With just a snap of his big purple, gauntlet-ed fingers, half the universe turned to dust. Perfectly balanced and perfectly villainous. Though the death toll of Thanos' plot makes it unquestionably evil, he argues that his unthinkable actions are a "mercy," to save what he perceived as overcrowded planets like his own from having to squabble over dwindling resources. Maybe if someone had leant him a copy of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, the Avengers -- and everyone else -- might have been spared such drastic losses, but watching Captain America, Iron Man and the Guardians deal with showers of cheeseburgers might have made from a slightly less dramatic film.
When you think about it, Thanos' method of eliminating 50% of all life could have been crueler. Sure, Spider-Man's last words are as traumatizing as you'd expect from a teenager lost in space whose short life is turning to ash before his very eyes. But, the Mad Titan could have wished more physically painful deaths on all of his victims -- there was no writhing in agony or screams of anguish, just quiet, spooky disappearances. Other supervillains' with similarly grandiose plans of death and destruction haven't been so merciful. While it's hard to find another evil plot with a kill count quite as high as Thanos' in Avengers: Infinity War, there have definitely been others that factor way higher on the pain and fear scales.
20 JOKER INCITES SUPERMAN'S REIGN OF TERROR
The horrific events leading up to the world of Injustice: Gods Among Us are infamous by now. The popularDC Universe fighting game is set in a future dystopia that answers a terrifying "what if?" question: What would happen if Superman turned on humanity? While the game focusses on the aftermath of this dramatic turn in the Man of Steel's moral code, the tie-in comics revealed how the stage was set. As it turns out, it was Batman's arch nemesis who was to blame for it all. Five years before the start of the video game's storyline, the first issue shows us a Supes we're more familiar with -- content in domestic bliss, expecting his first child with Lois Lane.
This is soon shattered after Jimmy Olsen is found dead and Lois goes missing. Superman enlists the rest of the Justice League's help, and they track down the culprits -- Joker and Harley Quinn. Joker wastes no time in dosing the Kryptonian with Scarecrow's fear toxin and suddenly Doomsday appears before him. Their brawl ends fatally in space, where the toxin wears off to reveal the horrible truth: Superman hallucinated that his pregnant wife was Doomsday. Enraged, he ends Joker's life and plunges Earth into an era of the most oppressive tyranny the planet has ever seen.
19 MAGNETO ATTEMPTS A PUBLIC EXECUTION
Mark Millar's Ultimates universe made the Marvel world a grittier place than ever before in the '00s. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver crossed a very taboo line, the Hulk was a full-on cannibal, Ant-Man and Wasp's relationship reached peak toxicity and the Avengers underwent an XTREME make-over to become the Ultimates -- less of a band of good-hearted superheroes and more like a covert branch of the US military. It made for some memorable if deeply controversial moments in Marvel history, and it wasn't just the universe's heroes at the center of it all.
The Ultimates' version of Magneto saw the mutant villain more bitter and vengeful towards humanity than ever before. From his base in the Savage Land, he reprogrammed the Sentinels that the US government sent to put a stop to his terrorism to instead obliterate most of Washington, kidnap the President's daughter and drag her father -- naked -- onto the White House lawn for an execution on live TV. Even after Xavier nullified him with amnesia, Magneto managed to return angrier than ever, plotting to reverse Earth's magnetic field to cause global natural disasters. The X-Men's efforts to stop him cost them the lives of Nightcrawler, Beast, Dazzler and even Professor X.
18 CASSANDRA NOVA'S MUTANT GENOCIDE
Cassandra Nova is one of the creepiest X-Men villains ever -- and that's really saying something. Introduced in New X-Men #121 (and #126) her body, which resembles a diminutive bald woman, is actually a formless parasite comprised of "emotional energy" called the Mummudrai. She first popped up in-utero as the unborn Charles Xavier's twin but, alerted to her malevolent presence, baby Chuck made sure she didn't survive. Cassandra managed to cling to life after being stillborn and became hellbent on returning the favor. She coerced Boliver Trask's nephew into giving her control of a fleet of "wild" Sentinels, which she ordered to attack Genosha.
The mutant-only haven was completely wiped out, with the death toll hitting a staggering 16 million. Led by Emma Frost, the X-Men swiftly took Cassandra out... or so they thought. At the last moment, Cassandra jumped into her twin brother's mind. She then revealed his true status as a mutant to the world in order to ruin his reputation, and secretly infected the X-Men with Nano-Sentinels that slowly broke their immune systems down. But she still wasn't done. Her next move took her into space, mentally manipulating the Shi'ar Empire into almost slaughtering Earth's surviving mutant population. Had she succeeded, it could have meant extinction.
17 DARKSEID CAUSES THE MULTIVERSE'S ENDGAME
DC's God of Evil has been putting the Justice League through its paces since his creation in 1970. As you'd expect from someone with that job description -- and with a planet called Apokolips as his home address -- Darkseid has done some downright devious things and is responsible for an awful lot of lost life, including his own mother and brother. Just to add to his evil reputation, one of his worst and most potentially devastating plans was carried out from beyond the grave. In 2008's Final Crisis, Darkseid was dead -- slain by his own son, Orion. Of course, a supervillain of his standing isn't so easy to get rid of, and Darkseid was eventually revealed to have returned in a new, human body.
As Boss Dark Side (ah, we see what you did there...), he was able to spread his beloved Anti-Life Equation through Earth's entire population to turn 6 billion humans into his loyal slaves. But Earth was just the beginning. Darkseid set his sights on infecting the rest of the universe with the Equation, and it took a time-travelling bullet from the Justice League and their allies to take him down. Not content with going down quietly, Darkseid's (second) death ruptured the split in time and space that his plummet to Earth originally caused, with the resulting black hole threatening to pull the multiverse into it. It took an actual miracle from Superman to save all of reality.
16 DARK PHOENIX WIPES OUT AN ENTIRE RACE
The Dark Phoenix Saga is one of Marvel's most iconic storylines, and a version of it will soon be hitting cinemas (again) in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. By now, we've gotten used to the idea of Jean Grey as a complicated and troubled heroine, but Chris Claremont and John Bryne's 1980 story broke new ground for the character, as she was taken over by an ancient and mysterious entity known as the Phoenix Force. The transformation was ignited by the Hellfire Club's Mastermind, whose mental manipulation turned the sweet and compassionate Jean Grey into Dark Phoenix.
Tapping into the repressed wealth of psychic power in Jean, Dark Phoenix had a murderous hunger that could only be sated by planet-wide devastation. She took it out on the unfortunate D'Bari, exterminating all 5 billion of them with horrifying efficiency. The narration really hits home how awful this event was for the innocent aliens. "Many who see this light -- the last thing they will ever see -- are confused, frightened. A very few -- who realize at once what has happened -- have time to curse cruel fate or make their peace with their god. Then, they all die." In the end, the only way for Jean to (temporarily) stop the madness was to end her own life, in front of everyone she loved.
15 LEX LUTHOR PROFITS FROM MILLIONS OF LOST LIVES
Lex Luthor is one of the most dastardly villains in comics, but more often than not, he'd tell you the exact opposite. Lex and Infinity War's Thanos have a lot in common -- both subscribe to the extreme point of view that a little death and destruction are necessary for the betterment of all. Lex is usually more interested in ruling Earth than destroying it, convinced that his nemesis Superman's existence will bring about the latter. In Superman: Lex 2000, Lex ascends to the office of President, much to the frustration of Superman. It wasn't the last time President Luthor would rule in DC media, but it was the most devastating for Earth.
His administration soon found itself embroiled in a war against invading alien forces that engulfed the whole planet. Imperiex, the "embodiment of entropy," had already blown holes through several other worlds before arriving at ours, and President Luthor had to unite every superhero and military force on Earth to defeat him. It was an impressive feat, and he would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that meddling Batman! After bugging his offices, Bats discovered Lex had been war profiteering and had used the coming conflict to boost his ratings. The cost of his greed was at least 8 million lives, including several heroes.
14 RED SKULL RECREATES A CONCENTRATION CAMP
Red Skull is not only Marvel's foremost Nazi cipher, he's worked directly under Adolf Hitler too, a backstory he regaled us and Captain America (a literal captive audience) with in Tales of Suspense #66. In WWII, he gleefully worked as a kind of Lord High Executioner for the Fuhrer, racking up an unknown but probably sizeable kill count of innocent lives. From there, Red Skull went on to commit all manner of gruesomely creative atrocities, but possibly none so horrific as what he did to the citizens of Genosha in Magneto #9.
Returning to his Nazi roots, Red Skull and his S-Men converted the island -- a safe zone for the mutant population -- into the Nazi's most notorious weapon: a concentration camp. Alive, the mutant prisoners were treated like caged animals; dead, their bodies were left in piles as a grim repetition of history. The only person more shocked than those reading was Magneto -- an actual Holocaust survivor -- who, when travelling to the island to save his kind, was psychologically abused by the Red Skull channelling Proff X's powers, forcing the Master of Magnetism to relive his childhood trauma until the past and present blur. It really is a fate worse than death.
13 MAJIN BUU OBLITERATES BILLIONS... FOR FUN
Unlike its goofy main protagonist, the villains in Dragon Ball do not mess around. On the surface, Majin Buu looks like someone molded some pink bubblegum into muscles and a scowl, but he's anything but soft and sweet in nature. His original form in Dragon Ball Z, Kid Buu, had the personality of an evil toddler -- wild, angry and completely unpredictable. Buu wasn't interested in coming up with convoluted world domination plans, he just acted on his whims, and unfortunately for our planet, those whims involved flexing his muscles with some light genocide.
Kid Buu's most devastating attack, the Planet Burst, was apparently able to destroy Earth "ten times over," but, as it turned it, just the one time was enough. With a mere swipe of his arm, Buu's "human extinction attack" wiped out 7 billion lives, including Krillin, Yamcha and other beloved Dragon Ball characters. There was no rhyme or reason for it, Buu just could, so he did. That alone makes him one of the most brutal on this list. Someone who kills on that level for sheer pleasure and bragging rights is beyond psychotic. It took Dende burning through his supply of wishes with the Namekian Dragon to power Goku back up enough to finally defeat Buu, and regenerate Earth.
12 SCARECROW FORCES GOTHAM TO DESTROY ITSELF
Scarecrow has never been one for destruction on a scale as grand as some of his fellow supervillains, but he has flirted with higher powers in the past. His long-standing affiliation with the emotion of fear seemed to make him an ideal wearer for the Yellow Lantern ring on more than one occasion, but his inability to follow orders quickly proved him to be an ineffective member of the Corps. (Plus, his insane ramblings really got on Sinestro's nerves.) Scarecrow definitely has the potential to become bigger and badder though, thanks to his signature weapon -- his fear toxin.
We saw earlier in Injustice: Gods Among Us how much damage this chemical can do in the wrong hands, and in Batman Begins, Scarecrow very nearly took down all of Gotham City with it. Working with the League of Assassins, Jonathan Crane dosed the Narrows into a widespread panic, and using the newly built highspeed train, he planned to make the spread citywide. The result would have been all of Gotham's inhabitants ripping each other apart in a fear-induced riot, which even Batman would have had trouble stopping. While the numbers are comparatively smaller to others on this list, the raw brutality of the plan is still hard to beat.
11 THE VISITORS TURN EARTH INTO A FACIST FOOD FARM
We all know the "we come in peace" line that's synonymous with alien invasion stories. Usually, we imagine that First Contact will either be a peaceful or world-ending event, but what if we can't immediately tell the difference? That was the sinister question explored in the 1983 miniseries V (and the 2009 remake.) The Visitors, as they were referred to, come to our planet in search of vital supplies of Earth-based materials and minerals to help heal their dying world. In return, they offer us technological advances, a deal that our governments accepted. Predictably, things slowly unravel.
A TV journalist sneaks aboard one of their 50 foot motherships and discovers that the humanoid race are actually flesh-eating reptilian creatures who chow down on small, live animals. His footage is stopped from airing on TV as the Visitors seize control of the world's media, and with the instigation of things like the Visitor Youth, they start to appear less like benevolent saviors and more like space Nazis. Their plan is actually to drain Earth of its water, feast on human bodies and enslave the rest of us as soldiers to conquer yet more planets. What's worse, they actually succeed. The series ends with Earth completely at their mercy with most of the population unaware of their real motives.
10 THE FRATERNITY ERASES SUPERHEROES FROM EXISTENCE
No one does brutality quite like Mark Millar, and his Millarworld limited series, Wanted with JG Jones in the early '00s is certainly no exception. The story follows bored cubicle drone Wesley Gibson as he breaks free of his monotonous life after running into Fox, a world-class assassin. Fox belongs to the Fraternity, an Illuminati-esque organization of villainous assassins who secretly control the world. Fox reveals to Wesley that his absent father was actually a member as well, who went by the codename Killer, and Wesley is expected to follow in his footsteps.
Wesley then meets Professor Solomon Selzer, an archetypal mad scientist who begins Wesley's training into a bullet-bending gunsmith. He also gives Welsey a little history lesson. It turns out that the bad guys won a war that mankind forgot was even fought. A world once ruled by superheroes was overturned when its supervillain community -- sick of being defeated -- used magic and futuristic technology to not only physically wipe out all of the heroes, but replace all memory of them really existing with memories of them being fictional characters. With nothing standing in their way, the Fraternity are free to commit any heinous crime they like, so long as they don't attract too much attention.
9 THE BORG: ASSIMILATE OR DIE
In all of Star Trek, there's never been an enemy as widely feared as the Borg. Simplistically, they are a cyborg collective of interconnected hive minds, but in reality, they aren't really a proper species at all -- relying on converting preexisting life rather than creating or being it. Anyone can be turned into a Borg, and that's where their power truly lies. Their "resistance is futile" line is one of the most quoted in Star Trek history, and with their ranks considered to be up in the trillions, that claim has a lot of weight to it. The Borg's method of conversion is through cybernetic implants and total identity erasure.
Effectively, once you become one with them, your previous life is as good as over. The process also drains you of any skin pigmentation and body hair until you look like the walking dead. The Borg first chronologically appeared in Star Trek: First Contact, where they try to convert the entire human race in the year 2063. Captain Picard is entrusted by the Federation to prevent this catastrophe, having had firsthand experience with them six years earlier as one of their drones. The memories of his assimilation still haunt him in nightmares, making it clear that the Borg's pursuit of universal "perfection" isn't as harmonious as they want us to think.
8 SETHE (LITERALLY) PLAGUES HUMANITY
After the climactic events of Flashpoint, the DCU officially merged with the universes of Vertigo and Wildstorm, bringing characters like Swamp Thing into the fold for good. The character's debut in the New 52 continuity was helmed by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette, and along with his newly resurrected human form, the mystic hero brought an ancient and sinister evil with him the world of DC. The storyline, "Raise Them Bones," begins with peculiar happenings in the natural world: birds, bats and fish dying en masse for no discernible reason.
Like any good horror movie, these signs signal the coming of Sethe, an avatar of the Black (also known as the Rot) a primeval force that represents decay in the way that the Green -- of which Swamp Thing is an avatar -- represents plant life. This makes Sethe an arch enemy of Swamp Thing and a dangerous one at that. Sethe is a natural master of necrotic magic, able to kill on contact and raise the dead as minions to do his bidding. His worst crime, however, is that he's also the living embodiment of pestilence, responsible for every single plague, like the Black Death, humanity has ever endured for as long as humans have walked the Earth. As such, his victims number in the millions, at least.
7 THE NOTHING ERASES IMAGINATION
The Neverending Story is a deceptively dark kid's film. You think you're getting a nice, '80s high fantasy fairy tale about a warrior kid taking on an epic quest with his furry dog/dragon companion, and then BAM! The kid's horse is swallowed by mud, he's stalked by a bloodthirsty wolf and the Big Bad is an existential nightmare made from storm clouds and the thoughts of every adult who ever told you to grow up and stop believing in made-up things. No, really, that's what it is. Called The Nothing, Fantasia's biggest threat is described as, "human apathy, cynicism and the denial of childish dreams."
Considering the name of the world it's trying to destroy and the framing of the story as a book being read by a lonely kid in our world, this makes a lot of narrative sense, but how on earth are you supposed to fight a metaphor? The Nothing is a "manifestation of disbelief" that aims to not just destroy Fantasia and all of his inhabitants, but to erase it from existence and turn its occupiers into "lies" in our world. Therefore, the only thing that can stop it is the faith that Fantasia is real. As their world is engulfed by emptiness, the Childlike Empress begs Bastion, the boy reading the story, to give her a name in order to prove his belief and dispel The Nothing.
6 ZOOM TRIGGERS THE COLLAPSE OF THE DCU
A lot of supervillains have been responsible for the collapsing of lives, governments or entire civilizations, but few can claim to have kickstarted a universe-wide apocalypse. Also known as Reverse-Flash, Eobard Thawn made his first comics appearance in 1963 and has remained one of the Flash's most diabolical enemies ever since. In New 52 continuity, he becomes the originator of the Negative Speed Force, and hatches a plan to make Barry Allen's life a living hell from the earliest stages of his life. Travelling back to Barry's childhood, he subtly manipulates things around Nora and Henry Allen until he breaks their marriage and lands Henry in prison.
He then systematically turned speedsters against the future Flash, destroying the heroes' reputation before it's even formed. In Rebirth's Flashpoint, he does himself one better (or worse) when it comes to meddling with the Allen family by pushing the blame onto Barry himself. In an attempt to undo the damage done by Zoom, Barry travels back in time to save his mother's life, a tiny change that has a dramatic ripple effect: the Flash, Justice League and Superman are gone and mankind is caught in a world war between Atlantians and Amazons. "This is your fault, Barry," Zoom taunts. "This hell is your creation. You traded the life of your mother for the rest of the world!" Ultimately, the diverging timelines clash to usher in a whole new DC universe.
5 CARNAGE ALMOST BLOWS UP REALITY
The '90s Spider-Man animated series ran from 1994-98 and was a big hit with old and new fans of Marvel's web slinging teen hero. As the character's co-creator, Stan Lee had an executive producer role and claims to have gone over every detail with a fine-tooth comb to ensure his stories were being accurately adapted. Something he couldn't control was Fox's crushing censorship policy at the time (thanks to the criticism that "violent" shows like Power Rangers attracted). Anything remotely graphic was prohibited or dampened, which made depicting characters like Blade and Carnage at full force tricky... but not impossible.
Carnage ended up providing the show with its high stakes finale in Season Five after a three-part Secret Wars arc, starting in "Spider-Wars: I Really Really Hate Clones" and concluding in "Spider-Wars: Farewell Spider-Man." The first half featured a wide range of cameos from Captain America, to Doctor Doom to Storm. The Beyonder also made an appearance after Spidey gets transported to an alternate New York that has been all but destroyed by Green Goblin, Hobgoblin and Spider-Carnage. Beyonder tasks Peter Parker to unite with an interdimensional team of Spider-Men to prevent Spider-Carnage's endgame: setting off an explosion in between dimensions that will level reality itself.
4 THE MACHINES SECRETLY ENSLAVE MANKIND
The Matrix trilogy brought cyberpunk, heavy existential dread and leather dusters to mainstream audiences in the late '90s/early '00s. Come for the cutting-edge, bullet time photography-captured action sequences and leave when the Architect starts spewing out impenetrable philosophy while distractedly doing his best Colonel Sanders cosplay in the second instalment. The premise of the series is that humanity is unknowingly trapped in a false reality, a dreamlike state of bliss that blinds us to the real, horrible truth. Computer programmer Thomas Anderson begins his journey to uncover this when he follows a mysterious woman to meet a man called Morpheus.
Morpheus offers him the chance to become enlightened, which the bored office drone jumps at. Suddenly, he awakens from a dream he didn't know he was in and is horrified to discover that the real world is a nightmarish dystopia run by artificial intelligence, with the human race kept alive only to serve as batteries for machines to live off of. Our minds are kept busy inside a fake world called the Matrix, with programs acting as digital enforcers on behalf of the machines to stamp out any signs of rebellion, which predictably occur in every new cycle of the Matrix's history. The idea of being trapped in dream wrapped up in a nightmare stuck in a never-ending loop is just brutally exhausting.
3 MISTER MIND EATS AWAY HISTORY
Some of the goofiest looking characters in the DCU are also some of the company's most cosmically terrifying. (Just look at Mr. Mxyyptlk when he decides to try villainy out for a laugh.) This Captain Marvel villain appears to be little more than a little green worm, but that appearance is grossly deceiving. The character dates all the way back to 1943 where Captain Marvel clashed with the insect's Monster Society of Evil, but even when he was at his most cartoonish, Mister Mind proved a disturbing presence -- evading capture and leaving the hero with no clue as to what he even was.
In the New 52 continuity, the telepathic terror was thought to be gone for good, but he suddenly burst back into the burgeoning multiverse from inside Skeets, who he had been secretly using as a robotic cocoon. The worm's new super-sized form made him more powerful than ever before -- not to mention hungry, and he set about consuming the entire universe, an act that Rip Hunter warned was effectively "eating years and events from this universe's history -- altering the Earth with every flap of his wings." This meant, as each Earth came to "occupy the same space" on a a different plane, Mister Mind's munching irrevocably altered all of them. The only way for Rip Hunter to put an end to his feasting was trap him in a 52 second time loop.
2 VIROXX TURNS BILLIONS INTO MURDEROUS DRONES
Viroxx is a somewhat obscure supervillain in Superman's history, but considering the level of devastation his inflicts, and the difficulty the Man of Tomorrow has in defeating him, you'd think he'd be better known or more widely used. As the name implies, Viroxx is a space virus of suitably huge proportions, and his effects have been felt across the entire universe. In a manner similar to Star Trek's Borg collective, Viroxx's life's mission is the conversion of all sentient life into his own personal army of zombified slaves, robbed of any semblance of individuality or memories of their previous lives.
But, unlike the Borg, this conversion isn't solely about the pursuit of perfection. Viroxx's captive minds develop a similarly voracious appetite to his, and their feeding also feeds him. Like a brain-hungry zombie, feeding is pretty much all his converted victims want to do, turning ordinary people irreversibly into cold-blooded monsters who, in some tragic cases, have to be despatched by those closest to them. By the time the viral monster crosses paths with Superman in Action Comics #778's "Infestation" 100-page special, he'd destroyed billions of lives. He also turns out to be unkillable even for Superman, with the Kryptonian forced to merely drive Viroxx as far away as possible.
1 THANOS PREVENTS UNIVERSAL PEACE
Who else could top a list of plans more brutally evil than Thanos' in Avengers: Infinity War than Thanos himself? Over the course of his time as Marvel's big, bad purple tyrant, he's decimated Wakanda, killed his own mother and blown up his own homeworld, taking out thousands of lives in the process. Thanos has also done some pretty decent things too, but no good deed can ever wipe away a slate that filthy. In 2018, Marvel marked the release of the third Avengers film by revealing the very worst thing that the Titan ever did.
In Thanos Annual #1, when Thanos had a complete set of Infinity Gems in his Gauntlet and was feeling particularly vindictive, he used the Time Gem to travel to Earth in order to... wait for it: help a little old lady across the street. Huh, so what's so evil about that? Well, nothing specifically. But, decades after this random act of kindness, Thanos pays a visit to a dying woman named Stephanie Kirchner and reveals a gut-wrenching truth to her. His intervention stopped the old woman from bumping into Stephanie, which meant she never had an epiphany moment that would have led to her instigating true world peace, saving millions and millions of lives. Thanos grins as the woman is crushed by the weight of everything he robbed her -- and mankind -- of. It's unspeakably chilling, even for Thanos.