Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
The earlier villains have the prime mover advantage. They came first, so others are seen as redundant if they fill the same role. New villains will have to do a bit more.

There is also the point that the classic villains benefit from designs by Ditko and Romita, as well as relatively strong first (and often second) stories.
The other thing is that most rogues gallery in Superman or Batman evolved over time. Whereas Ditko created them all by himself in a very short time. Ditko was also an apprentice of Jerry Robinson, co-creator of Joker and Batman was one of his favorite comics, so he had the advantage of several decades trial-and-error and resting on shoulders of giants.

Batman comics after the initial three decades or so plateaued in terms of new lasting villains -- Ra's Al Ghul from O'Neill/Adams is the biggest new villain that's in the 70s (40+ years after character's debut). After Ra's you had Bane who was the biggest new villain. Since then we've had some flash-in-the-pan villains with strong debuts but no heat (Hush), as well as one or two minor psychopaths like Professor Pyg. In the case of Superman, the big new villain is Brainiac (from the 50s) and after him it's Doomsday (the 90s).

So on that light, Spider-Man's pretty natural in terms of it being hard to introduce new pantheon villains to the mix. After a point you hit a natural plateau.

That's also the case with X-Men, where initially they had Magneto, Juggernaut, the Sentinels, Mimic and a few others. Then the Claremont era brought in Hellfire Club, Arcade, Phoenix, Mister Sinister, William Stryker. Then after him you had Apocalypse. The most recent big new villain is from Grant Morrison's run with Cassandra Nova.

Fantastic Four have it worse in my view. There's not a real lasting new villain outside the Lee-Kirby run.