Mississippienne and I were discussing comic book vendettas tonight and laughing at some of the seriously lame reasons supervillians go after their arch-nemisis. I offered that Lex Luthor can’t get over the fact that he lost his hair and blames Superman for it. Mississippienne countered that Dr. Doom hates Rex Reed because Dr. Doom was building a machine to speak to his dead mother, and Rex told him he had it calibrated wrong (Dr. Doom wouldn’t listen). Rex was right…the machine went kaput and somehow Dr. Doom blames him for this.
What are some other awesomely stupid comic book vendettas?
There was a recurring minor Avengers villian, I don’t remember his name, who won the lottery and bought a bunch of third rate supervillian gadgetry and repeatedly attacked the Avengers in order to become famous.
Two incidents I recall : He attacks while Wasp is having a large party of superheroines over ( she wanted more female Avengers ); amusingly, they beat him almost without interrupting their conversation beyond comments like “Who is he?” and “Oh, one of those”. In the second, he tried to booby trap them when they appeared on the David Letterman Show; they broke the traps and Letterman beat him unconscious.
The Legion of Superheroes had several enemies that hated them because they wouldn’t let them join - some examples: Jungle King, Spidergirl (who did, eventually join), Ronn-Kar & Radiation Roy. (The open auditions were a real bad idea - they rejected a lot of useful members, or crazy people who’d hate them for it.)
That’s not why pre-crisis Luthor hated Superman. He hated Superman because, after he created life, Superboy destroyed it (in the same incident that cost Luthor his hair), and also because Superboy ruined all of the inventions Luthor created to help Metropolis, and wound up getting him sent to reform school. Even though Superboy did all that for good reasons, in Luthor’s bad judgement, he thought it was because Superboy begrudged Luthor his superior intelligence, that being the one thing that Luthor was superior to Superboy in.
Hee hee hee, I’m not making fun of you – we both know you meant Reed Richards. But thinking of Dr. Doom shaking his fist and obsessing over film critic Rex Reed is hilarious.
What does “mistaken identity” count for? (Actually, I can’t really think of any hero-villain antagonisms based on that at the moment, but there’ve got to be a couple.)
Well, that’s not so much “worst” as in “badly written” as much as it’s worst for “tragically pointless.”
Legion of Super-Heroes again (assuming I’m parsing you correctly)!
The League of Super-Assassins were a group of people native to the planet Dryad (technically, only Blok is native to Dryad, the rest were the decendants of human settlers), who were living on the planet when it was destroyed.
The Legion had been trying to evaccuate the planet, but the LSA were kids, and so they didn’t realise that, and were manipulated by the Dark Man into believing the Legion had been responsible for the destruction of Dryad.
Blok eventually realised they weren’t behind it, and joined, whereas the rest…continued to hate the Legion.
Sorry to keep up the hijack, but for some reason I’m reminded of the South Park where Leonard Maltin, Sydney Poitier, and Robert Smith unite to defeat Mecha-Streisand.
The guy was born and raised in a Central American prison for some crime that his father had done. Then, for some odd reason, he started having nightmares about bats…then, some guy from Gotham gets imprisoned there and mentions Batman, so suddenly Bane realizes that his purpose in life is to destroy Batman???
He never met Batman. Batman never did anything to him. But somehow, this childhood nightmare became a full-blown vendetta against Batman!
Some of the others are petty or trifling, but this one is absurd.
Not from a comic book (that I know of), but I thought that Picard’s clone in “Star Trek Nemesis” had a ridiculous vendetta. He’s cloned by the Romulans for a harebrained scheme to replace Starfleet’s top officers with doppelgangers, then packed off to a hellish Reman mine when the plan is shelved. When he takes power, he swears that he will destroy… Earth.
Jeez, what did the good people of Earth ever do to him? Wouldn’t he be more likely to be pissed off at the Romulans for consigning him to the mines?
One version of the story makes Doom’s hatred particularly irrational: he was “disfigured” (i.e. got a small scar) in the resulting explosion, and when he forged himself a suit of armor he insisted on putting on the mask before it cooled properly (and really disfigured himself as a result).
