It is often said that you can judge a man by the company he keeps.\u00a0 A corollary of that is that you can judge a man by the enemies he has made, which is a type of company that he keeps.\u00a0 Supposing that is true, then we should be able to judge a super-hero by the types of enemies that are gunning for him.<\/p>\n
By how does one judge?\u00a0 By what criteria should one rank the bad guys?\u00a0 I thought it would be fun to let the geek culture on the internet do that for me and, in keeping with the spirit of minimal effort, I would amalgamate the various rankings and reach some conclusions.<\/p>\n
To this end I\u2019ve compiled lists from the following sources:<\/p>\n
Comparing these lists isn\u2019t terribly easy in that they are of differing lengths.\u00a0 In addition, there are several questions that can be posed, such as:\u00a0 1) which villain ranks first, 2) which franchise has the best enemies, 3) which publishing house has the most memorable bad guys, and so on.\u00a0 There is no fair way to slice and dice these data and, in some sense, it doesn\u2019t matter since the rankings are clearly subjective in the truest fanboy kind of way.\u00a0 What I offer is a slightly subjective cut, guided but not ruled by statistical methods, through what the lists above.<\/p>\n
The first step in analyzed the lists was to dump the results into an Excel spreadsheet with four columns for each list: 1) Ranking, 2) Character Name, 3) Publisher, and 4) Franchise.\u00a0 The first three are provided by the list maker\u2019s themselves and requires no additional comment.\u00a0 The franchise categorization required a bit more thought.\u00a0 Lumping bad-guys like the Joker under Batman or Venom under Spider-Man were straightforward, but what to do with overlap characters that tend to go from single books to team ones?\u00a0 Was Doomsday a Superman enemy or Justice League?\u00a0 In the end, I decided that the best way was to keep as much specificity and to use some judgement based on my own understanding of the genre.\u00a0 Under this approach, Doomsday was a Superman baddie plain and simple.<\/p>\n
The next step was to decide how to compare the different-length lists.\u00a0\u00a0 Also of concern was the question as to the exact ordering in any amalgamated list.\u00a0 For example, IGN ranks Magneto first and the Joker second while WhatCulture has the Joker first and Magneto in third place.\u00a0 Clearly there is very little that separates the top 10 from each other and so on down the chain.\u00a0 Numerical ranking was provided for each \u2018tier\u2019 of 5 villains.\u00a0 The top 5 were provided with a ranking of \u201820\u2019, the next five with a \u201819\u2019 and so on down to the bottom five (if provided) who got a \u20181\u2019.\u00a0 In this way, some of the arbitrariness of fanboy glee could be tamed and understood.<\/p>\n
The next step was easy, sort the various data and look at the results.\u00a0 The first sorting was on publisher; due to the Vertigo imprint on DC, there might be some debate as to whether to include or exclude these rankings from the statistics \u2013 I opted for inclusion.\u00a0 The raw scores are summarized in the table below for the four big publishers: Darkhorse, DC, Image, and Marvel.<\/p>\n
| <\/td>\n | Darkhorse<\/em><\/strong><\/td>\n| DC<\/em><\/strong><\/td>\n | Image<\/em><\/strong><\/td>\n | Marvel<\/em><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | IGN<\/td>\n | 4<\/td>\n | 541<\/td>\n | 6<\/td>\n | 475<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | WhatCulture<\/td>\n | 33<\/td>\n | 466<\/td>\n | 21<\/td>\n | 483<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | Complex<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 217<\/td>\n | 17<\/td>\n | 216<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | ThoughtCo<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 78<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 117<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | FanSided<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 399<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 376<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | CollegeHumor<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 196<\/td>\n | 0<\/td>\n | 236<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n | <\/p>\n Overall, the polls were split between DC and Marvel with IGN, Complex, and Fansided favoring DC and WhatCulture, ThoughtCo, and CollegeHumor favoring Marvel.\u00a0 However, the Complex ranking left the two publishers in nearly a tie and so I think it is fair to give Marvel the edge in this department.<\/p>\n The next munging of the data was to rank franchise.\u00a0 Here some additional latitude was required since certain franchises center around team books but with individual titles in support.\u00a0 For example, should the Justice League be considered separately from Wonder Woman, the Flash, and the Green Lantern?\u00a0 Should Captain America and Iron Man standalone or be grouped with the Avengers?\u00a0 To split the middle, I grouped members with their usual team but left the individual statistics along with the total.\u00a0 The next table summarizes.<\/p>\n
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