It’s really hard to do a Top 5 Batman Villain’s list, because not only are there a ton of them but thanks to the movies and the animated series even the lesser known one’s are pretty well known. I mean, gee I wonder who #1 would be? So I decided to go a different way.
I talked before about Batman #412 which I consider a great done in one. We get introduced to The Mime, and she is defeated and never seen again after that issue. But the issue is so well written and paced it’s still memorable. Then you have Anarky, who was such a popular badass he made a bunch of appearances and even got a solo book…which was so awful it killed the character’s popularity and the character all but vanished. Mime and Anarchy are those minor Batman villains which a real Batman fan knows but is mostly unknown or forgotten.
Some are one shot’s who appear once and never again, and others do get other appearances but nothing ever elevates them to be one of the premiere members of Batman’s Rogues Gallery. Sometimes they will be popular after being reinvented, for example Floyd Lawton aka Deadshot was a joke villain before Suicide Squad changed that. Here are five Batman villain’s that aren’t so well known, but I still love them. And yes I know I am on a limb saying these are “unknown” or “obscure”, most if not all have appeared in some form in various media I am just saying they’re just not as popular as the main baddies like Joker or Bane. And I am only going by comic appearances here.
Magpie
When John Byrne gave us the new Superman in 1986, he made sure to give us the “first meeting” of him and Batman. Where they did not like or trust each other. Course this didn’t last forever, but in that story the two ended up tangling with Magpie. She was a former museum curator who wanted to possess the gems she watched but could never own. She killed a lot of people before Batman and Superman finally nabbed her. She did kind of appear here and there before being killed off.
KGBeast
Yeah if you’re a major Batman fan there’s (or watched Arrow to be fair) no way this name isn’t familiar to you. In the classic Jim Starlin storyline “Ten Nights of the Beast” this trained assassin was out to kill 10 representatives of the US government to stop Star Wars (did I mention this was the 80’s?). It took all Batman to defeat before he killed his #1 target-Ronald Reagan!
The Reaper
Everyone raves about Frank Miller’s Batman:Year One but the follow up Year 2 wasn’t that bad at all. Created by one of my favorite Batman writers, Mike W Barr gave us a character who challenged Batman’s ban on guns. Reaper had a similar backstory to Batman’s but his idea of stopped villains was by slaughtering them. And his definition of villain was a lot stricter, killing basically innocent people who did things he did not approve of like prostitutes.
Man-Bat
Whatever happened to Kirk Langstrom anyway? Actually this is almost cheating, to be fair this guy is pretty popular. But where else can I talked about this character? So I am referring specifically to the period Neal Adams wrote him when he was a Batman foe. For awhile in the 70’s he was a pretty regular foe of Batman’s. He was a zoologist who was gong deaf, and the serum he took to cure that did what most serum’s used to do in old fiction. In this case it transformed him into a Man Bat. I don’t remember those stories but he blamed Batman for interfering with his attempts to save his daughter.
The Wrath
It’s to bad this one isn’t more popular, because it makes perfect sense. I said that The Reaper was almost a mirror image of Batman, well The Wrath IS a mirror image of Batman. The difference is rather than waging war on criminals he wages war on law enforcement! This was due to the fact that police officers accidentally murdered his parents. Yes this was tossed out in The New 52 but the few appearances before that made for an interesting psychological analysis of what could have happened if Batman had chosen another path.
There are plenty more from The Calculator to Kite Man (yeah that was a thing) so comment and let me know who you’re favorite less than popular Batman villains are.
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