Best/Worst X-Villains Created in the Past 10 Years

[worstblogever]

Last week during the All New X-Men #27 thread, a few folks were mentioning how that fans weren't too thrilled about the Future Brotherhood, and pointed out that fans haven't seemed to rally around many original villains in the X-Men universe in the past 10 years, thinking back to Cassandra Nova as the last threat that people seemed to enjoy. And a poll thread on the subject was going to come up...

Since Grant Morrison left the X-Books in June of 2004, leaving both Cassandra Nova and Sublime as his completely new villainous creations, a decade has passed. Many other creators have come and taken a crack at creating new villains, but perhaps not with the same level of success. The following are some of the faces we've seen:

• Children of the Vault
• Shi'ar Salvage Pirates
• Ord & the Breakworlders
• Evolutionaries
• Vulcan
• Immortal Man of Tabula Rasa
• Diskhord
• Kid Hellfire Club (Kade Kilgore & Co.)
• Hellfire Academy Kids (Snot, Mudbug, Tin Man... Infestation)
• Golgotha
• Kaga
• Animax
• Miss Sinister
• Xraven
• The Y-Men
• Final Horsemen
• Apocalpyse Twins
• The Red Right Hand/Mongrels
• The Buzzard Brothers
• Lord Deathstrike
• David Michael Gray
• Daken
• Kimura
• Friendless
• Cortex
• S.C.A.R.S. (Ballistique, Rococo, Sylvius)
• Sublime Corporation (Lobe, Verre, Bouncing Betty, Blur, Thug)
• Luca Aldine
• Leper Queen
• Project Purgatory
• Unit
• The Isolationist
• Kenji Uedo
• Rouge Mort
• Predator X
• Shi'ar Death Commandos
• Tattooed Devil
• Future Brotherhood

Who are the best, and worst of that bunch? Feel free to comment on who you feel delivered, or who fell short.

[BroHomo]

Project purgatory!!!!!

[worstblogever]

Animax


The dragon/demon summoning threat from Phoenix who kicked off "Battle of the Atom", and the potential future assassin of President Dazzler. Teen Iceman thought she was hot, which is just like Iceman, to dig a villainess.

We're still waiting to see if she ever factors into another storyline, or becomes another one of those weird one-hit wonder villains.


Apocalypse Twins


The children of Warren Worthington III and Ichisumi, and heirs to En Sabah Nur, somehow... the Apocalypse Twins have the Clan Akkaba legacy giving them credibility, plus some cruel mentoring from Kang for an extra nudge. Oh yeah, and they destroyed the Earth after making Daken, Banshee, the Sentry, and Grim Reaper into their Horsemen. So their pedigree to villainy, and rap sheet is impressive, if nothing else.

Buzzard Bros.


They're pretty much two redneck cannibal mountain men who have a grudge with Wolverine for him not letting them eat him. I wish there was more to explain, but that's really them in a nutshell. At least they don't give the full "deliverance" treatment to their food, I suppose.

[worstblogever]

Children of the Vault


Believe it or not, they've only appeared in two story arcs so far. But in that time, they managed to have Serafina break Cannonball's heart, brainwash Northstar & Aurora to attack the X-Men, nearly crashed a flying ship into the mansion, tried to publicly execute Rogue for their own entertainment by crushing her, slowly, and oh yeah, nearly fused their inter-dimensional city, Quitado, into Mumbai. Imagine what they could do if they were given more time to work with than single arcs.

Cortex


I don't know how original he is, because "Evil Madrox Dupe" has been done before. More than once, even. This one just had some T/O virus infection to make him a little more durable than most of the rest, and an alternate future timeline backstory that made him somewhat of a surprise. Somewhat.


Daken


At first, people made fun of his hair, and his "slight alteration on Wolverine's claws" design. Then he got pheromone powers, and the whole picture of how much of a bisexual sociopath he is started to come to light, and people were getting to like him. However, he keeps dying and immediately getting back to life like, more so than the average Marvel character (2 resurrections in an 18 month span), he doesn't use his pheromones as much, and his defining trait seems to be his daddy issues. His hair remains ridiculous.

[worstblogever]

David Michael Gray


This fella was a scientist/businessman who found the genetic remains of mutants who were killed off during the Black Plague, centuries earlier, and decided to clone them, and use them as living weapons. When Storm's team of X-Men tracked him down, he killed himself rather than be taken alive. He obviously went to get his master's degree in mad science.

At least he has 3 names, though. That's a quality usually reserved for serial killers.



Diskhord


They were a masked heavy metal band, who while touring, found an alien that looked like Shuma-Gorath's bastard kid. It caused all sorts of literal chaos around their shows, which they I guess just thought was cheaper than getting actual pyrotechnics. Somehow, they held their own in a fight against the New Mutants for more than 2 seconds, but with the tentacled extra-terrestrial that gave them powers gone, we might not ever see these knock-offs of Slipknot again.


Evolutionaries


Primitive men who were granted the gift of Celestial technology, and decided to use it by deciding what species deserves to be the top of the food chain on Earth, and to wipe out whichever branch of the genetic tree was less impressive in the name of evolution, effectively accelerating what nature started. They killed off Neanderthal man, and then wiped out the Neo like it wasn't even a thing. They're hanging out with the High Evolutionary right now, which makes sense story wise. What doesn't, is they're opposed by the newest incarnation of the New Warriors. *shrugs* I dunno.

[Anduinel]

Children of the Vault and the Purifiers here.

[Mari]

I voted for Daken and Vulcan. I think both are terrible to originate from X-Men or as sibling of X-Men.

[worstblogever]

Final Horsemen

Ichisumi. Sanjar Javeed. Decimus Furius. Jeb Lee (admittedly, "Jeb" is not as badass as sounding a name as the rest of those.) The concept of the Horsemen is not new, by any stretch. Hell, at the point they debuted it was over 3 decades since the originals turned up in X-Factor. These four mutants came from different badass places and times in history, and were kept on the backburner by Apocalypse to be called up when s*** really got real. So far, the X-Men killed one, knocked up the only girl on the team, and kept dismembering the other two until the Apocalypse Twins wiped them off the map. So maybe not so badass.

Friendless

That six-armed telepathic alien guy who turned up in space toward the tail end of Mike Carey's run on X-Men: Legacy (vol. 1) was Friendless. He had Havok, Polaris, and Korvus trying to survive a wave of attackers, gave Rachel Summers a run for her money on the Astral Plane, and seemed content to kill himself and anyone else he could because, well... he was a nihilist who was treated so badly by his own species, he wanted everyone and everything to die. (If this guy ended up working for Thanos, I wouldn't complain at all.)


Future Brotherhood

Xorna. Raze. Xavier Jr. (or III?). Grown-Up Molly Hayes. Dark-ish Beast. Future Deadpool. Ice Golem. They were the antagonists of X-Men: Battle of the Atom.

I think that says enough.

[worstblogever]

Golgotha

A giant alien space blob shped like a mushroom that would make mutants go bugs*** crazy the longer they were in its general proximity. We're talking like a level of violently insane that would have made the Manson Family go, "Jesus, just chill out, man." The solution the X-Men had to them? Kill 'em all in space before they get to Earth. Really, the best thing about Golgotha was all the crazy things it made the X-Men do, like Emma Frost considering stabbing herself in the face with a pair of scissors, or even worse, Rogue kissing Wolverine.

If only the comparison to Cthulu had been made, well, it would have helped Golgotha's credibility a bit.


Hellfire Kids/Hellfire Academy


Everyone's fond memories of the S&M Hellfire Club were thrown out the window, and replaced with spoiled psychopathic children. Then they recruited their own knock-offs of the Hellions, who were older than they were, but still took orders from them (then again, Mud Bug and Snot don't exactly seem like the "leader" type). I'd go into more detail, but I'll just remind everyone that they were voted "Worst Villain(s)" in the X-Book Awards for the past three consecutive years.



Immortal Man

The living god that runs Tabula Rasa, and has the unfortunate timing to have been designed by Greg Land, who made an advanced intelligent lifeform from within a hyper-evolved biosphere look exactly like the love child of Mysterio & War Machine, for reasons that are not completely understood. Perhaps it does not speak well of him as a character, that the most memorable thing from the arc he appeared in, was Cyclops being swallowed up, and pooped out of the giant sphincter of some living terrain. When you get upstaged by a giant bunghole, you're probably not the coolest villain ever.

[worstblogever]

The Isolationist

Peter David originally conceived the Isolationist back during his first run on X-Factor, and over a decade later, the tease of a villain lurking in the background on Genosha came to fruition, with a name and an appearance and everything.

It seems The Isolationist has duplication powers like Rogue or Mimic. Except... he can duplicate the mutant powers of like every mutant EVER. That might sound neat, but he wasn't so good at controlling them, particularly telepathy, and he heard what everyone was thinking all the time. So his solution was, "kill all the mutants, then I have no powers."

Man, I wish I had the Isolationist's problems. Not his solutions, though.

Kaga


Well, yeah. We're doing that. Kaga was a mutant who was born not long after Hiroshima in Japan, because, holy crap, was everything radioactive as all get-out. But as he grew up with extra fingers and hyper intelligence, he looked on the TV and then the O5 X-Men were on it. And he was like, "WTF? They're all pretty and s***! One day, I'll show those handsome bastards who the best mutant poster child is! It's KAGA!" Seriously, that's his motivation. So he started investigating the X-Men's greatest foes, and threw them all into a genetic blender to create Krakoa-sized Brood, and a bunch of other really heinous things to throw at San Francisco/Utopia to prove his point, or lack thereof. Perhaps the only really offensive, long-standing horrible achievement you can give him credit for is desecrating the corpse of Wallflower to make a bio-weapon, which only dashed the hopes of New X-Men/Academy X fans that she might be resurrected any time in the foreseeable future. (That jerk.)

Kimura

The physically invulnerable overseer to X-23 from The Facility, Kimura is seriously twisted. You know when you see Sabretooth murder someone in a comic, and have a grin from ear to ear? Kimura takes that look, and puts it on a pretty face, but adds Michael Jordan's tongue hanging out. If super-sadism was a legitimate super-power, she'd have it. She's gone grindhouse horror on a bound-up X-23 with a chainsaw. Emma Frost wiped out the only positive memory she ever had, of her grandmother, to punish her... but that seems to have only made her even more psychotic. And oh yeah, is still out there, apparently hunting down X-23's blood relatives, looking for revenge, in an open plot hook.

[worstblogever]

Leper Queen


Ah, the Leper Queen. She has the coolest origin story, possibly, of any character on this list. She was a happy, ordinary mother, until the day that her baby daughter developed pyrokinesis, and burned the damned house down around her, horribly burning her, and leaving her with the motive to kill all mutants, because they're just horrible abominations that should be stopped for the good of humanity and they don't make anyone else look like the daughter that Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger raised together in their image.

She led the Sapien League on raids against the Xavier Compound right after Decimation, got kidnapped, then abandoned by Apocalypse, and then turned up in South America, where she was "rescued" by Bastion, who infected her with a strand of the T/O virus to put her under his control. Her mission was to then kidnap mutants and infect them with the Legacy Virus so they would become "mutant suicide bombers" and kill humans, inadvertently, per her orders from Bastion. Not liking that angle for killing more humans than mutants to further the cause, she responded by purposely leaving a big enough trail of bread crumbs on her way to the United Nations that X-Force found her, and X-23 shot her in the head before she had the chance to kill Boom Boom.

Because when you try to kill Boom Boom, damn it, that's when you've gone to goddamned far and need to be put down.

Lord Deathstrike


We don't know anything about this guy, really. He's a cyborg who seems to respect Lady Deathstrike's style and Kabuki theatre. It seems he doesn't necessarily hate all mutants, as one minute he'll get hired to murder Wolverine or Mystique and do it, and the next, he'll get paid to work for Sabretooth. He's pretty much what happens if one of the Reavers goes off the reservation and just becomes a mercenary, I guess.

Luca Aldine


Googly Eyes. One of more well-liked villains of the past decade is a disembodied consciousness that can possess other mutants, has the power of presience that he's borrowing from Blindfold, debuted as a psychic avatar with big ol' googly eyes. He was a great nemesis for Legion, during X-Men: Legacy (vol. 2), so we'll try and not dwell on his peepers (did someone say PEEPERS? Oh yeah. That was me.), and focus on the fact that he committed matricide, and attempted sororicide.

[Anduinel]

I agree with the first. The second... the Purifiers were technically around since the 1980s, when they debuted with Rev. Stryker during "God Loves, Man Kills"... so they really were a returning threat.

It's not that I don't love them, they just weren't "new".

They've just been revamped to the point that it doesn't feel the same, I guess.

[worstblogever]

Miss Sinister

Marvel was envoking Rule 63 of the Internet for a couple years there, what with a female Hobgoblin in Spider-Man, Loki running around in Lady Sif's body in Thor Comics, and oh yeah, during one of Nathaniel Essex's "death phases", a lady by the name of Claudine Renko was traipsing around in a corset and thigh-high boots, living up to her moniker by working with Sebastian Shaw by being a honey trap for Daken, and then making Gambit as sexually uncomfortable as he's ever been seen.

In the end, she's still a less intelligent Mr. Sinister with boobs.

The Mongrels

Gunhawk. Fire Knives. Saw Fist. Shadow Stalker. Cannon Foot. They were Wolverine's abandoned bastard kids, who were found, raised, and trained by a group of James Howlett-revenge-obsessed humans called the Red Right Hand as the last step in their scheme to get back at Logan. No, not by having his kids killing him... by getting him pissed off enough that before he took a second to think about it, to murder their "hired goons, the Mongrels" before stumbling into a room where he'd learn they were the fruit of his very loins.

Just don't ask me why Cannon Foot's whole superpower was to kick steel balls real hard. That makes Batroc the Leaper look like an Asgardian demigod.

Ord & the Breakworlders

They're a super-strong, super-durable alien race (who oddly look like the villains from Galaxy Quest) with the intelligence and technological know-how to successfully accomplish interstellar travel, create weapons of mass destruction (as in, projectile bullets large enough to fire through and destroy a planet), and y'know, create a process to easily reverse death itself.

And yet, in spite of that, Ord and the people of Breakworld proved themselves rock stupid. Seriously, they're so full of fail it's ridiculous. Lockheed can foil their schemes. They can't destroy Earth. They can't destroy their own planet. They probably can't make a sandwich without starting a fire, in spite of the fact they can SCIENCE UP EVERY INVENTION TO EVERY PROBLEM WE FACE IN EXISTENCE EVER. Also ridiculous? That the X-Men moved out of San Francisco, and left these chumps living in the suburbs there to suck on Rice-A-Roni. Seriously, they're still there, uglying up the Castro District.

[worstblogever]

Predator X


The Facility created these nasty little buggers, and the first thing any of them ever did was... eat Mammomax. Even worse, they went on to eat one of the greatest characters ever conceived, Peepers.

Damn you, Predator X. Damn you straight to hell.

They got armor upgrades, when the Facility kidnapped Mercury and took part of her "body" to donate to it. But the more mutants they eat, the bigger and meaner they get. So when one went to the Xavier Mansion and ate out of the cemetery full of dead kids in the yard, WHOA, it was a bad thing. Except when one ate Wolverine during "Messiah CompleX", and he cut its way out of its belly.

Project Purgatory


There was always this lingering plot hook from "Inferno", that the mutant babies N'astirh was going to sacrifice were handed off by the New Mutants, to Freedom Force, of all people. Yeah, that's right, we were told on good faith that the Blob & Pyro would do the right thing and make sure children were sent back to their families for a happy ending.

WRONG. The military kept them, and took them to Limbo, where they researched them for years (which pass faster down in Limbo, of course) as part of an operation known as Project Purgatory. They were abandoned and left for dead by the American government in that hellish realm, and the kids were manipulated into becoming the secret weapon of the project, and hell bent on destroying Limbo, once and for all, by using the Bloodstone Amulet to unleash the Elder Gods.

The teenaged Inferno Babies, now Project Purgatory, had a variety of powers, and handed the New Mutants their asses for a couple issues, until Dani Moonstar went full Claremazon and led the charge to a big comeback win, cemented with Legion re-writing reality itself. Most of them are believed dead, or at least, incapacitated after their battle with the New Mutants.

Red Right Hand


These guys have no super-powers. They're ordinary people who bear a grudge against Wolverine, for a variety of things, mostly legitimate. Like "he killed my husband while working as a government assassin" or "he killed by dad in a barfight", or "he got my wife killed by fighting with the Hulk so he leveled a city block" kinds of things. Their eldest and founding member took a few shots at killing Wolverine, only to fail each time, and instead, opted for a long game of revenge.

It involved pacts with demons, putting a bunch in Wolverine's body to send him to Hell. Best case scenario he stayed there. Worst case he escaped, and then phase two: Trick him into murdering his own children. And then, after leaving a video recording to let him know he'd slaughtered his own offspring, they killed themselves, so Wolverine would have no one to direct his rage at.

Presumably, their own deals with demons, and general evil ass nature mean they went to Hell, where I'm guessing at some point down the line, Wolverine's going to have another round of fighting with the supernatural. Oh yeah, that's coming.

[KurtW95]

I really don't like any of the listed characters, but if I'd have to choose one that I like the least, I'd go with the Hellfire Brats. Can't stand them.