5 Justice League Villains Who Should Probably Fight Other Teams (Because They’re Out of Their League)

The Justice League is the greatest team in the DC Multiverse. Sure, you might like the Justice Society or the Teen Titans or the Legion of Superheroes more, but the League is the team that everyone turns to when things are at their worst, combining the heroes of the DC Universe into a potent fighting force. The Justice League is a team that has some of the most powerful members you can imagine, so their villains have to be powerful as well. The League lives up to its name, with nearly every superhero out there is a potential member of the team. Villains who fight the League have to be ready for the most difficult battles they’ll ever face.

The Justice League has been around for 56 years and they’ve faced every kind of enemy you can imagine. Looking at the team’s roster of villains, there are definitely some bad guys that don’t really belong. They can’t really match the team and should probably move on to fighting someone not as strong. These five Justice League villains should fight others teams because the League is just too much for them.

5) Professor Ivo

The Justice League first appeared in the ’60s and superhero comics were very different back then. They were written for younger readers and not as serious, so in those days you could just have a mad scientist who creates great robots to fight the team. That’s not really a thing anymore. The various members of the League have continually gotten more powerful over the years and they use those powers better. A lot of Silver Age League villains don’t work anymore, with Professor Ivo being chief among them.

He’s always been one of the weakest Justice League villains. He doesn’t have any powers and is obsessed with immortality, able to create powerful robots like Amazo. Ivo doesn’t really fit into the pantheon of Justice League villains anymore, but he could definitely work well against a weaker team that doesn’t have numerous members with godlike power. Ivo could make a name for himself in the modern day, but he’d need to battle a lower-level team and not the most powerful force in the multiverse.

4) The Key

The Key is another Silver Age villain (you’re going to be seeing one more of those), from the time when gimmick villains reigned supreme. The Key is a scientist who believes that the ultimate power lies in the mind of every human, you just need to find the key to unlock your potential (get it?). This has led to him creating technology that allows him to go into anyone’s mind, using their actions to help unlock the power in his mind. He’s honestly a really cool villain in a lot of ways, but his time fighting the Justice League should definitely end.

The problem with the Key is that he’s just the standard science villain and his attacks almost all involve the same kind of thing – creating a fake world in the minds of the heroes which lets off the energy the Key is looking for. Most of these stories start out in media res, because honestly it’s kind of hard to figure out how someone like him can take down Superman and put him in the machine. Against the League, it’s always the same Key story and that’s boring. A weaker team would make more sense for his attacks and take the story in directions a battle against the League wouldn’t.

3) Vandal Savage

Vandal Savage has been around since the Golden Age of comics, battling against the Justice Society and their allies. Sometimes, he would make the multiversal trip to Earth-One in the ’60s and ’70s to fight the League as well. When Crisis on Infinite Earths changed everything for DC, he became one of the Earth’s deadliest villains, using his millennia of experience to come up with plans that could challenge the most powerful bad guys out there.

Savage is an awesome villain and works well against numerous characters. However, the League is just too powerful for him. Vandal is an immortal with superhuman strength and agility, enhanced durability, a healing factor, and super-intelligence, but at much lower levels than would be helpful against the League. Savage does a lot more damage when he battles the lower-level teams, since his power level does well against them. Vandal Savage is a great villain, but it’s time he started going after the Titans or the Justice Society and leaving the League alone. He’s currently a Batman villain (but what popular DC villain isn’t at some point) and he’s doing a bang up job there, showing that if you keep him away from the League, you’ll get better stories with him.

2) Prometheus

This one pains me to write, because I love Prometheus and want to see him fight the League more but let’s be honest – he needs to go after someone else. He’s the evil opposite Batman – his criminal parents were killed on a cross-country rampage and he swore revenge, using money they had hidden to allow him to train himself into the perfect justice-killing machine. He created technology that allowed him to trump most metahumans, including a helmet that allows him to absorb knowledge via its hard drive (it used to be a CD-ROM because ’90s), and he’s an excellent fighter, able to take down the heaviest hitters in efficient, damaging ways.

Prometheus is a villain who can potentially beat the League at any time with his skills and tech, but always loses because he makes the kind of dumb mistakes that you can’t make against members of the League. They’re the best and have dealt with everything. However, pitting him against a lower-level team like the Teen Titans or the Outsiders is perfect. He’d do much better against them and would get built up in the eyes of readers, which could lead him back to fighting the League. Until then, he should bottom feed more.

1) T.O. Morrow

DC reinvented themselves in the ’60s, creating loads of new heroes and villains. However, they often were taking their ideas from the past (which is common in comics) and ended up making numerous mad scientist villains for the Silver Age. T.O. Morrow was first introduced back then. Morrow is the greatest roboticist in the world; not only does he create extremely formidable robots but he creates ones so human they often betray him. He’s very proud of this, often saying that Red Tornado blows Amazo away because he broke his programming.

Morrow is a cool villain who I’ve developed a lot of affection for over the years, but he doesn’t belong fighting the League anymore. Most writers have stopped throwing him at the team, but it’s long past he showed up fighting someone else. Mad scientists like Morrow can still work in the 21st century and the character has grown in some cool directions. Morrow and his creations fighting Will Magnus and the Metal Men is money with the right creative team, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.