Give Supes a break – he was created in 1933, when Roosevelt was President and the New Deal was the great idea of the time…
He was real!! :eek:
1938, actually. 
First, I’ll object to Raguleader’s characterization of Lester Tourville as a villian. He’s an antagonist, surely. But not a villian.
As for Rob Pierre… He’s a mixed bag, but also stuck with a no-win situation. Now, Oscar St. Just, his right hand man, however, is something of a monster. Neither man is personally vile, nor even cruel. But they embraced ruthlessness as a tool and were trapped by it.
If one wants to find characters I think are villians in the Honorverse, Admiral Esther McQueen, I think comes closer to it than many. Pierre was far more concerned about the general good than his actions may have implied; McQueen was simply in it for personal power. She had a number of virtues, including loyalty. But, her motives are a bit murky, I think.
Now, from the old StarBlazers cartoon, let’s not forget Deslock. Flaming megalomaniac, ego the size of a small star, hedonist. And still found that his allies could so disgust him, he’d turn on them, and join forces with his former enemies to stop them.
I’m amazed nobody has mentioned Lord Venturi from Disc World yet.
Vetinari. And he’s not even really a villain in most of the books he appears in. In fact, in Jingo, he’s one of the heroes.
:rolleyes:
Anybody got a link to that SuperDickery page? That thing was excellent.
Then we could add Lord Downy. He runs a school that trains people in the art of killing people, but as everyone knows, Assassins have a meticulous code on the Discworld.
More of an adversary than a villain, but Javert in Les Miserables (certainly the musical, it’s been too long since I read the book) is quite honorable. His dogged pursuit of Valjean is the result of his honor-bound duties as a law enforcement officer, and he has a profound respect for the letter (if not the spirit) of the law.
Granted, his honor causes his brain to pretty well explode in the face of the knowledge that a man can be both a criminal and a good human being, and he goes crazy and jumps off a bridge to his death. C’est la vie.
OK, I’ll grant you that one. Still, Lester’s gotta get some villian points for apparantly supporting the entire galaxy’s tobbaco industry single-handedly 
Not sure if I would go so far as to call St. Just honorable, though he was very loyal to his boss. Well, his second boss.
Ah yes, McQueen, the only Havenite Admiral to fail twice at getting rid of The Committee of Public Safety. The woman just couldn’t catch a break. . A tad bloodthirsty at times, she was. Must go with the territory though.
It’s actually kinda tricky to pick out villians amongst the Havenite camp though, where most of the more heroic characters apparantly started out as terrorist/revolutionaries, and many of the characters who didn’t either defect to the Manticoran Alliance or happen to be in bed with the aforementioned terrorists/revolutionaries.
From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’d like to nominate Spike the Vampire. Though one of the more capable vampire baddies (he had two Slayer deaths to his credit, far more than most vampires manage), he would almost always keep his end of a bargain (like when he left Sunnydale in return for Buffy sparing Drusilla’s life), and was willing to help the good guys when someone wanted to bring about an end to the world (“I like the world. It’s got all these people running around, like Happy Meals with legs.”)
Bester and Morden were both rather honorable (if also rather snakey and manipulative) villians on Babylon 5.
that page is full of Malware, as I’ve warned others before.