50 Greatest Super Villains In Comic Book History

37. Carnage

(Write-up by Daniel Wood, Whatever a Spider Can Editor)

How do you make one of the scariest, most vicious, blood-thirsty comic book super-villains of all time? Well, you get the already iconic Venom symbiote and you attach it to a deranged serial killer named Cletus Kasady. Congrats — you’ve got yourself absolute carnage.

Carnage was created to be a darker, more psychopathic, version of the Venom symbiote, and Marvel hit the nail on the head. Before Cletus had even become a super villain, he’d murdered his grandmother, attempted to kill his mother, murdered the disciplinarian of an orphanage, pushed a girl in front of a bus and then burnt the orphanage down. When he became Carnage, he turned into a fully-fledged serial killer, murdering people and leaving “Carnage” written on the walls. It really doesn’t get much darker and messed up than that.

Carnage isn’t just a psychopathic killer, though, he’s also a formidable foe for Spider-Man and any other hero that crosses his path. In fact, Spidey himself could only defeat Carnage by making a desperate truce with Venom. But like every good comic book villain, he didn’t stay defeated for long.

The Carnage symbiote would then go on to find itself controlling a wide range of hosts, wreaking all manner of havoc. It took control of most of the Avengers in the Carnage USA storyline, it became Spider-Carnage when it took over Ben Reilly, and perhaps most famously, it controlled Gwen Stacy in the Ultimate universe. Regardless of the host, Carnage has always caused problems for Spider-Man, S.H.I.E.L.D and the Avengers alike.

He’s given birth to two more symbiotes, Toxin and Scorn. He’s done battle with Deadpool in a highly memorable miniseries, and most recently, he’s sacrificed himself to stop the inverted X-Men’s Gene Bomb that would’ve killed all humans in an act that Spider-Man described as “the worst man he ever met doing the most noble thing he’d ever seen.”

I know it’s easy to lose sight of all of the horrific things that Carnage has ever done in light of such a noble self-sacrifice, but I feel it’s important to state that despite that, Spider-Man still described Cletus as “the worst man he ever met.” This is despite having met the Green Goblin, who killed his first love, and Doctor Octopus, who literally stole his body and pretended to be him. It’s for that reason that Carnage will always be one of the greatest villains of all time.

Next: No. 36: Me am more misunderstood than evil?