The 20 greatest (and 10 worst) Spider-Man villains of all time
By Mike McNulty
10th Worst Villain: Carnage
No doubt some of you are crying foul over this symbiotic serial killer’s placement as the 10th worst Spider-Man villain. After all, ever gracing the pages of Amazing Spider-Man during the early 1990s, Carnage has amassed a huge and devoted fanbase. He’s headlined several comic book miniseries, any even had his own ongoing monthly written by Gerry Conway, one of Spider-Man’s best writers.
But other than his design by Mark Bagley, Carnage is also one of the most overrated comic book villains created within the last thirty years. The only reason he exists at all was so Marvel could capitalize off of Venom’s surging popularity during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. And once they also turned Venom into an anti-heroic “lethal protector of the innocent,” they needed a more “extreme” version of him to fill the void.
So in Amazing Spider-Man vol. 1 #344, Venom’s co-creator, David Michelinie, and artist Erik Larsen, revealed that symbiotes could asexually reproduce. This resulted in one of Venom’s offspring bonding itself to Brock’s cellmate–a serial killer named Cletus Kasady, who was essentially the Joker sans the clown motiff. In fact, Carnage’s co-creator, Erik Larsen, admitted he just directly copied the Joker, and just changed his skin and hair color. In other words, Carnage is a blatant rip-off of Batman’s greatest villain, with similar powers to another Batman villain, Clayface.
The result was a diminishing of Venom as a viable villain for years afterward. And when folks think of Carnage, they think of the fourteen-part Spider-Man crossover, “Maximum Carnage,” one the prime examples of how bad 1990’s comics could get. Not exactly an ideal legacy for a supposedly top-tier bad guy.