Tragic Villain in Comic Books.
- Batman:
- The most archetypical Anti-Villain is Mr. Freeze. His main motivation is to find a way to save his dying wife, no matter what it may be. A major factor in his introductory appearance in Batman: The Animated Series is that a Corrupt Corporate Executive directly caused his Freak Lab Accident that nearly killed both him and his wife.
- Prior to the aforementioned animated series, Mr. Freeze was just a generic Silver Age kooky tech-based villain: B:TAS came up with the idea of Mr. Freeze as a man simply wanting to restore his wife and every incarnation since (except for the one in The Batman) has adopted this aspect.
- Although in the New 52, Nora isn't his wife, she's a frozen woman from the '40s with a heart disease. Freeze is just crazy, which is just as tragic when you think of it. As of DC Rebirth, she's back to being his frozen wife.
- Depending on the Writer, Killer Croc can also be seen as one of these. Yes, he's a homicidal cannibal, but he is often portrayed as having little to no control over those urges. His increasingly bestial appearance and the gradual loss of his own humanity (again, Depending on the Writer) makes it impossible for him to have any sort of life other than that of a villain. In his appearance in the Titans series, he mentions that all he wants now is to be left alone.
- One of the common threads between most iterations of The Penguin is a start as a downtrodden outcast who finds a talent for organized crime as a path to demanding respect. There's usually some element of unfortunate circumstance exacerbating his outcast status, whether the more fantastical versions that have him deformed to resemble a penguin physically or the more realistic takes that have him as a Impoverished Patrician or a low-born aspirant to Gotham's upper class.
- Bane was born in a prison, forced to serve out his father's sentence, lost both his parents, and was forced to become a test subject for a dangerously potent steroid that, in some alternate futures, will eventually leave him too sick and weak to care for himself.
- Although always sympathetic in some way, as is with almost all Batman supervillains, Poison Ivy became this when New 52 altered her backstory. After spending the majority of her childhood gardening, then finding her mother murdered and buried in the garden, she become pretty distrustful and misanthropic. Some stories have portrayed her as straight-up evil (remember the Harvest?), but the majority revolve around her simply going to EXTREMES to aid the environment, something she has a supernatural connection to.
- The Riddler became this. After getting high scores on some important tests, his father beat him in the belief that he had cheated. His father's jealousy at his intelligence started a need for Edward Nygma to prove his innocence and superiority. This need manifested as riddles and puzzles. It wasn't until he attempted to commit a crime without leaving riddles that he realized his compulsion. In his attempt to not be take back to Arkham, he realized he had psychiatric issues and needed to go back to Arkham for help.
- In most incarnations, Two-Face can be considered this. Harvey Dent was a genuinely good man with a dream of ridding Gotham of organized crime as District Attorney. The combination of childhood trauma from his physically abusive father, the failure of the criminal justice system to actually punish those he tried to convict, and his scarring at the hands of Sal Maroni turned him into a madman obsessed with duality and fate. His first targets as Two-Face were the same criminals he had spent his career trying to bring justice to, only with a gun rather than the courts.
- Harley Quinn counts as well (although she first appeared in The Animated Series before becoming a character in the comic as well). She was just a normal psychiatrist who developed an unhealthy infatuation for the Joker, and became a supervillain as a result. Even worse, the Joker doesn't really love her, treats her horribly, and basically just sees her as a tool he can use to his advantage by playing on her love for him.
- Batman (Tom King) managed to wring tragedy out of Kite Man of all people — an unlucky, but perfectly reasonable everyman with a loving son, Charles "Chuck" Brown was entangled into the turf war between The Riddler and the Joker for his knowledge in aerodynamics, and following a series of mixups with Batman, The Riddler poisoned his son and ensured a slow, horrible death, and he was turned into a suicide bomber for The Joker. It's really clear that he's only a "supervillain" as a means to satisfy his death wish, though amazingly, the arc ends with him finding a modicum of peace siding with Batman at the end of the war, and following his institution and surprising rehabilitation at Arkham Asylum, he seems to be in better, non-villainous spirits. Time will tell if that sticks.
- The most archetypical Anti-Villain is Mr. Freeze. His main motivation is to find a way to save his dying wife, no matter what it may be. A major factor in his introductory appearance in Batman: The Animated Series is that a Corrupt Corporate Executive directly caused his Freak Lab Accident that nearly killed both him and his wife.
- Captain America: Some versions of the comics portray the Red Skull of all people as this. Yes, THE Red Skull. While most of the time the writers play up how irredeemable and monstrous he is, certain stories go out of their way to remind the audience that Johann Schmidt has had a miserable life. His mother died giving birth to him and his own father tried to drown him shortly after (he ultimately committed suicide), which left the Skull an orphan who lived an isolated and lonely childhood. After spending most of his life in poverty and failure, he was taken in by Adolf Hitler, who shaped him to becoming his personal Übermensch. He initially had traces of goodness still in him, but what little there was got beaten out of him by his fellow Nazis and further indoctrinated him into becoming the remorseless psychopath he is now. The Red Skull genuinely believed in his cause and he was devastated to see all he had worked for crumble to ruin and remain absolutely loathed in the modern world. It's possible had circumstances been different, Johann Schmidt may have been a different man.
- The Flash: Magenta in Rogues has the least reason out of all of the Rogues to want to go back to a life of crime. Particularly because her powers are starting to go out of her control without medication. But because living on parole doesn't help cover the medication anymore, she's roped into joining the job by Captain Cold.
- The Incredible Hulk:
- The Glob is a Swamp Monster formed from the corpse of a man who’d only wanted to see the woman he loved one last time before she died. The poor thing fails, dies, then dies again, and is resurrected, only to be controlled by the villains. The monster also never even meant any harm — though it does attack sometimes — it simply mistakes other people for its lost loved one and wants to reunite with them. Or destroy everyone for getting between them. Or mistakes people for its tormentors and seeks revenge, even though everyone it had known in life is actually long dead. Basically, a very sad life and an even sadder after-life.
- The Abomination. Once Emil Blonsky, just another communist spy doing his job of infiltrating an American Military base. Unfortunately he stumbled upon and out of curiosity, activated a gamma ray machine buit by Bruce Banner. Blonsky became a monstrous reptoid who'd be known as the Abomination, and while he at first reveled in his newfound power, his life soon became a spiral of misery and loneliness, arguably ''even moreso'' than Banner's. The Abomination longs to return to his wife Nadia, but can never become human again, and it only fuels his resentment of the Hulk for having the life he desired. Anytime Emil gets a chance at a normal life, it's ripped away from him. He becomes human again, he gets forcibly changed back in a few days. He finds companionship with a homeless community to see them destroyed by the police. The Abomination soon embraced his lot in life and fatally poisoned Bruce's wife Betty to bring the Hulk down to his level. Too top it off, after Hulk gives him a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Banner forces Emil to watch a video on loop of his wife Nadia, tormenting him with how far he's fallen.
- Invincible: Omni-Man was initially The Mole on Earth for the villainous Kryptonian-like race known as the Viltrumites, sent to lower Earth's defenses and prepare it for conquering. However, Omni-Man instead ended up taking a liking to Earth and even had a wife and son whom he loved dearly. When the time came for him to finally conquer the Earth however, he ended up being torn between his family and his duty to Viltrum. It took him nearly killing his own son to finally realize how far he'd gone. This eventually leads to a Heel–Face Turn and he becomes the official Deuteragonist of the rest of the series.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Antichrist is revealed to be none other than Harry Potter, with all of his heroics being engineered without his knowledge to set up his global conquest. After learning of this, he then proceeds to single-handedly Rape, Pillage, and Burn Hogwarts before hiding from the world, burying himself with anti-depressants.
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Boom! Studios): Soul of the Dragon has its Big Bad, the Witch/aka Scorpina, imply at one point that she regrets not being in the Main dimension when the Zordon Wave hit the Universe, purifying many villains, feeling she missed her chance to be a better person.
- The Mighty Thor: Gorr the God Butcher. His entire life has been a Trauma Conga Line as long as the Praia do Cassino Beach, all because of the "gods" refusing to help him in his darkest hour (and the poor guy's had A LOT of those) and his own people turning on him for daring to suggest the gods either don't exist or don't care (he's wrong about the former, but tragically right about the latter), which led to the Necrosword finding him and twisting him into the murderous savage who becomes one of Thor's greatest foes. At the end of the day, Gorr is a desperate and broken man who lost everything dear to him all because of the gods, directly or not.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): The comic turns King Sombra, originally a Generic Doomsday Villain, into one. As a foal, he was found in the snowy wastes outside the Crystal Empire and taken in by an Orphanage of Love, where he met his Only Friend, a filly named Radiant Hope who didn't judge him for being a bit weird. Throughout his childhood, however, there were signs that he was not like other foals; When they first saw the Empire's Artifact of Hope, Radiant saw herself as a beautiful alicorn princess, while Sombra saw his future as a horrific monster, though the benevolent princess Amore assures him that his fate is not set in stone. Then, every year on the Empire's greatest festival, he would fall sick, unable to even leave his bed, and at one point would have died if not for Radiant's talent for magical healing saving him. Despite all of this, he grew up to a fine young stallion, until the day Radiant Hope received a letter inviting her to attend Celestia's academy in Equestria. Terrified both of losing his only friend and that this would mean the vision they saw as children would come true, Sombra ran out into the snowy field where he was found as a child, and there found what would ultimately doom him. A voice spoke to him, and told him his true origin; He was an Umbrum, an Ancient Evil long imprisoned by the magic of the Crystal Empire, created in the shape of a pony so he could leave their prison and free them. Broken by the revelation that he had never been anything other than a monster, and that Amore had known all along and done nothing to help, Sombra accepts his destiny by killing her and enslaving the Empire, leaving only Radiant Hope to bring word to Equestria. The final entry of his journal recounting all of this says that he knows that Celestia and Luna are coming for him to do what they do best; Vanquish monsters.
- Paperinik New Adventures: The Coolflames are people whose planets were invaded and conquered, had their intelligence and emotions drained out of them, and are now forced to work for the race who invaded and conquered their homes.
- Runaways: In volume 2, Lillie and Tristan were heroes back in the early twentieth century, but then a gang war killed all their friends and caused Lillie to lose the only man she ever truly loved and also left Tristan badly deformed, and the two of them spent the next century engaging in organized crime in order to gather the resources to send the Runaways back in time to change the past... which is actually what sparked the gang war in the first place.
- Spider-Man:
- Curt Connors was a dedicated army surgeon who lost his arm in service. Wanting to repair his arm to get back to normal, he next took up studying reptiles to figure out how they regrew limbs. He came up with an experimental mixture that he thought would restore his missing limb. And it worked, but the side effects turned him into the villainous Lizard. Something Connors fears and hates, but which he has little to no control over without any antidotes to losing his arm. The Lizard has repeatedly put Curt through extreme trauma, but over 50 years later, and he's no closer to putting the Lizard behind him.
- Dmitri Smerdyakov aka Chameleon. Born the bastard son of an aristocrat in Russia, his family despised him from the start and he was The Un-Favorite who was tormented, neglected and abused simply for being born. The only member of his family to acknowledge him was his half-brother Sergei Kravinoff and he bullied him often and had no real love for him. Dmitri used his talents with disguise and mimicry to impress others, but by the time he became an adult, he couldn't stand to look at his own face, nor could anyone who knew him before his criminal days even remember what he actually looked like. Chameleon's Sanity Slippage in the 1990s run of the comics due to his immense trauma is also played very tragically.
Chameleon: I'm nothing... I'm nothing... I'm nothing... - Spook: Mr. Nobody is heavily embittered by the way his father attempted to use and dispose of him as part of his long-term infiltration of NATO, causing him to seek revenge on the whole world to make himself feel better.
- Superman
- As a baby, Doomsday was killed thousands of times over throughout a period of decades, and had every single death recorded into his memory. This caused him to grow up to be an insane monster that hated all life. At his core, he's a traumatized infant in an adult's body who thinks he has to kill everything in order to stay alive.
- Initially at least, despite the monster he would become, Superboy Prime started out as an innocent kid who just wanted to help people and be like Superman. If the Crisis on Infinite Earths hadn't happened, he probably would have been a great hero. It's hit on very hard when he's imprisoned in the Speed Force by the Flashes and he screams "Don't you understand?! I'm a hero! When I grow up I'm going to be SUPERMAN!!". However as time went on, his atrocities became severe enough that all sympathy that could be given to him was destroyed, especially when he grew to accept the role of a villain.
- Transformers: Last Bot Standing: The Survivors for the most part are ultimately shown to simply be Cybertronians desperate to see their Dying Race survive another day, even if it means making biofuel out of any sentient life they come across. Their leader Steeljaw, however, is revealed to have never given up on his Decepticon mindset upon showing his true colors.
- Wonder Man: Wonder Man has been straying into this. After being revived, he's become increasingly disillusioned with the perpetual cycle of superhero-supervillain violence. After repeatedly asking the Avengers not to re-assemble, he puts together a team of similar malcontents (including a new Goliath, angry over his uncle's death during Civil War) who attack Avengers Mansion and Stark Tower, demanding that the Avengers be disbanded.
- Wonder Woman:
- Doctor Psycho was initially born deformed, bullied all of his life because of it, framed for a crime that he did not commit, had his fiance stolen from him, and was led to believe that she was complicit in the Frame-Up. As the years went on, though, he became crueler and unbearably sadistic and sympathies dwindled accordingly.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Debbie Domaine had no motivation to become a supervillain, nor any interest in becoming one. Kobra, however, wanted a Cheetah for himself, and targeted Debbie since she was the niece of the original. He kidnapped, tortured and drugged her until she was suitably Brainwashed and Crazy for his use, and she never recovered from his project, becoming unstable and unable to control her emotions and outbursts. She lived out the rest of her life in Arkham.
- In Wonder Woman (Rebirth) the new version of Cheetah's origin story turns out to have been masterminded by Diana's enemies, who not only arrange for her unwanted painful transformation but ensure she thinks Diana abandoned her. In reality, they rendered the communicator Diana gave her useless.
- Pretty much every version of Silver Swan ended up a villain due to tragic circumstances, lies, and manipulation. In at least one case Silver Swan was forcibly made out of a kidnapped teenage girl, and the modifications were killing her before Diana was able to find a doctor capable of saving her life.
- In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Tomas Byde was Driven to Suicide by Ares' manipulations, and then pulled into making a deal with Ares who twisted his grief into fury while he was near death. Once he realizes the deception and betrayal that went into turning him into the Duke of Deception, he is horrified and overcome with guilt at all the deaths he has caused due to his own weakness and permitting himself to be led on in this way.
- Diana herself in Flashpoint was heavily manipulated by her traitorous peers into making war on the Atlanteans. She was devastated by the destruction of the conflict and having to fight her former beloved Aquaman. She had no knowledge of the most heinous acts of her people and when she learned of the atrocities being committed in her name, Wonder Woman had a full scale Heel Realization.
- X-Men: Magneto could be the poster boy for this trope in comic books; he was a Jewish boy who had the grave misfortune of growing up in Germany during the rise of the Nazis (and being born a mutant - albeit one whose powers hadn't yet manifested - didn't help his case). Witnessing and enduring the absolute worst of humanity during WWII, he ended up being the Sole Survivor of his entire family, and after finally being granted his freedom and settling down with a woman, he was made to suffer even further by ignorant humans (who prevented him from rescuing his daughter from a fire and being forced to watch her die). Virtually every miserable thing that has happened to him is due to bigotry and human violence. Little wonder why he hates non-mutant people so damn much. His crusade to build a utopia where mutants reign supreme is born of the idea that he could make a world where no one need suffer as he has.
