Times The Bad Guys In Comics Were Actually Right

If there's one villain that embodies the idea of truly believing he's right more than any other—even when he clearly isn't—it's Dr. Doom. In fact, considering that he was smart enough to invent a time machine, strong enough to go toe-to-toe with the Avengers, and good enough at magic that he's second in line for the title of Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, it's actually not hard to believe that he could actually make the world a better place if the so-called "heroes" of the Marvel Universe would just let him run things for a while. Well, until you remember that former Fantastic Four writer Mark Waid once said that Doom would eat a baby's head like an apple if he thought it would hurt Reed Richards. There's one thing you have to give him, though: at least one of his motivations is pretty pure.

For years, everything Victor Von Doom did—studying magic, conquering Latveria, even building the machine that would literally blow up in his face and make him a lifelong enemy—was devoted to the single goal of finding a way to release his mother Magda's soul from Hell. And in the pages of Roger Stern, Mike Mignola, and Mark Badger's epic Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment, he finally did it.

The twist, of course, is that his plan involved teaming up with Dr. Strange to confront Mephisto, and then selling him out by offering to swap Strange's soul for Mama Doom's. The thing is, Magda refused to sentence an innocent to eternal torture, even to get herself out, and rejected her son forever for trying to free her with an act of evil. At the end of the book, though, there's a double twist. In rejecting Doom's offer of salvation, Magda purified her soul and freed herself, and it turns out that was Doom's plan all along. In the story, it's mentioned that he did it so he could accomplish his goal and free himself from the "burden" of his mother's love. It's cold, calculated, and tragic, but it got his mom out of Hell without actually damning Dr. Strange's soul in the process, and that's a net positive.

Magneto has been right about things so many times that characters wearing "Magneto Was Right" t-shirts has been a running gag in X-Men comics since about 2001. It's easy to see why, too—as much as he might occasionally sink a nuclear submarine with all hands aboard or launch an attack with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, it's hard to blame him when the other side keeps building giant purple robots made of racism.

In the early '90s, however, Magneto came up with what really does seem like a pretty solid solution to his problem. Realizing he'd never be able to make a mutant homeland on Earth, he instead created Avalon, an orbital fortress made out of an asteroid—his second orbital asteroid fortress, for those of you keeping track at home—and invited any mutants who wanted to leave Earth to join him. What's more, he declared that even the ones left back on Earth should still consider themselves under his protection, should they need it. It was a pretty generous offer, and really felt like a win for everyone.

Unfortunately, having an orbital city-state led by an occasional terrorist who once led a gang who literally referred to themselves as "Evil Mutants" didn't sit well with the governments back on Earth, especially once he acquired some nuclear weapons in the interest of self defense. Still, it was a nice dream while it lasted. And hey, if you ever need another example of Magneto being right about something, don't forget the time he dropped the Red Skull in a fallout shelter and left him to starve to death. Mutant or human, we can all agree that it's never the wrong time to condemn an unrepentant Nazi to a slow and painful death.

It's pretty difficult to imagine the Riddler, best known for basing crimes around crossword puzzles and that one time he was possessed by a demon summoned by Thomas Jefferson (long story, don't ask), would ever actually be right about something. In Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki, and FCO Plascencia's Zero Year, though, he definitely became one of those villains who made a pretty good point, even if his methods were... well, let's be charitable and call them "questionable."

This particular methodology involved hitting Gotham City with a massive "superstorm" hurricane that also distributed chemicals designed by Poison Ivy across the city, causing massive damage and a quick overgrowth that pretty much destroyed the whole town. Then, he cut Gotham off from the outside, trapped its residents in their now-apocalyptic new home, and told them he would only free them if one of them asked a riddle he couldn't solve.

According to Batman, this was basically just the Riddler bragging about how smart he was on a grand scale, but if we take him at his word, you have to admit he has a point. If there's one thing we've seen from the past few years of news, it's that we're woefully unprepared for superstorms, even the ones that don't come complete with bone monsters and planet serums. It's highly doubtful that any of us would decide to deal with that by creating a city-sized riddle-based crucible designed to jumpstart intelligence in the community, but still. You can't expect a guy who fights Batman with a stick shaped like a question mark to decide he should be funding scholarship programs for inner-city schools.

As the leader of the Decepticons, Megatron is personally responsible for a war that lasted 4,000,000 years, and saw the Transformers devastating not just their own planet, but massive swaths of the galaxy. Megatron himself is—as you might expect from someone who's been fighting enemy robots for longer than the entirety of recorded human civilization—directly responsible for several war crimes, and the deaths of more Autobots than we could ever count. But really? He has a point.

Or he did at one time. The Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye comic goes pretty in-depth into what Cybertronian society was like in the days before Megatron first strapped on his fusion cannon. At that time, it was a planet ruled by the Functionists, who believed everyone's station in society was determined by what they turned into. On paper, it makes sense, but if you happened to be, say, a poet who just happened to turn into a bulldozer, here's hoping you like construction. Megatron's entire war is a rebellion built on the simple idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings—the only difference is that he wanted to achieve peace through tyranny, and got to the point where he wouldn't let anything stand in his way.

And not only that, but when the cast of the book found themselves in a universe where Megatron never came to power, they discovered things were actually worse if the Functionists were never challenged and continued to turn Cybertron into a fascist theocracy. The only upside was that the rest of the galaxy never suffered from the war, but that also meant that kids in the '80s were stuck with Go-Bots instead of Transformers, which would truly be a fate worst than death.

Occasionally, a villain can be right not by being on the correct side of things from a moral issue, but just by understanding how their arch-nemesis operates better than anyone else. Say what you will about the Joker, for instance, but that guy knows a lot about Batman, and when he starts talking, it might help to listen.

Take, for instance, Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel's Batman R.I.P., in which a group of villains called the Black Glove spends a few years attempting to destroy Batman, and betting amongst themselves as to how long he can last before they finally break him. Not if, you understand. When. Naturally, they got the Joker to help out with the project, but in doing so, well, they hired the Joker, and he wound up making his own bet: that Batman would literally dig himself out of the grave and take them all down.

No prizes for guessing how that story ended, but it's proof once again that the Joker isn't quite as mad as he'd have everyone believe—or at least that he is, but that doesn't stop him from understanding that no group of upstarts is going to take out Batman on their first try.