Reviews by Kyle Ellis

Created because they wanted the Green Goblin back but didn't want Norman Osborn or Bart Hamilton involved, or have Harry Osborn become him again, creators instead decided to make a new character in the Goblin heritage. With a secret identity as convoluted behind the scenes as it was on the comic pages, Roderick Kingsley ended up being the first incarnation of Hobgoblin. A billionaire fashion designer with underworld connections, he came into his riches rather unethically.

After Kingsley was almost murdered by fashion rival Narda Ravanna aka Belladonna, he decided to protect himself a little better. Luckily, one of his thugs stumbled across Norman Osborn's Green Goblin lair. Kingsley then killed him so he wouldn't tell anyone.

He perfected Osborn's strength potion since he was a whiz at chemistry and biology. None of those pesky side effects Osborn had like blacking out for long periods of time. And he updated Greeny's gadgets, like the glider and the Jack O'Lantern bombs. He was also a huge narcissist. Kingsley ended up wanting to leave the Hobgoblin behind, so he decided to frame Spider-Man advocate Flash Thompson. But Jason Philip Macendale Jr., also known as Jack O'Lantern, got in the way by trying to break him out of jail for the framed crimes. Kingsley then pretended that Daily Bugle reporter Ned Leeds was the Hobgoblin by brainwashing him. Macendale paid Foreigner to take him out. People believed he was the Hobgoblin for years after his murder.

Few villains have done more with less. The pencil-thin Crane has one of the most effective attacks of DC's Rogues Gallery. How many other villains have routinely made Batman afraid? Crane's downfall is his own shortsightedness. But as the creepy figure in the night, he helps open up interesting avenues into the Dark Knight's psyche. That's true power.

Dr. Jonathan Crane is one of the most formidable and thematically intriguing Batman villains of all time. As a child, he was bullied and tormented, so he decided to research the human psyche and how people dealt with fear. After being fired from a teaching position, Crane decided to use his knowledge to literally scare people to death for the supposed trauma he suffered in his life. Scarecrow wants nothing less than everyone in Gotham to be as afraid as he once was.

The Dark Knight's single greatest weapon in his war on crime is fear, and the Scarecrow is the only villain truly capable of taking that advantage away from him. The sole fact that the Scarecrow is often capable of bringing the Dark Knight to his knees by inducing hallucinations of his greatest tragedies - his parents' murder, Jason Todd's death at the hands of the Joker, etc. - makes him a no-brainer for this list. That he also happened to play such a huge role in revitalizing the Batman film franchise makes him rank even higher on our evaluation of best comic baddies.

Some comic book villains are motivated by greed, or the need for revenge, or pure and simple insanity. The Riddler is a little different - you might say he embarked on a career in crime for the fun of it, at least in a very specific way. Obsessed with puzzles, mind-games, and elaborate death traps, he's compelled to commit crimes that involve some form of complex mental challenge. (What compels him to dress in bright green, though, is anybody's guess.)

In his early days, Edward Nygma was a bright young boy who enjoyed showing off his mental acuity. This led him to a career as a carnival con-man, where he could easily dupe fair-goers out of their money with his schemes. Eventually, this proved far too easy to satisfy his boundless ego. He embarked on an escalating series of crimes in search of a more worthy opponent - of course, he found exactly that in Batman.

The Riddler is a classic example of the "talking killer." He can't simply commit a crime - he has to create an elaborate scheme with which to pull off the job. Proving the worth of his superior brainpower is his real goal, which is why he's occasionally taken on less legally questionable challenges as well. For instance, he offered his services as a consultant to Carmine Falcone, when the mob boss sought to determine the identity of the Holiday killer. While his stock as a villain may have dropped in recent times, Riddler has had more than his fair share of greatest hits over the years - the most noteworthy being his deduction of Batman's secret identity (which he has since forgotten after a head injury). When it comes down to it, the Riddler is one of the few rogues capable of rivaling Batman's knack for detection and deduction. If only he'd drop the whole legit lifestyle and get back to wreaking havoc on Gotham City.

She may not possess the dangerous feminine charms or impressive superpowers of a villain like Poison Ivy, but Amanda "The Wall" Waller is as deadly a foe as any in the DC pantheon.

Waller, who first appeared in Legends#1, is a widow from Chicago who used her bright mind to escape a hard life in the Cabrini-Green housing projects -- her daughters and her husband were murdered there. She studied political science, and became a congressional aide. Early in her career, she discovered the existence of the Task Force X/the Suicide Squad, an undercover group of supervillains who are contracted out by the government in return for amnesty. Waller saw an opportunity to improve the program, made a pitch to the White House, and was placed in charge of the Squad.

President Lex Luthor promoted Waller to Secretary of Metahuman Affairs, but Waller was jailed when his administration collapsed. She is soon released, however, and becomes involved in the covert-ops Checkmate organization -- first as Black King, and then as White Queen. She is later implanted with nanotechnology which allows her to control Chemo during missions.

Dr. Curt Connors was once a skilled surgeon who enlisted in the army to help wounded GIs. After a blast injured his arm, it had to be amputated. When he got back to the states as a research technologist, he became obsessed with the secrets of reptiles and their limb regenerating abilities. Connors created an experimental serum from reptile DNA and made himself the guinea pig. His arm did grow back but not without side effects-the main one being turning into a giant human lizard.

As Lizard, Dr. Connors has superhuman strength, speed and agility. He can scale walls, regenerate limbs and whip his tail at high speeds. The Lizard can also mentally command all reptiles within a one-mile radius. What makes Lizard so hard to deal with is the man inside the monster. Peter Parker continually uses his own scientific prowess to change him back into his friend Curt Connors. But with stress or chemical reactions, he always seems to go back into remission. Even though he shows no love for humans, you can also still tell that Dr. Connors is inside there somewhere, as he never seems to harm his wife Martha or their son Billy. Aww.

As Connors, he's sacrificed turning back into Lizard to help Spider-Man many a time. He's saved Aunt May's life, developing a formula to dissolve the Rhino's costume and etc. all to later become the Lizard again since he had to deal with chemicals. He also let Parker be his teaching assistant at Empire State University for a time, and you know how unreliable Parker can be.

Once known as Samuel Sterns, a chemical plant employee of Boise, Idaho, he was moving radioactive materials one day. Somehow they exploded and Sterns was subjected to gamma radiation. After recovering, he became a green-skinned giant-brained genius who called himself The Leader, due apparently to his subconscious desire to be as smart as his physicist brother Philip.

After the radiation, The Leader could predict outcomes of things in advance, had a perfect memory, superhuman intelligence and could control normal humans by only touching them. He is sophisticated in weaponry, computers, humanoids physics and genetics. He also has an army of plastic Humanoids, which he used to try and rewrite Earth's history, overthrow the US government and capture the Hulk to study him and steal Bruce Banner's Absorbatron to absorb the energy of a nuclear explosion.

At one point, The Leader rescues the Hulk from a battle and operated on him to save his life. Indebted, The Hulk goes to the home world of The Watcher and raids his "Ultimate Machine, which contains all the knowledge in the universe. This ends up being too much knowledge for The Leader and he collapses. The Leader then joins forces with General Ross to fight The Hulk. He has created android duplicates of the President and Vice President while trying to kidnap them and he even gamma-radiated Manhattan's water supply to mutate the human race into being like him. He even bombed Middletown, Arizona, killing thousands and built his own society called Freehold in the Arctic which was populated only with people dying from radiation poisoning.

Although he has no superpowers, Kang is a genius, history scholar, physicist and engineer. Due to his expertise in time travel, he is trained in 40th century combat and has battle armor that has sweet hologram and force field capabilities. With the help of his time ship, he also has access to technology of any century.

Born Nathaniel Richards, Kang is an ancestor to the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards. Bored with his time, he travels back to ancient Egypt and becomes Pharaoh Rama-Tut. Luckily, the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange just so happened to be time traveling as well, and stopped him.

Calling himself the Scarlet Centurion, he somehow manages to manipulate the original Avengers into fighting the Avengers of the actual time. After he is thwarted, he goes back to his home century and becomes Kang the Conqueror and starts his own empire. Most of his problems seem to stem from women though, as he tries to impress Princess Ravonna by defeating the Avengers. He also tries to woo Celestial Madonna, which leads to the death of Avenger the Swordman.

Kang later battles Hawkeye and Thor in the Old West. He ends up drawing too much energy, and destroys himself. But Kang somehow returns. Even though the original was dead, a number of flawed Kangs were created due to his constant time travel, The more-stable Kangs form a council to stop the stupider ones.

Writer Garth Ennis created one of the most colorful comic book villains of all time when he conjured up Herr Starr, foe of Preacher protagonist Jesse Custer. A former German special forces solider, Starr is recruited by the Grail and tasked with recovering Custer - but he has plans of his own. He intends to use Custer in his own scheme to overthrow the leadership of the Grail.

Starr's countenance is marred by a series of scars around his right eye that form star shape - they were put there by bullies in his youth whom he has long since dispatched with. He is a skilled marksman, despite not having sight in one eye, but is not especially adept at unarmed combat - his justification for this is that he has "no intention of being unarmed."

Through a bizarre string of punishment that is meted out to Starr, a running gag in the series, the character becomes even more disfigured. He loses a leg after being attacked by three hillbillies, he has his right ear shot off, and Jesse cuts a penis-shaped gash in his forehead. Oh, and to add insult to injury a Rottweiler bites off his genitals. After each humiliating incident, Starr merely utters a glib, "S***." That's his final word, in fact, as he's killed by Tulip who shoots a bullet through his chin and blows off the top of his head.

Victor Fries had an obsession with freezing things even as a small child, which led him into the field of cryogenics. When his wife Nora fell seriously ill, he discovered a way to cryogenically freeze her body until a cure could be found.

Fries' colleague attempted to stop the process, and the ensuing struggle doused Fries with hazardous chemicals. These chemicals induced strange physical changes in his body: his skin grew pale, he could only survive in sub-zero temperatures and his mind became fractured. Fries created a containment suit that served to protect his body and augment his strength, as well as a gun capable of flash-freezing anything in its sights.

With his wife gone and his grip on humanity shattered, the newly dubbed Mr. Freeze began terrorizing the citizens of Gotham City. His gun became a way of inflicting on others the pain he feels in his own heart. Though his crimes typically serve little purpose, Mr. Freeze is still coldly ruthless and one of Batman's most deadly foes.

Pathos is a key ingredient in any great villain, and Freeze has tons of it. This man dedicated his life's work to curing his cryogenically-frozen wife's cancer, and just happened to fall victim to one of those unfortunate accidents that seems to always befall comic book characters. Who can't relate to that?

More importantly, Victor Fries' loss is as deep as Bruce Wayne's, which makes him such a dynamic antagonist. To up the stakes even further, the comics have progressed Mr. Freeze into a truly deranged lunatic, one who has given up all hope of reviving his dead wife and accepted a career of unadulterated murder. Good stuff.