My vote goes to Carnage the illegitimate offspring of Venom.
Of course Cletus Kasady was nuts to start with.
Your choice?
Define evil.
Does insane count? Because if it does, no-one touches The Joker for pure quill, 4D Eeeeeeeevil.
You can’t go wrong picking Hatemonger.
I second Carnage. Dude let a troupe of villains through NYC slaughtering everyone they came across for no other reason than that they were there.
The Joker isn’t even in the same ball park.
Carnage? Over the likes of Neron, Nergal, Mephisto, The First of the Fallen, Azazel, Satan, or the dozens of other incarnations of pure evil in the various comics companies?
I agree they are evil. But theirs was, the end justifies the means.
Carnage had no end.
He just kills.
I vote for the Joker…not only insane, not only evil, not only ruthlessly sadistic…he’s also incredibly annoying.
As a matter of fact, if the whole DC universe were real, I would be suing the hell out of Batman for not killing the Joker.
I agree with silenus that a working definition of “evil” is needed here. Off the top of my head, power-mad Henry Bendix from Stormwatch, who abuses his position as head of an international team of superheroes to prevent superhumans from creating “a finer world” for the rest of mankind, leaps to mind, as does the nasty Chtlulhu analogue God beastie from The Authority, which attempts to kill all of humanity and terraform Earth because we interfere with its retirement plans.
Gotta go with Darkseid. He rules an utterly hellish world with egions of slaves troops and superhumans tortured and brainwashed into obedience, commands weapons of such power that they annihilate the line between magic. His goal? Nothing less than the universal annihilation of free will.
He’s Orwell’s Big Brother, with bigger ambitions and eye beams.
That makes him crazier, not more evil.
The ends of Neron, Nergal, etc are as evil as their means.
What word should we use for the worst?
Craziest? Most dangerous? Scariest? Most sadistic?
I’d argue against Carnage for all of those, too, but I think that they might be more the concept that you’re looking for, so this could get to arguments on the matter other than semantic ones.
The bad guy in Watchmen, whose name will go unmentioned so we don’t spoil. (Please don’t be the one to spoil this!)
–Cliffy
All the other villains listed had goals beyond destruction, etc. Carnage kills out of the sheer joy he gets from killing. He tortures and maims for the thrill. In all the comics I’ve ever read, noone comes close to him. Not Darksied. Not Joker. Not Mephisto.
But which one was that? So much ambiguity…
Kid Miracleman, the grown-up one. Once discovered by Miracleman, his rampage through London(?) ranks high on the list of evil, uh, rampages.
Carnage will only torture and kill you. The Joker will torture and kill your daughter, to drive you crazy, so he can make a point to a third person. He’s not only sadistically evil. He’s creative.
But I’d fall into the hands of one of those two, when all is said and done. They’d only kill me. When Darkseid is done… You’re willing to die *for *him.
Now that’s evil.
The Four, from Planetary. Super-powered amoral “warrior-kings” who set up “Science Cities” to study (torture, maim, dissect) unfortunate people cursed with powers of their own, slaughtered the population of an entire world to turn it into a storage place for their weapons, and discovered the greatest and most important secrets in the world, only to withhold them for their own selfish ends. Elijah Snow said it best, referring to the Four: “I don’t like killing. But I want to kill these people.” They are very strong, very smart, and very evil.
I’d go with Joker over Carnage as well.
To make a Buffy analogy, Carnage is kind of like Spike in that he just wants to kill, kill, kill and he doesn’t really care who (well, he’d like Spider-Man). Joker is more like Angelus - he has very specific people he wants to hurt and does a very good job of it. I’d say the second is really more evil than the first.
There’s also Thanos, who sort of encapsulates both. He murdered half the population of the universe to impress a girl and also reduced his grandaughter Nebula to a state where she experienced inconceivable torture.
For twisted-ness, there’s the new Reverse Flash, who killed The Flash’s unborn children to teach him to be a better hero.
Now that I think about it, what was cutting-edge depiction of ‘realistic’ evil in the mid-80s (my Miracleman entry) is now much more likely to be the norm, here in the age of The Authority et al.