Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
One doesn't really need a great rogues gallery to be an interesting hero and character. It's more a question of design and the kind of stories you are telling. Superman doesn't have many good villains and Spider-Man villains are on the whole better than his. Everyone thinks Lex Luthor is a great villain for instance but Dr. Doom is better than him, and Modern Lex is basically a copy of Doom and Kingpin. Superman's most interesting villains are Brainiac, Bizarro, and my favorite Mr. Mxyzsptlk, and of course more recently Darkseid has become a Superman villain. But for a variety of reasons, those characters tend not to be used too much because they take Superman away from his street-level civilian setting and Luthor as a whole fits that main corner of Superman more consistently than these other characters who are best for specific arcs, so that makes Luthor Superman's arch enemy even if on the whole he's not a very well-written character, and certainly never conceived to be the arch enemy. It was what worked best for Superman. Superman's stories aren't about his bad guys, it's about him, his family, his friends, Lois Lane, and his longing for Krypton and navigating and balancing his two identities. Fundamentally, Spider-Man is just like Superman in that regard. His story is not about him and the bad guys.
Spider-Man has an unique and interesting Rogues Gallery in terms of powers, costumes, and design, but not by personality and depth. They aren't as thematically rich as other villains. Like in Batman, when you do a Scarecrow story you can talk about fears and inner demons, and at least pontificate a bit about psychology. And unlike Spider-Man who doesn't have a single compelling female villain, Batman has many like Poison Ivy, Talia al Ghul, Lady Shiva. The reason Batman's rogues gallery is so much better and interesting is that for the longest time, Batman sucked as a character. People read the comics mostly because the villains were cooler and interesting, and the subtext of Batman has always been that you secretly root for the villains to get one over the spoiled rich kid bore who is the Commissioner's little lapdog. Adam West's BATMAN and Tim Burton's first Batman films are entirely about that. When they made Batman a more complex character, they basically invented the idea that these villains are dark reflections of Batman's personality and Batman is an inch away from becoming as bad if not worse, and that basically meant that Batman's relationships with his rogues is far more important than his relationships and connections with his supporting cast who he mostly treats like s--t.
That's also true for the Fantastic Four who as many will note are often less interesting than the world-building they are part of. There's no question that Dr. Doom is just more interesting than Reed Richards and even the Fantastic Four put together, but Reed and Doom have the greatest rivalry and Reed being this straight, boring, character is important. He's not the flamboyant, charismatic one. If you try and make Reed interesting as both the mess of the fantastic four movies try and do, you end up destroying the function and dynamic of those characters. Not all heroes and all villains are supposed to be cool tortured ones. Some villains exist just to make the hero look good. Most of Spider-Man's bad guys serve that function. They exist to complicate and mess his life up, to give him some victory or defeat to balance his personal wins/losses, but they aren't interesting by themselves.