The First Family of Marvel Comics has faced a lot of adversity over the years. Some of it personal. Some galactic. Some villains are great. Some not so great. While many of the Fantastic Four's villains are among the best villains in all of Marvel - hi, Galactus - there are just as many that are not.
The line between crazy good and just plain crazy is as thin as the page of a comic book, and these ten villains went right through it. Hailing from every era of the Fantastic Four, here are their ten most pathetic villains, ranked.
10 Infant Terrible
This vaguely Sleestak-looking creature is the Infant Terrible, a thoroughly '60s alien member of the Elan race. The Elan possess incredible psionic abilities, able to rearrange atoms and molecules with their minds. Also, they can shoot energy out of the antenna-things. Infant Terrible wasn't so much a villain, per se, but a nuisance. He got separated from his parents and rather than look for them, he ran amok all over New York City bending and warping reality. Still, the Fantastic Four had to give him the boot.
9 Blastaar
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created some of the most iconic characters in all of comics (and media, really). But not all of them were on the same level. Blastaar, AKA the Living Bomb-Burst, was created on maybe an off-day for the duo. An alien from the Negative Zone, Blastaar tried to conquer the earth a bunch of times and got beat by the FF a bunch of times. His primary attribute is shooting blasts of energy out of his hands, and there's only so much you can do with that before people catch on.
8 Nicholas Scratch
A wizard and maybe, just maybe, a Doctor Strange wannabe, Nicholas Scratch got scratched off the Cool Villains list quite a while ago. You know a guy is serious when he wields something called the Satan Staff. Unfortunately, doing his best heavy-metal album cosplay couldn't help Scratch against the Fantastic Four. Neither could his considerable magical talents, which included dimensional-traveling, teleportation, and energy manipulation. Scratch's big mistake is he went at the FF through Reed and Sue Richard's son Franklin, and that never ends well for anybody.
7 Salem's Seven
Even better - worse - than Nicholas Scratch are his children. All seven of these magical users live in the town of New Salem, the hometown of Agatha Harkness, who later became Frankin Richard's governess. They conspired with their dad to kidnap Franklin, but all the magic in the world couldn't help them.
It didn't help that the individual members of the team weren't that great. Their powers mostly consisted of changing shape into animal forms and being fast or strong. Brutacus, Gazelle, Hydron, Reptilla, Thornn, Vakume - yeah - and Vertigo later became allies of the Fantastic Four.
6 Terminus
Terminus has a great Kirbyesque scale and alien weirdness, but as a Fantastic Four villain, he's just more of the same. Created by John Byrne during his landmark run on the title in the 1980s, Terminus recalled Galactus in both name and deed. The Fantastic Four discover him in space and he comes to earth looking to do what he does everywhere else - destroy planets. Like the other would-be Earth Destroyers, Terminus gets the shaft. Literally. Mister Fantastic drives him deep into the Earth's crust.
5 Paibok the Power Skrull
A problem with the Fantastic Four and their Rogues gallery is that so many of their early foes are iconic. As a result, later runs have a tendency to echo what's come before. That's the case with Paibok the Power Skrull, who's really another take on the classic Super Skrull. Paibok shows up in the early '90s, looking to get back at the FF for their endless dunking on the Skrulls. His solution is to replace Alicia Masters with his former Skrull over as a kind of Real Skrulls of Tarnax IV bit of petty payback. Ok.
4 Fasaud
No. Just... no. Transformed into a living electronic image by an electrical shock from a television camera, Fasaud could never transform out of being a stereotype. Marvel had generally left behind squirm-inducing villains based on less than progressive views on people from other countries, but in the '80s they made room for this guy. Fasaud wasn't really worth the headache then or now. He could electrocute people, which ouch, and teleport, but as far as FF villains go, he was pretty low stakes. Safe to say he probably won't be in the eventual MCU Fantastic Four film.
3 Red Ghost and His Super-Apes
Some ideas are just so bad they're good. Red Ghost is not one of those. The ratio between all-time great villain and not-so-much got set early on in the Fantastic Four with this guy, who debuted in issue #13 of Fantastic Four in the spring of 1963.
Red Ghost was a Soviet scientist devoted to beating America to the moon, and pursuant to that he assembled a gang of cosmonaut monkeys. Motivated by the FF's own rocket flight, he copied their specs (something Russia later actually did with the space shuttle) to give himself superpowers.
2 Hyperstorm
A very '90s and forgettable villain, Hyperstorm arrived from an alternate dystopian future with a big secret: he's actually Jonathan Richards, son of Franklin Richards and Rachel Summers. Instead of being a good person like his parents, he's a bad guy who can warp reality with his thoughts. Apparently he had enough of doing that in his own time and decided to come back to the present to try it out there. Despite his massive powers and family ties, his lameness couldn't be overcome.
1 Paste-Pot Pete
Paste-Pot Pete is part of Marvel's history for a couple of reasons. He's one of the first supervillains of the fledgling universe to debut in the early '60s, and he's one of the absolute worst. Basically his gimmick is he runs around with a suit filled up with glue which he can shoot kind of like Spider-Man does his webs. This actually works enough for Pete, later called Trapster, to survive and continue to make appearances down the line. Crazy as that glue might be, it's not enough to stick him on a more flattering list.