Born Again” storyline, where after learning Daredevil’s secret identity, Kingpin spent months systematically destroying Daredevil’s life and driving him to a mental breakdown. There are few people in comics who share a deeper mutual hatred for each other, and fewer archenemies who fight more bitterly than these two. Fisk isn’t limited to just Daredevil either, and hates Spider-Man almost as much, with the prime example being when he hired a hitman who shot Aunt May the very second he learned Spider-Man’s secret identity.
8) J. Jonah Jameson
J. Jonah Jameson is easily one of the most motivated haters on our list, given that he made hating Spider-Man a core part of his job for decades. Spider-Man inadvertently ruined Jameson’s son’s space launch, and Jonah has hated the Wall-Crawler ever since. Jameson dedicated every piece of his life to destroying Spider-Man’s reputation, throwing away all of his journalistic integrity to tear down Spider-Man for simply existing, and through his massive outreach convinced nearly the entire population of New York City to hate him. Now, Jonah has calmed down a bit in recent years, even becoming an ally to Peter after he revealed his secret identity, but still, this man hated Spider-Man for the sheer crime of being a hero, which made Jonah feel inadequate. Anyone who screams this loudly and spends that much time thinking of ways to incriminate Spider-Man has more than earned their place on this list.
7) Red Skull
Red Skull runs on hatred like it’s gasoline. He is literally a Nazi, so it’s hard to imagine a single ideology that has inspired more hatred than that. He hates the very concepts of freedom and people living without his rule, but somehow he hates Captain America above everything else. Captain America embodies every ideal that Red Skull despises, and vice versa. The man literally worked for Hitler. Again, it’s really hard to hate more than a Nazi, and Red Skull specifically wants nothing more than to tear down Captain America. Some prime examples of his spite are killing Captain America in Old Man Logan and wearing his bloodied suit, alongside altering his history to make him into a HYRDA agent. This man despises all of humanity with a burning passion, yet even he’s not in the top five.
6) Bullseye
Yet another Daredevil villain, Bullseye and the Man Without Fear have given each other a million reasons to despise each other. Bullseye has killed not just one, but two of Daredevil’s lovers by impaling them in the gut, and attempted to do the same to a third. Daredevil has paralyzed Bullseye, carved another tattoo into his head, and played a traumatising fake game of Russian Roulette with him. In response, Bullseye has made it his personal mission to kill every single one of Daredevil’s lovers, and was driven by so much sheer rage at the thought of Daredevil that when he developed a brain tumor and had a mental breakdown, he hallucinated that every single person he saw was the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Even when losing his mind, the only thing that remained was his utter hatred of the blind superhero.
5) Lex Luthor
Lex hates Superman for both philosophical and personal reasons. The philosophical reason being that he thinks someone who does as much as Superman holds humanity back from solving their largest problems on their own, making them reliant on him. The personal being that the people of Metropolis love Superman more than Lex, and Lex cannot stand the thought of that. Lex has gone out of his way to destroy and demean Superman in every way possible, but perhaps the best example of his unending hatred came when Lex developed Kryptonite poisoning after years of wearing a Kryptonite signet ring. So he spent years wearing a ring specially because he might maybe one day be able to use it to hurt Superman, and when said ring gives him cancer, he still blames the whole thing on Superman. Luthor is the definition of an egomanic who will go to any lengths to justify his petty, schoolyard hatred of the world’s greatest hero, but that’s what we love about him.
4) Doctor Doom
Doom probably hates Mr. Fantastic about as much as Lex hates Superman, but the difference is that Doom has even less of a reason, and is far, far more petty about it. Doom hates Reed because when they were in college Reed told Doom his device wouldn’t work, and when Doom tried it and it blew up in his face, instead of coming to the conclusion that Reed was right, he assumed Reed must have tampered with the device and blamed him for everything. From that day, Doom made it his mission to destroy Reed and everything he stands for, all because Doom refuses to entertain the idea that he made a mistake. Doom hates Reed so much that when Sue was pregnant with their daughter and Reed was captured by other villains, he helped deliver the baby specifically so Reed would have to live knowing that his daughter lived because of Doom. Of course, he also took the rights to name her Valeria, made her into his magical familiar for a later assault on the Fantastic Four, and ensured that her first word was Doom. This is only just scratching the surface of all the insane actions doom has taken, all out of a bottomless, misguided hatred.
3) Sabretooth
Sabretooth well and truly hates Wolverine. Up until now, the entries on this list have taken all manner of despicable actions to destroy their target, but Sabretooth enjoys Wolverine’s suffering to the nth degree. He has dedicated years of his life to ensuring that Wolverine suffers no matter what, and the most prominent example of this being how every single year Sabretooth tracks down Wolverine to ruin whatever semblance of a life he’s managed to build for himself. No matter where he is or what he’s doing, Sabretooth will take the time to find Wolverine and kill someone, either someone Wolverine loves or innocent people, and display them for Wolverine to see. After that, the two fight like rapid, savage animals. No matter how many chances he has to kill him, Sabretooth will keep Wolverine alive, just to ensure that he can make him suffer more later. These two have the most on sight rivalry of all time. They are territorial beasts, and no matter what all they want is to see the other one ripped to pieces, but breathing just enough to stay alive. Wolverine’s pain is the motivation for a clean fifty percent of whatever Sabretooth does, and he is the best he is at what he does.
2) Black Manta
You wouldn’t think that anyone could have feelings this powerful about Aquaman, but Black Manta will literally cross any line if it means hurting the King of Atlantis. Nothing is sacred to this supervillain, and no one that Aquaman loves is safe. This man is so dedicated to ruining Aquaman’s life that he sold his soul to the demon Neron to gain the power he thought would let him kill Aquaman, and just a little before that, did something that no other villain had ever done before. He murdered Aquaman’s infant son, marking the first time a villain had killed a child directly on panel, literally going farther than villain ever had before. He’s so obsessed with ruining Aquaman’s life that after Aquaman died he retired from villainy and opened a successful fish market. Black Manta enjoyed his life, he was happy, but the second he heard Aquaman was back he murdered all of his customers and once again dedicated himself to destroying his archenemy. This man is obsessed, and it’s positively insane.
1) Reverse-Flash
Eobard Thawne, and I cannot stress this enough, is the pettiest being ever conceived by humankind. This man isn’t just obsessed with hating Barry Allen, he routinely breaks the laws of reality and returns from death with the sole purpose of making sure Barry has a bad day. If I tried to list every vile act he’s committed just to make Barry’s day a little worse then we would be here for two weeks, but to briefly cover some of the most egregiously insane actions; Thawne traveled back in time to murder Barry’s mother and pin it on his dad, erase Barry’s childhood best friend from existence just so Barry would be lonely as a kid, killed his dog so he would be sad, and even pushed him down the stairs as a child just because he could. Thawne cannot kill Barry and still exist, so he made it his singular purpose to make Barry’s life as inconvenient and as sad as physically possible. He has made it so he is responsible for every bad day in Barry’s life, and actively wants Barry to blame him for everything because Barry’s despair is Thawne’s soul food. He literally named himself the Reverse-Flash, the opposite of the Flash!
Thawne’s hatred is so legendary that it’s broken out from the comic book bubble into popular culture. Do you know the “It was me, Barry!” memes and their wild and insane plots? It would legitimately be perfectly in character for Thawne to ruin Barry’s first experience with his girlfriend exactly like that. If he did, I don’t think any of Thawne’s fans would bat an eye, they’d just nod and move on because traumatizing Barry like that is a Tuesday for him. Thawne’s entire existence, the reason he keeps fighting against retcons and universal resets to return, is specifically so he can make Barry feel bad. I cannot express how much this man hates the Flash, and he without a doubt deserves the number one spot on this list for any of the petty, disgusting actions he’s taken over the years.
So there we have the ten biggest haters in all of comics. There are plenty more despicable haters we could have easily included on this list, but who do you think belongs up here in the hatred-fueled big leagues? Who do you believe subsists on a diet of more densely compacted spite than anyone else? Let us know in the comments below!
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