Admit It: Doomsday Was Never Meant to Be a Great Villain—Here’s Proof

There are so many amazing villains that Superman has gone up against over the years, but Doomsday isn’t among them. Characters like Darkseid and Lex Luthor are ingrained in pop culture history due to what amazing villains they are. But not every villain that Superman has gone up against is so fantastic. While Doomsday is an undeniably popular villain, the argument could be made that he’s not a very good one.

Doomsday is an incredibly intimidating villain, but he’s not exactly compelling. He only lives to cause death and destruction. He doesn’t care about anything else. Every time Doomsday shows up, it’s an incredibly dangerous situation that pushes Superman to his limits, but that’s a story that can only be told so many times before it gets stale, leading to the problem of Doomsday just not being a very good villain for Superman. He’s mostly an obstacle to be avoided, but he isn’t a character who mentally or philosophically challenges Superman. All he can do is show up and destroy things.

5. Doomsday’s Strength Is Wildly Inconsistent

And Strength Is All He Really Has

The only real notable thing about Doomsday is that he’s extremely violent and really strong – strong enough to famously kill Superman. But DC seems to struggle with deciding exactly how strong Doomsday is. In some stories, Superman and Doomsday seem evenly matched. In other stories, Superman struggles to take Doomsday on even with a specialized suit. Then, in the Injustice universe, Bane was capable of restraining Doomsday by himself. In the New Krypton storyline by Geoff Johns, James Robinson, and various artists,, Doomsday was literally beaten to death by a group of Kryptonians who had just gained their powers.

It seems that Doomsday is as strong or as weak as the creators of a particular story need him to be. This malleable state isn’t a new facet of the character – or any comic book character – as creators do it all the time for superhero characters. It’s not exactly great storytelling when Doomsday is defined almost entirely by his strength. Without his overwhelming physical power, Doomsday really doesn’t have much to offer as a villain.

It’s very hard to view Doomsday as a serious threat when one story might present him as Superman’s physical superior, then his equal, and then have him be weak enough that a human with some minor strength enhancements can restrain him. If DC kept his strength consistent or continually increased it, the character would be more consistent, but it wouldn’t make him more interesting as a foil to the Man of Steel.

4. Unlike Doomsday, the Best Villains Have Understandable Goals

Doomsday Really Doesn’t Want Anything Real

One of the best ways to make a villain compelling is to give them an understandable goal. There are plenty of villains in superhoer fiction that give people pause because they can actually see where the villain is coming from. Lex Luthor hates Superman for making humanity weaker. Lex Luthor believes that humanity needs to face adversity in order to overcome it and grow stronger. But if Superman is always there to solve every problem that humanity faces, then Earth’s population becomes entirely dependent on him and can’t reach its true potential.

This motivation is fantastic for a villain of Lex’s calibre, and it’s also very understandable for audiences. Likewise, in Batman lore, the Joker believes that if anyone has one bad day that’s terrible enough, they’ll be driven insane. This ideology is paralleled with Bruce Wayne’s backstory, where he witnessed his parents” deaths and had one terrible day that eventually led to the birth of Batman.

These compelling motivations and goals are part of what makes these two arch-villains so iconic, but Doomsday is completely devoid of any cogent motivation, espeially in contrast to Superman. He has no real goals or ambitions; Doomsday simply wants to kill all living things in the world. He doesn’t really care who or what is in his path. If it’s alive, he wants to kill it.

While he especially wants to kill Superman, it’s mostly born out of animal rage. Doomsday doesn’t want to kill Superman to achieve or prove anything in particular, and it’s not like he’ll stop once Superman is dead. All Doomsday wants is to kill everything in the universe, which isn’t exactly a very interesting motivation, especially compared to the likes of Lex Luthor.

3. Doomsday Has No Personality and Is Pretty Boring

Even DC Knows This

Doomsday doesn’t have a personality, and that’s just a plain old fact. Doomsday is defined entirely by rage and hatred. He’s nothing more than a mindless beast, especially when compared to the hyper-intelligent and hyper-empathetic Superman. This void of feeling makes it very hard for Doomsday to be the central antagonist of a story, as he literally does not have the personality to carry any conflict. Amusingly, DC Comics has tried to get around this by simply turning Doomsday into a different character, which has happened several times, most recently in Superman #19 by Joshua Williamson and Dan Mora.

If Doomsday doesn’t have a personality, creators simply force a different one on him to carry the story, as seen in Superman: The Doomsday Wars by Dan Jurgens. The central conflict of this story was that Brainiac had stolen Doomsday’s body. It’s perhaps the most dangerous that Doomsday has ever been, and it’s entirely because he wasn’t really Doomsday; he was just Brainiac – a Superman villain with real motivation and personality – with Doomsday’s powers.

Most recently, in the latest Superman series by Williamson and new ongoing artist Mora, Doomsday is once again the central conflict of the story. Williamson and Mora have gotten around the monster’s lack of personality by making him a new character. Doomsday is revealed to be the Time Trapper, one of the oldest villains in the DC Universe. This reveal has given Doomsday the ability to talk and think, making him an actual character with real goals. It should be alarming to DC that one of Superman’s most popular villains has to constantly be made into other characters just to carry a story.

2. Doomsday Was Good for One Story and One Story Only

After Killing Superman, He Doesn’t Have to Be Around Anymore

There came a point where the Superman creators at DC felt that they had done everything they could do with Superman. The only surprising storyline that they had left was to kill off the Man of Steel. This belief resulted in the iconic Death of Superman story wherein, as the name implies, Superman died. But the creators at the time – Jurgens, Louise Simonson, and others – needed a villain to deal the killing blow.

Instead of granting that honor to Darkseid, Lex Luthor, or even Mongul, they created a brand-new villain for the specific purpose of killing Superman. That’s how Doomsday was born in the 1990s. He was a one-note villain created for the sole purpose of showing up, decimating everything and everyone in his path, and then killing the Man of Steel.

Doomsday served this purpose beautifully. He was a villain who couldn’t be reasoned with and a monster that only wanted death and wouldn’t stop until he caused it. The problem is that after the The Death of Superman, Doomsday didn’t go away. DC kept bringing him back again and again. While it makes sense to want to give Superman the rematch and triumph over the one monster who had killed him, Doomsday still didn’t go away.

Now, every time he shows up, the story tries to give him an intense gravitas, but there isn’t anything Doomsday can actually do beyond punch and smash. Doomsday isn’t going to kill Superman again, so he just shows up, everyone freaks out, and then he beats up Superman again. It’s hardly the epic climax that he had when he was first introduced, because he’s now outlived his purpose.

1. Doomsday Should Actually Be Very Easy to Deal With, Especiallt for Superman

Just Pick Him Up and Put Him Someplace Else

Everyone – creators, fans, and DC characters – always treats Doomsday as some unstoppable threat that has no solution, but he does. He has a pretty easy solution, actually. Doomsday has no intelligence; he can’t fly; and he can’t teleport. If one were to leave him somewhere remote, he’s pretty much taken care of. If Superman opened a Boom Tube, tossed Doomsday through, and put him on a deserted asteroid, that would be the end of Doomsday. Superman has even managed to kill Doomsday in the past by teleporting him to the end of the universe, so it’s not like teleporting Doomsday is impossible.

While Doomsday has proven resistant to the Phantom Zone in the past, there are still plenty of solutions that could take care of him. Zatanna or any other magic user could open a portal to a dead universe and just toss him there, for example. There are tons of ways that Doomsday could be defeated, and he doesn’t have any real answer to this kind of weakness. While it’s true that Doomsday can evolve, that only tends to happen in response to death. Leaving him stranded somewhere isn’t going to cause him to evolve in a way that lets him escape. For all these reasons – and a few more – Doomsday just isn’t a very good Superman villain.