I was recently reminded of Paste Pot Pete which got me wondering, who’s the lamest villain ever? In movies, in TV, in novels, in comics, whatever, who’s the lamest villain? Intentionally lame or otherwise, whose the lamest (though I suppose it would make sense to make a distinction between intentionally lame villains for comedic effect and villains who are supposed to be taken seriously.)
Paste-Pot Pete, believe it or not, is supposed to be taken seriously. Well, at least halfway seriously. It is hard not to see the artist sniggering as he creates panels for Paste-Pot Pete.
Paste-Pot Pete’s shtick is this: he can shoot glue out of wrist cannons. He fights superheroes a lot and loses a lot, which is really par for the course for supervillains. But he also holds the distinction of being the only supervillain to known to be defeated by an unoccupied office building.
Paste-Pot Pete has gotten an upgrade and is now the Trapster, and he has much better glues now and he can shoot them from his gloves and he can swing on the glue strands like Spiderman, but to me he’ll always be … Paste-Pot Pete.
Paste-Pot Pete was upgraded to The Trapster sometime back in the 1970s, and I’m pretty sure that the comic I read about it in was a re-print. He had joined a group called “The Frightful Four,” or something like that; the leader was a guy with a stupid dome-y helmet and a John Waters moustache who called himself the “Wingless Wizard,” because he had these anti-gravity discs he used to fly around, and also throw at other people to make them weightless (I’m not sure what his propulsion strategy was, since he could control his weightlessness and fly around, and no one else could). I don’t remember who the Frightful third and fourth were.
There was a flashback in that comic to when the Trapster was still Paste-Pot Pete…he wore something like a clown suit and a big floppy tam-o’shanter and carried a bucket of paste that was connected by a hose to a big squirt gun. So not only were both hands occupied, but if he tipped over his pail he’d be totally unarmed. Also, a pail doesn’t hold a whole lot of paste.
And didn’t he originally fight the Human Torch, not Spider-Man?
I’m sure someone can explain why I am wrong but having only seen the shorts of *Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer * my son and I could only puzzle how “surfing” constituted any threat to anyone.
The Captain Planet villains. In the real world, pollution is a byproduct, something that nobody wants, but most people are willing to live with. In the Captain Planet world, however, pollution was an end in itself. It was like a fetish or something. The bad guys trashed the environment because they got off on it.
You could possibly make an exception for Plunder (the eeevil Big Businessman) who was motivated by money, but the rest of them (Greedly, Blight, Scum, Duke Nukem) rarely ever displayed any sort of rational motivations. They were just indulging their pollution fetishes.
When I was in high school a buddy and I created a superhero villain - The Angler, aka The Fisher of Men. He was, as you might expect, armed with a fishing pole, several dangerous lures, some of which were explosive/radioactive. He was quite proficient in aiming his cast, etc. This was a serious attempt to create an original super, not at all tongue-in-cheek. So lame. My friend was really a talented artist though and made some great sketches of The Angler in action.
I’ll see if I can find a link to the images, but a few weeks ago I saw images from a parody comic that had a supervillain with a huge crotch mounted cannon. That was psthetic.
In Alan Moore’s brilliant Supreme run, which was a multi-layered homage to Silver Age Superman comics, he had a Green Arrow analogue character named The Fisherman, who was pretty much the same as your Angler. He even had a teen sidekick named Skipper, a stand-in for Speedy.
That’s somewhat uncanny since we were dicking around with this character in 1994, right about the same time Moore must have been creating his character. I know I read some of the Supreme issues but I don’t remember The Fisherman. Do you know any of the issue numbers that he appears in? I can’t remember if I read Alan Moore’s *Supreme * or the guy who did it before him though. I could have sworn I read Story of the Year, but I can’t remember anything about it. Maybe I just remember the cover, so compelling. I need to stop by the library this week and see what I can find.
Aquaman fights a villain named the Fisherman. Recently, there was an attempt to revise him into something less laughable by revealing that The Fisherman was actually under the compulsion of a parasitic alien, and was biding its time before it could signal for invasion.
Moore followed a lot of horrible hacks (including Supreme’s creator Rob Liefeld), and didn’t take the reigns until the late '90s, although the character had been around since about '93. His entire run is collected in The Story of the Year and *The Return * TPBs, which are both well worth reading or rereading.
Batman’s Rogues Gallery has always set the bar for lameness. Most of these guys have no exceptional abilities or any real motivation for crime. The Ventriloquist is probably the worst offender, as he is actually a sidekick to his own tenuous gimmick. Plus, he’s not even a very good ventriloquist. But I believe he was originally intended to be somewhat comical, so he may not count.
The Eraser was always my favorite lame Batman villain-- he dressed like a pencil. His gimmick was that he could use his rubbery hat to “erase” crime scene evidence in some unspecified manner. Also, he could attack with his razor-sharp pointed shoes. I always thought there was a tiny kernel of cool potential in there under all the layers of shame. Take off the rubber hat, dress him in a more stylin’, Tarantino-esque outfit, and he could be the ultimate hitman who leaves no traces. Batman’s only clues to the murder would be things that ought to be there, but aren’t for some reason-- give him a chance to do a little honest detecting once in a while.
God, there are so many turds to choose from. Crazy-Quilt? Killer Moth? The Ten-Eyed Man has eyes on his fingers-- that’s his one power. Yet somehow he’s a deadly threat in Gotham City.
Admittedly, for sheer Silver Age derangement, it’s hard to beat the Flash’s old nemesis, Turtle Man. Yes, Turtle Man-- with the power to be… SLOW!
Which was not, BTW, a parody comic. It was a tad on the weird side during Morrison and Pollack’s runs (Codpiece was from early in Pollack’s run), but it wasn’t parody. Especially in Pollack’s run, where the weird was used to explore sexuality, sex, and sex identity.
Surfing’s only his mode of propulsion (although, honestly, getting clocked by a board that can move at multiples of light speed can’t be good, even if it doesn’t go much more than supersonic in the cases where he hits people with it). The major threat of the Surfer, when he first appeared, is the fact that he’s followed by a giant who intends to turn our planet into a Galactusnak. Plus, wielding the Power Cosmic makes him a hell of a threat in his own right.
Right then…lame villains…
Well, on the deliberately lame side, there’s the Amoeba Boys, from the Powerpuff Girls. And the Powerpuff Girls Z version of Mojo Jojo.
Superman’s got a bunch. I can’t remember his name, but the guy from the story that revealed the super-hypnosis thing had a record player strapped to his chest, and gets my vote for the lamest (although he existed mostly to be trounced by Superman, and set up the whole hypnosis thing).
They updated him for Batman the Animated Series put out by WB in the 90s. They did an excellent job of making the Ventriloquist, and his “dummy” Scarface, into a decent villain. In fact, I think they ended up influencing the comic book character to change, but I might be mistaken.
