Not everyone can be the Joker.
When you’re looking at a career as a criminal, characters like the Joker , Two Face, Poison
Ivy, Bane, the Penguin, the Riddler, well, those are high standards and expectations
people.
So naturally, Batman has had a lot of villains over the years who grind his gears in a different
way; they don’t challenge him, they just make his life more difficult with their idiotic
and irritable tactics.
These villains are bottom barrel stuff; they’re the villains that mostly appeared during the
silver age in the era where comics were a little too wacky and campy for our contemporary
taste buds, but still provided for a whole lot of laughs.
Many of these villains wouldn’t make more than one or two appearances back in the day,
and well, after hearing what they’re deal is, you’ll probably guess why.
10 Penny Plunderer Penny Plunderer has to be a personal favourite
of mine.
First appearing in World’s Finest Comics issue 30 in 1947, the Penny Plunderer, aka
Joe Coyne, was a fellow who used to sell newspapers, but after he was caught stealing pennies,
he became real hard and decided that a life of crime was for him.
How did he commit his crimes?
Everything had to be penny themed.
This included wild schemes like putting Batman and Robin into a deathtrap shaped like a giant
penny.
He’s the reason why Batman has the giant penny in his Batcave, although poor Penny
Plunderer would later be retconned out of Bat’s rogue gallery and the giant penny
was attributed to Two Face as an item he once used to try to crush the dark knight.
So dude doesn’t even get to keep his claim to fame, that’s how much he annoyed Batman
and DC.
To be fair, he wasn’t really operating on the best of business models.
And surely, he would’ve floundered in Canada; we stopped making pennies years ago.
9 Doctor Doom We’re not talking THE Doctor Doom here of
Marvel fame.
Oh no.
This dude’s one and only appearance in DC comics was during Detective Comics issue 158,
and he didn’t even get a real name.
He was known solely as Doctor Doom.
But don’t think he lives up to his name.
His biggest claim to fame was an attempt to steal a sarcophagus, failed, and jumped into
the ocean and hid under a dock.
But that’s not the end of it; he then broke into the Bat Cave, but clearly didn’t think
this plan through because he then decided to try to use all of the trophies in the Bat
Cave to fight against the dynamic duo.
This resulted in him throwing a grenade at Batman and hiding inside the sarcophagus he
tried to steal, but then got stuck inside, with the blast sealing the ancient coffin
with him inside.
So yeah, technically, Batman and Robin have a dead guy inside a sarcophagus in their Bat
cave that they never bothered trying to pry out and save.
He was just that irritating that it wasn’t worth it.
8 Anarky This V for Vendetta wannabe is Lonnie Machin.
Lonnie’s motivation to becoming a criminal was that he had a pen pal when he was 11,
and learned that his pen pal’s life in his third world country sucked balls.
He then decides to get woke and learn all he can about politics, and decides he’s
gonna be the one who helps give the oppressed people of Gotham City hope.
Right, sure you will buddy.
Anakry’s first move is to read a newspaper and follow up on some workers rights claims.
Eventually, he stirs up enough trouble and crosses paths with Batman, who then figures
out that Anakry is a child.
Oh, and while all this is happening, Anakary has somehow banded together a group of homeless
dudes, including one named Legs whose crippled, in order to help him fight for justice.
So yeah.
You can see why Batman would groan over this self righteous guy.
7 Captain Stingaree You can’t help but feel bad for Captain
Stingaree.
For starters, he was one child of a set of quadruplets.
He had a rough time growing up, and he dressed up as a pirate as a means of finding himself.
He also falsely believed that one of his three twin brothers was secretly Batman.
So Bruce Wayne, being the ultimate troll, decides to get all three of Stingaree’s
brothers to dress up like Batman in order to get him to stop stirring up trouble and
lure him out.
But really, it felt like it was more of a way for him to screw with Stingaree’s head
more than anything.
6 Ten Eyed Man The ten eyed man has ten eyes but they’re
on his damn finger tips.
HOW IS THIS EVEN A THING, YOU GUYS.
Okay, so real talks.
In theory, this villain is only a major threat to himself.
He can’t do anything with his hands without seriously hurting one of his ten eyes.
Throw something his way?
He’ll go to catch it and bam, he’s hurt his eyes.
This actually happened by the way, with A SHRUB.
First appearing in Batman issue 226 in 1970, he lost his eye sight from an explosion, but
gained ten other eyes in the tips of his fingers, and decided to take Batman on by demanding
the Dark Knight meet him in Vietnam (since he was a war vet and wanted to fight on his
own turf).
For whatever reason, Bats went along with this, and went along with the fight, which
eventually led to Ten Eye Man being captured and imprisoned.
He would later be removed from the DC universe thanks to Crisis on Infinite Earths, where
he was killed off.
No surprise there.
http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Ten-Eyed_Man
5 Crazy Quilt A former thief and painter, Crazy Quilt first
hit the scene in Boy Commandos issue 15 in 1946.
Like our last number, he was blinded, the cause of his tragedy being a gun shot wound,
which led the character to volunteer for an experimental procedure which would leave him
only seeing bright colours.
His main go to from there was to use a helmet that hypnotized his victims with flashes of
bright colour, but really, he boiled down to committing petty crimes and vandalizing
things, with his threats consisting of removing all colour from Gotham.
Batman doesn’t have time for that sh*t!
Especially when it was revealed that Crazy Quilt was using a water soluble dye to commit
his crimes.
Dude ever hear of rain before?
Yeeeah.
4 The Ventriloquist First appearing in Detective Comics issue
583 in 1988, the alias of Ventriloquist has belonged to three different characters in
the DC universe over the years.
We’re talking about the first version of him, Arnold Wesker.
Why is this fellow annoying?
Cause without sticking his hand up the butt of his puppet named Scarface, he’s just
a quiet meek dude who is absolutely harmless.
Scarface, the puppet, is a 1920s gangster who was used as a means of coping with with
the dissociative identity disorder that Wesker developed thanks to seeing his mom get assassinated
by thugs from a rival mafia family.
This puppet becomes a full blown gangster when in use, tommy gun and all, but here’s
the thing.
Batman takes down crime bosses like it’s a walk in the park.
So a puppet sized crime boss who isn’t actually a crime boss?
You can see why Bats would groan over that.
3 Polka Dot Man The Polka Dot Man is another Batman villain
that didn’t manage to see the light of day for overly long.
First appearing in 1962 in Detective Comics 300, polka dot man, aka Abner Krill, decided,
for unknown reasons, to become a criminal and make his MO putting dots and spots all
over Gotham City.
As you can imagine, Batman and Robin were like, yo dude, what are you doing?
And shut him down real quick.
Although kudos to him for managing to catch Robin, which felt like pure luck.
Polka Dot Man’s schtick is that the dots on his costume do a variety of interesting
stuff, from creating weapons or morphing into an escape vehicle.
Years later, he would reappear and aside from his costume, basically abandon his polka dot
gimmick, instead choosing to use a baseball bat to assault a gotham PD officer.
Batman didn’t even bother to get involved in that one, because Harvey Bullock got to
Polka Dot Man first and beat the crap out of him, which led to Krill filing a lawsuit
against the Gotham PD for police brutality.
On the plus side, because of how utterly ridiculous this character was, he has appeared in a slew
of other Batman related media, including the animated series Batman The Brave and the Bold,
and is defeated when Batman jumps in three dots in his uniform, causing him to tilt like
a pinball machine and shut down.
He’s even in the upcoming Lego DC Super-Villains game, too!
2 Condiment king God bless condiment king.
Really.
He’s a dude whose MO is to fire condiments at people.
So for context, Condiment King first came to be in the Batman The Animated Series, created
by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.
He was literally a mockery of the long list of silly Batman villains the caped crusader
has had to face over the years.
His whole schtick was to use condiments to fight in battle.
So Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, you name it.
And he didn’t even prove to be much more than a nuisance for Batman; he ended up slipping
on a puddle of Ketchup that he had created, and nearly fell off a roof in the process.
1 Kite Man Kite Man is the product of the creatives at
DC running out of ideas when it came to whipping up new villains.
Who in their right not desperate mind would think, hey, you know what’s pretty darn
evil?
Kites.
Let’s make a villain whose entire persona is based around kites.
Great work everybody!
Dear lord.
Kite Man, aka Charles Chuck Brown first appeared in Batman issue 133 in August of 1960, so
he’s a prime silver age villain, that’s for sure.
So Kite-Man’s whole schtick is that he has a glider kite contraption that he soars around
in, along with a pretty silly costume.
He appeared twice in the comics facing off against the Dark Knight, and poor Batman,
in order to put an end to Kite Man’s shenanigans, had to get a kite of his own to chase him.
But Bruce wasn’t the only hero he tormented.
He made Hawkman and Hawkgirl groan in frustration a few times too.
The character went on to make an appearance in DC Rebirth, as a very unstable individual
whose catch phrase was “Kite Man, hell yeah!”
There we have it friends!
Which one of these villains did you find the most entertaining?
Which ones do you secretly hope would make their way back into the pages of Batman’s
comics?
Let us know in those comments below!
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