Not So Harmless Villain / Comic Books

• In a lot of the Marvel/DC crossovers, the Badass Normal characters of one universe would always be looked down upon by the living god characters of the other. One particular example: Spider-Man is following Carnage as he's being transported to a prison across the country; along the way it passes through Gotham City, and Bats is very displeased with having the wall-crawler on his turf. However, Cassidy figures out a way to escape and goes bloody crazy at a time that the Joker also happens to be active, and rather unintentionally the heroes end up switching their villains. Carnage laughs off the Bat until he's taken down with expert planning, and Spider-Man really, really doesn't seem to perceive Joker as a physical threat, but Joker just won't stop, and dances happily across the Moral Event Horizon numerous times. After realizing just how similar he really is to Cassidy, down to hallucinating Joker's smile as Carnage's symbiote-grin, he almost beats Joker to death before Batman gets him to stop. Really, through the whole thing, nobody took anyone else seriously before the ass-kicking started except Batman.
• Aquaman:
  • In Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis, the Human Flying Fish has a silly name and costume and is only in it for money, but proves dangerous enough to defeat and capture Arthur, and he's never actually defeated, instead fleeing when he realizes his employers were serious about destroying the world.
  • Black Manta. As some Belle Reve guards learned in Aquaman (2011) #14, "the guy who loses to Aquaman" can kill you with his hands tied.
• Asterix: Brutus usually is a joke villain who keeps playing with knives and getting scolded by Julius Caesar. In Asterix and Son, however, he attempts to murder a baby, Caesar's infant son, and he causes so much carnage he proves to be the most ruthless and effective enemy the Gauls have faced since Convolulus.
• Avengers Arena: The series takes Arcade and makes him a genuine threat. By the end of the series, half the kids in Murderworld are dead, and he has escaped without punishment. Zig-zagged in the aftermath in that nobody else in the super-villain or superhero community still respects him because A) it is explicitly pointed out that his grand scheme to "become a threat" is a blatant In-Universe rip-off of Battle Royale by them (Arcade also said it was so, but he saw it as 'inspiration') and B) in order for it to work out as well as it did, he had to go after teenagers, so the ones who are not disgusted in an Even Evil Has Standards fashion mock him because they think that he went after "easy" targets. As such, he spends his appearances afterward whining about still not being respected before the teenagers that survived find him and give him the most humiliating vengeance they can devise.
• Batman:
  • The Long Halloween and Dark Victory both do this for Calendar Man. Once a campy gag villain who committed relatively harmless crimes while dressing up in costumes based on specific days, his internment at Arkham changed him into a creepy, white-clad inmate who'd mastered the art of Break Them by Talking, already knew the answers to the mystery Batman's trying to solve, and later manipulated a rehabilitated character back into madness. Unfortunately, the change didn't stick.
  • Later, in the Batman: Hush story arc, the Riddler, bitter that he's fallen so far in Gotham's criminal hierarchy, decides to team up with the new psycho on the block and puts Batman through the wringer. He figures out Batman's secret identity. The only thing that stops him from completely destroying Batman is that he has the answer to the ultimate riddle, and it's no good if everyone knows the answer. Thankfully for Batman, he eventually got hit in the skull with a mace and received a case of Easy Amnesia.
    Riddler: I used to be a somebody in this town. Now, everybody has a gimmick. I was going to show them all. And I did.
  • The Riddler turns to Not So Harmless in the Peter Milligan tale "Dark Knight, Dark City". For the first chapter, you think he's the same old Riddler, leaving clues to pointless crimes. Then he nearly kills a security guard... then a baby... then he blows up a minion's throat... That's about the time one of Riddler's minions outright tells him, "You're starting to make the Joker look positively sensible.", after commenting to another that he's looking positively less stable than ever before. Then you find out that the crimes aren't the point, they're just a way of manipulating Batman into a Fate Worse than Death. It eventually turns out that the increased level of evil is due to Demonic Possession.
  • In Batman #251, after 20 years of campy, oversized set pieces and pies in the face and bloodless bank robberies, the Joker goes after some of his old henchmen who ratted him out. Audiences are expecting sneezing powder or filling their house with balloons, as Joker hands the first henchman a cigar, he thinks of how "classic Joker" it is. The old exploding cigar. Except the explosive in this one is nitroglycerin, and when the henchman lights it, waiting for a little "pop", it blows up his head and most of the room. Joker's back.
    • Those unfamiliar with Joker usually dismiss him as an idiotic buffoon, only to realize very quickly he's an Ax-Crazy lunatic. He's one of the most unpredictable characters despite existing in a world filled with metas and gods. Even the other villains tend to keep him at arm's length. What makes Joker so scary is the lack of a consistent backstory due to his Multiple-Choice Past.
  • Harley Quinn in the Joker's Asylum II: Harley Quinn one-shot. Rival mobsters, cops and so on know that Harley is a fairly harmless character, whose weapon is a big comedy mallet. But they're standing between her and Mr. J. on Valentine's Day, which means that she's not kidding around anymore. Even Batman decides that the best way to stop her is to capture the Joker first, so that she'll want to go back to Arkham. It really says something when Batman thinks that fighting the Joker is a safer bet.
  • The mastermind behind the grand plan to finally bring Batman and Gotham to its knees in Batman Eternal is none other than Cluemaster, who exploited his status as being C-rank fodder in order to pull the strings from the background, knowing Batman would never suspect so much destruction from an amateur. Though he gets hijacked by Lincoln March, his plan still nearly destroyed Gotham.
  • Crazy Quilt was a villain so pathetic, he more commonly fought children than adult superheroes (namely the Boy Commandos and Robin), and was soundly defeated each time. However, when Jason Todd became Robin, the Quilt went after him because the previous Robin made him go blind, and proceeded to beat him savagely, leaving his unconscious body for Batman to find. It's stated that the incident would weigh on Batman's conscience for years. Fortunately, Jason recovered and the two teamed up against Crazy Quilt once again, but Jason learned an important lesson about the consequences of taking on the identity - and the enemies - of Robin.
  • The Condiment King, a Canon Immigrant from Batman: The Animated Series, has what might be the goofiest possible gimmick for a supervillain to have, is largely an incompetent idiot, and not even his fellow villains take him seriously at all. And yet, in Tim Drake's 1993 solo series, Robin actually acknowledges that he could be legitimately dangerous to people suffering from severe allergies (since his condiment guns could send them into anaphylactic shock).
  • Batman Beyond: Ghoul was nothing more than a Mook for the Joker in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, and remained so for most of Beyond's comic book run... until he killed Vigilante with Joker toxin and became The Man Behind the Man for Rewire and goaded him into trying to kill his father, the mayor of Gotham.
• The Beano:
  • Baby Face Finlayson was a harmless villain in his early appearances in the 1970s and '80s but he became not so harmless in Kev F. Sutherland's strips in the 2000s where the character reached almost Big Bad status.
  • Walter the Softie started off as little more than the effeminate favorite victim of Dennis the Menace (UK) who loved to play with teddy bears and dance ballet. Then around 2009 he became a Nerdy Bully fully willing to exploit his intelligence and reputation to ruin his Arch-Enemy's life, and essentially became the Brains to Dennis's Brawn in their Brains Versus Brawn conflict.
• Deadpool: The villain Madcap debuted in Captain America and spent most of his tenure as a wacky comic relief D-lister. Then he was accidentally merged with Deadpool, whose mind drove him from comical insanity to not-so-comical. After being expelled from Deadpool's body, Madcap set about making the mercenary's life hell, including such acts as brainwashing innocent civilians into feeding themselves to a tiger, or infecting Deadpool with a virus so that he would pass it on to his young daughter and her adopted family and be Forced to Watch them die.
• Daredevil: Daredevil (Mark Waid) does this with the Jester. For years, he was nothing more than a C-list Joker knockoff who no one took seriously, in-universe or out. Now he is a diabolical mastermind with a love of chaos and a need to make Matt's life hell. It culminates in him cheerfully crossing the Moral Event Horizon when he makes Foggy Nelson hang himself just to spite Matt.
• Disney Mouse and Duck Comics: The comics have a number of villains that seem harmless most of the time, only to turn devastating the moment whatever normally limits them is removed:
  • Pete is often shown in Italian stories as a buffoonish brute, of little danger for the police, and mostly a danger as a subordinate to other villains, such as the one where he's noted to be Mouseton #2 public enemy, below the Phantom Blot but above Doctor Vulter, a terrorist. Why would he be considered more dangerous than a terrorist? Because for all his buffoonish and brutish manners he's scarily intelligent and an excellent criminal mastermind, and if he has the time to build up some resources he will take over all crime in town. Notably, one story where he managed to keep Mickey off his back for five years had him in control of the entire United States, and on the verge to Take Over the World before he's stopped at literally the last second.
    • On one occasion a trio of criminals hired Pete to rob a money transport and decided to doublecross him after he made the plan because he demanded too large of a share. The moment they told him they wouldn't pay Pete tried to beat the stuff out of them, something he could have easily done by being larger and stronger than them, forcing them to jump in their car... And watch in horror as Pete gave chase not caring at all about what happened to other drivers as long as he got his hands on them. They managed to escape when Pete got caught in a massive crash, and a few days later enact the heist... And right as they were celebrating, Pete arrived with a police tow truck and stole their loot: he had been forcibly enrolled in the police after the crash, and figured out how to use their resources just to take his revenge. While he's eventually foiled by Mickey, Pete is still happy because he got what he actually wanted, make the other three pay for doublecrossing him, and being arrested in the process is a small price for that. Incidents like this are why Mouseton's criminals fear him more than Phantom Blot, and even Phantom Blot threads lightly when dealing with him (or rather makes a clear deal and keeps his word).
  • Some stories have also diminished the threat posed by Phantom Blot himself. Comes the Darkenblot saga, and in the first installment he single-handedly takes hostage the richest men of Avangard City during its renaming as Robopolis by stealing control of its police robots, and in the second he comes dangerously close to take over Robopolis himself by subverting the organization that broke him out of jail (now renamed Kingdom of Robopolis). All of this because in Robopolis they didn't really understand the kind of threat he could pose until after he had already taken over the Kingdom of Robopolis.
  • The Beagle Boys are usually shown in failed attempts at breaking into Scrooge's Money Bin and be stopped in hilarious ways. Thing is, the Money Bin is a formidable fortress capable of repelling attacks from small armies, ruthless witches and even giant mechs, and whenever they dedicate themselves to other targets they're basically unstoppable. They also have connections with other Beagles all over the world. Best shown in a Paperinik story, where our hero had accidentally time traveled to the future and in his absence they have expanded their numbers by recruiting outside the family and have effectively Duckburg on its knees through the sheer number of robberies, even with the Nephews taking over as superheroes and arresting as many as they can, only being stopped when Paperinik, remembering their "secret" hideout in Duckburg's underground, leads the Nephews there and helps them bust their leadership (Blackheart Beagle, I-176, and the three main Beagles).
  • Magica's threat seems relatively small even in-universe, even if bizarre due its magical nature and her immense creativity and utter lack of shame. This is because after their second run-in Scrooge prepared for everything he can imagine Magica coming up with and thus anticipates most of her plans (including the time she threw a flaming meteor at the Money Bin). But whenever she comes up with something he didn't anticipate (such as brainwashing Santa into doing the dirty work for her), Scrooge is in for a desperate battle.
    • Best shown when Magica had to deal with the main seven Volcanic Witches. First the witches, whose leader had decided to betray Magica and make the Midas' Touch herself, attack Magica's house on Mount Vesuvius to steal her coins for the spell, only to end up stalemated because Magica had fortified her house that much, and only win when Irma drew power directly from the volcano to overpower the defenses. Then the group attacks the Money Bin, and they find themselves on the wrong end of a hilariously one-sided fight against Scrooge's anti-Magica's defenses, forcing Irma to draw power from the core of the planet and her sister witches, as while Magica is experienced enough to deal with them Irma isn't. Then in the final battle Irma, who has betrayed the others and stole their powers, tracks down Magica on a boat in the middle of the Pacific... And realizes she's screwed when Magica casually drops the information she's an Oceanic Witch and they're now on her turf, with Magica's single attack being so devastating that Irma loses the stolen power and suffers permanent damage at her hands (frozen by Magica because she could't be bothered to tie her up).
  • Jeeves, Rockerduck's secretary and sidekick, is usually seen as a fool with little initiative. Problem is, he's extremely cunning, and when given proper instructions he can pull off feats such as hijacking's Gladstone's immense luck (a feat only ever pulled off by Paperinik the Devilish Avenger before and since).
• Doctor Who (Titan):
  • In Doctor Who: Four Doctors, the Voord, one of the show's most memetically notorious unimpressive monster species, become a genuine universe-level threat thanks to teaming up with an evil alternate version of the Twelfth Doctor.
  • This is turning into a trend in the Titan Doctor Who crossover events, as in Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen the previously-ineffectual incarnation of Rassilon from "Hell Bent" teamed up with the Cybermen to try to destroy the universe and recreate it with himself as its creator God, and only failed because they inevitably tried to stab him in the back.
  • Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension takes it to self-parodic extremes in the Fourth Doctor issue, in which due to the multiversal collapse the Doctor and Romana II have to deal with incursions into the main universe by more-powerful alternate universe versions of notorious unimpressive monsters the Quarks, the Krotons, and the Ogrons, all of whom have become their universes' dominant cultures due to, the Doctor theorises, neither he nor the Daleks existing in them.
• Empowered: There once was a low-level biomage named Fleshmaster. After being humiliated by his peers, he finally dared to use his powers on himself, and returned as the new superhero dWARf!. But since he was still being pissed off, he cooked up a really Big Bad-worthy scheme. Which was about killing all his peers at the same place where they once had humiliated them, the Capeys Awards.
• The Flash:
  • The Top seems like a silly dude with a spinning top gimmick and a stupid suit, until he gets his mind back and turns into a genuinely terrifying villain. The fact that he was given actual superpowers and thus posed a more realistic threat to the Flash may have helped. Even before that he engineered his own resurrection and then came within an ace of becoming President of the United States. The Top has always been smarter than you'd think.
  • The Rogues are a whole team made of this trope: more than once they have been underestimated by both heroes and villains alike due to their goofy-looking costumes and weaponry, and they collectively keep to a strict code of honor. However, the fact that these villains have standards doesn't make them any less dangerous. Captain Cold had no problem ordering the death of his own abusive father, and not ten minutes before killed some young Gotham punk who tried to take on his name. Heat Wave is a full-blown pyromaniac. Weather Wizard exploded a man from the inside using a tornado. Trickster once out-tricked the devil himself. As Flash himself has pointed out in the past, the Rogues aren't just a bunch of villains who each have their own sometimes silly-seeming gimmicks. They're Central City's version of the Mafia with their own sometimes silly-seeming gimmicks.
  • Captain Cold in particular is a noteworthy example for his role in Forever Evil (2013): Luthor is openly contemptuous of his intelligence and abilities - especially now that he's reduced to using his Cold Gun again, not having An Ice Person powers. Meanwhile, the other team members (not counting Bizarro), Black Manta, Sinestro, and Black Adam are heavyweights who overlook him. Initially, it appears that he's merely around to have someone from the Flash's Rogues. Then he goes up against Johnny Quick, the Crime Syndicate's Psychopathic Manchild version of the Flash, who disarms him and taunts him about how useless his weapon is and how he's completely helpless. Cold retorts that it's not a freeze gun, as Quick claims, but a Cold one, that takes things to absolute zero. He then demonstrates that it's also voice-activated, promptly freezing Quick's right leg, before shattering it and killing him.
  • Captain Boomerang is a perpetual Butt-Monkey and the subject of mockery and disdain from almost everyone, both due to his absurd gimmick and obnoxious personality. He's also one of the most ruthless and vicious of the Rogues, and has a shockingly high kill count. His boomerangs may seem silly, and he's generally a coward, but when backed into a corner he's much more clever than he seems, able to kill even a speedster like Jaculi in Suicide Squad 1987 and being the one to kill Tim Drake's father (though he was killed in the process).
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) ignores the cartoon's Cobra-La origin of Cobra Commander, with writer Larry Hama instead characterizing him as an ex-hippie used car salesman who wants to Take Over the World. Initially, the character never strayed very far from the cartoon's General Failure persona, though he eventually evolved into a Villain Ball, and a halfway-competent Big Bad, costing the Joes billions of dollars in equipment and a squad of team members (though this was actually due to lieutenants misunderstanding his orders). The character's final turn into a full villain occurred in issue #131 (December 1992) when, after numerous tries, Cobra located and attacked the Joe team's Elaborate Underground Base. After readying the second wave of the attack, the following conversation takes place.
  Viper: This is too easy, Commander. Something has to go wrong.
  Cobra Commander: I won't stand for negativity in the ranks. (shoots Viper) You wait and see. Well, it's too late for you, but the rest of you, you just wait and see.
• Green Lantern:
  • Black Hand was once a campy joke with a weapon that was dependent on stealing energy from Green Lantern's ring and a gimmick of committing crimes based on famous folk sayings. Then Geoff Johns and Blackest Night revamped him into a twisted death fetishist and the Antichrist leader of an army of zombie supervillains.
  • Larfleeze seems like just a wacky loon who never does anything beyond stealing anything that looks shiny to him. He's also the only member of the Orange Lanterns. Sounds harmless enough right? Except being the sole Orange Lantern also means he's the sole wielder of the Orange Light's power, making him one of the most powerful ring wielders in the universe. And he's not just a loon, he's dangerously mentally unstable and has an explosive temper; he tends to respond to attempts to steal his precious loot with utterly psychotic bouts of violence. He's the only Orange Lantern because he killed all the others to get their stuff. The Green Lantern Corps are rightfully careful when dealing with him.
• Hellboy: The Osiris Club spend most of the series being completely ineffectual, despite claims to extraordinary supernatural power. Then Ragna Rok starts, and it turns out they actually are powerful - enough that they manage to summon and bind one of the Oghru Jahad. That they don't cause a hell of a lot more damage is only because long-term planning isn't one of their strengths.
• The Incredible Hulk:
  • The Abomination has often been regarded as an evil knockoff of the Hulk and little more, a Dumb Muscle bad guy who's not dumb enough to be as entertaining as his heroic foe. Still, this guy's "crowning moment of evil" was poisoning Betty Ross with his own radioactive blood. (At first, everyone thought it killed her, but she should be so lucky — it turned her into Red She-Hulk.) Which is not much better given how hulks are usually treated by the public. Such an act is pretty evil when one considers the implications.
  • The Intelligencia from Fall of the Hulks. The team is made of M.O.D.O.K., the Leader, the Wizard, the Red Ghost, and the Mad Thinker, all B- or C-lister villains (except for M.O.D.O.K., who's a fairly popular villain purely due to his ridiculous appearance). Together they have become a pretty deadly force. How deadly, you ask? They managed to out-gambit Doctor freakin' Doom.
• Invincible: The series repeatedly does this with its supervillains as part of it's Decon-Recon Switch of superhero stories, constantly driving home that these dudes in ridiculous outfits are still violent criminals and fully capable of causing incredible damage and death with their superpowers, regardless of how "silly" one may find their fashion sense. To be specific:
  • Machine Head's crew of supervillains — himself, Titan, Magmaniac, Tether Tyrant, Magnattack, Furnace, Kursk, Isotope, and Guest-Star Party Member Battle Beast — sure seem like they're just low-level starter baddies for Invincible and his fellow new Guardians of the Globe to warm up on, what with their goofy names and gaudy costumes. Instead, they prove to be deadly hardened criminals who give the Guardians their first truly dangerous fight and go on to be persistent enemies for the rest of the series. Battle Beast in particular turns out to be a nightmarish Boss in Mook's Clothing so far above the Guardians' then-current weight class that they only survive because he gets bored and leaves mid-fight after maiming three of them without breaking a sweet.
  • Doc Seismic initially comes off like an especially goofy Mad Scientist with a glass jaw who is no serious threat. Then the heroes learn the hard way that Evil Genius + seismic powers + utter insanity = incredibly dangerous lunatic who can create massive destruction if not contained, and he nearly kills the Guardians when he gets serious.
  • The Lizard League are a bunch of Animal Themed Superbeings in ridiculous costumes who don't pose any physical threat to Invincible... but only because he's a Flying Brick well beyond their ability to hurt. When him and most of the other Guardians are off-planet for one issue, they seize the opportunity and reveal themselves as deathly serious terrorists by taking control of a nuclear missile silo as part of a scheme to hold an entire city hostage. When the Guardian skeleton crew of Rex Splode, Duplikate, and Shrinking Ray try to stop them, they put up an absolutely horrific fight and kill Shrinking Ray, destroy most of Kate's copies, and cripple Rex, who is forced to go all out with his explosive powers and kill most of the League to stop them… and he nearly dies himself in the effort.
• Iron Man: The Living Laser was such a joke, everyone (even other villains) called him "the Living Loser". Eventually, however, his abilities were amplified by Count Nefaria, and even though this was temporary, it eventually turned him into a being of photons, making him far more dangerous and a true threat.
• Justice League of America:
  • Though he wasn't completely harmless before, Doctor Destiny was always a traditional Silver Age villain, using dream powers to mess with gravity and create chaos while not really killing anyone. Cut to the "24 Hours" story in The Sandman #6.
  • Doctor Light was an incompetent villain for a long time. In Identity Crisis (2004), it's revealed that the League wiped his mind and deliberately turned him into a joke after he raped Elongated Man's wife. He recovered and takes on the Titans. All of them.
• My Little Pony Generations: The S'monies at first seem fairly harmless, mostly performing petty pranks and coming across as bumbling and inept... but that's mainly due to their masters not really giving them good orders. Once they tell them to take things up a notch, it soon becomes apparent they're capable of very efficiently sowing discord, disrupting society, and driving others into becoming increasingly antisocial and cruel.
• New Gods: One of the New Gods of Apokolips is Glorious Godfrey, whose power is... being charismatic. It's not until Legends that Godfrey shows just how devastating his Compelling Voice and personality can be, by using it to turn the populace against their heroes.
• The Punisher: Jigsaw, though it took him several tries to actually reach serious villain status — indeed, what finally pushed him over the top was the ability to survive meeting the Punisher that many times. It's been explained that Frank considers Jigsaw a bane on the Underworld more than innocents. He gets to kill people by proxy when letting the lunatic go.
• Secret Six: Catman has received this treatment in spades, courtesy of Gail Simone. Essentially, he went from a fat slob with a cat gimmick (at his lowest point; before he was a sort of Spear Counterpart to Catwoman, but less lucky) to a sociopathic, lion-pride-leading, muscly badass somewhere in the Sahara with his insignia carved into his chest (by his own hand!) and a pair of razor claws.
• Sin City: The Yellow Bastard had this moment in his eponymous story. He was believed to have been comatose and missing a hand (among other body parts) and was no longer a threat. He comes back as a yellow, disfigured freak bent on revenge.
  Yellow Bastard: Recognize me, Hartigan? Huh? Do ya? Recognize my voice, you piece of shit cop? I look different but I bet you can recognize my voice!
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): The Deadly Six were mostly played for comedy in Sonic Lost World. In the comic's Metal Virus arc, they're far more sadistic and dangerous, but Zeena deserves special mention. In the game, she's a one-note Alpha Bitch stereotype who doesn't even take her own fights seriously. In the comic, she tortures Cream, a 6-year-old child.
  • Dr. Starline is an odd case, due to becoming serious after he's Killed Off for Real. He starts out as a Loony Fan to Eggman and is largely treated as just another weird minion, but eventually he decides to form his own faction to surpass Eggman. He craftily gathers resources, puts together some complex plans, and finally manages to take on Sonic and Eggman... and fails miserably, with everything falling apart in a single issue and Starline himself winds up dead after reaching the Despair Event Horizon. After that, however, all his resources and leftover plans start going out of control and inflict tons of collateral damage, requiring Sonic and Eggman to team up to survive the initial chaos. As well, because nobody registered him as a real threat, Starline was free to indulge in his total Lack of Empathy, with Surge and Kit remaining traumatized by his many cruel experiments. The heroes were apathetic when Starline was defeated, but now they absolutely loathe him.
• Spider-Man:
  • Brand New Day recasts C- and D-list loser villains into competent and credible threats. The Spot comes back as a vengeful psychopath who slowly drives his prey insane by stalking him, while the White Rabbit is an Ax-Crazy drug dealer who's willing to commit mass murder to collect the money she's owed. This also applies to classic Lee-Ditko-Romita villains like Electro, the Shocker, and the Rhino, who have all been rehabilitated from the Villain Decay they've suffered.
  • Shocker actively invokes this trope. He's actually dangerously competent and has a pretty good track record against Spider-Man, and has even nearly killed him a few times, but he's pragmatic enough that he does not punch above his own weight and keeps a low profile by supervillain standards (focusing on street-level profit-focused crimes) so he'll stay off the radar of bigger superheroes like The Avengers and psycho vigilantes like The Punisher who would shoot him on sight.
  • Mysterio, with his rather ridiculous costume and somewhat weak premise (he's a glorified stage magician with a lot of gadgets), often comes off as something of a joke, but every now and then he pulls off something unexpectedly big.
    • In Guardian Devil, a then-dying Mysterio decided to try and drive Daredevil so insane that he almost murders an infant with a ridiculously convoluted scheme, just because at the time Ben Reilly was Spider-Man, and the dying Mysterio wanted a grand exit and felt it would be wasted on Reilly, who Mysterio had subconsciously picked up was not the original Spider-Man.
    • He once trapped X-Man in an illusion of a perfect reality.
    • He also used a robotic avatar to muck around in the Ultimate Marvel universe, including killing their version of the Kingpin.
    • At the start of The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), Mysterio stages an 'alien invasion' that nearly overwhelms the entire superhuman community of New York.
    • Perhaps his biggest deed happens in the Bad Future What If? Wolverine storyline Old Man Logan, where Mysterio's mastery of special effects reached Game-Breaker levels, in that he was able to manipulate Wolverine, he of the incredible senses and huge amounts of experience with having his head screwed with, into going absolutely crazy and slaughtering the entire X-Men team thinking they were his enemies coming in for a final battle. Not bad for a guy with a fishbowl for a head.
    • Oddly enough, none of these actually happened to his main enemy Spider-Man, at least not in the comics, which suggests that perhaps ol' Fishbowl Head should go find himself a new archenemy (though it's worth noting that Mysterio disguised himself as a psychiatrist and nearly drove Spider-Man insane in one of his earliest appearances).
  • White Rabbit is a moronic, incompetent nutcase who's a total joke in the criminal world, even getting beaten up by Grizzly and the Gibbon, two other joke villains Spider-Man had completely dismissed as a threat. However, as Spidey acknowledges, while she's little more than a nuisance to him, she's still poses a threat to civilians, even if she's completely ridiculous. One comic highlights how dangerous she is to normal people, showing her fighting off cops, killing a man, and then easily escaping trial.
  • The Wall has a really silly gimmick and childish personality, but he did manage to murder a bunch of people and is so fast that he hit Spider-Man before his Spider-Sense can activate.
• Supergirl: Reactron. In his first Post-Crisis attack on her, Supergirl disposes of him quickly and notes that for a guy with near limitless power, Reactron isn't thinking very big, or using his powers very intelligently. Then he gets modified and given a new Kryptonite-powered armor in the beginning of New Krypton'' and proceeds to nearly kill Kara Zor-El several times, as well as murder her parents and her whole race.
• Superman:
  • Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? provides several examples:
    • The Prankster, Toyman and Bizarro go from harmless nuisances to murderous monsters. Bizarro, in particular, stands out, destroying the Bizarro World and then decimating Metropolis.
    • The final enemy Superman faces is Mr. Mxyzptlk, who has gotten bored of playing pranks and decided to be truly evil. An interesting subversion in that he's only harmless by choice, and when he goes for it, he becomes a threat so nightmarish that Superman of all people is forced to break his non-killing code.
  • The first Superman Superstars storyline in Action Comics also has Bizarro as the villain. And while his opposite nature is usually played for comedy or (even in Whatever Happened?) tragedy, this one plays it for horror. Bizarro manages to turn all of Metropolis into Bizarros, acting the opposite of how they usually would. And not in the usual "ha ha, the dogs are walking the humans!" way but in a "the opposite of not wanting to be hit by a bus" way. Superman runs himself ragged trying to stop everyone in Metropolis from killing themselves and everyone around them, and being treated as a monster for it. While Bizarro is inside his head saying things like "Most loved man in Metropolis. Does it no make you want to love them back? Love Bizarros until they all live laughing?"
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW): Bebop and Rocksteady are lovable goofballs like they are in other incarnations of the franchise. Unlike other incarnations, these versions are exactly as powerful as you would expect a pair of hulking warthog and rhino mutants to be; they can take ridiculous amounts of punishment and the Turtles can only slow them down in a straight fight. When one of the team (Donatello) tries to fight them alone, they savagely beat him to near death.
• Ultimate Marvel: In The Ultimates 2, while not strictly "harmless", Loki remained behind-the-scenes and manipulated events to create the Liberators whilst branding his brother as a mentally ill man who is powered by stolen technology. Once his team is defeated, though, Loki decides to stop holding back and release his full godly power. His first action turns the sky red.

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