Oh, you must be new to comics?

You don't ask silly questions like that!

The Vulture (Adrian Toomes), Amazing Spider-Man 2 (October, 1964)



Leave it to Steve Ditko to create the perfect image of a villain named for a bald-headed, hook-beaked scavenger. I think what always struck me about the original version of the Vulture was the incongruity of his advanced age, and the way Ditko captured it with just a few lines. Adrian Toomes was like an Ebenezer Scrooge of the skies; anger and bitternesss were etched into the wrinkles in his face. And yet despite his age, he was always a serious threat to Spider-Man.

I loved that Ditko drew him as wizened and lean, too. No bodybuilder's physique for him.

The design of the costume, too: I'd venture to say that Ditko's only equal at capturing the look of feathers and the gracefulness of wings was Kubert on Hawkman. So simple and so beautiful. The Vulture never looked like a guy suspended under huge wings (see many versions of the Angel), but a bird with a man's head. And Ditko's use of blacks for the undersides of the wings... beautiful. I also loved that white ruff, too, as if Toomes had to be as "vulturian" as he could. As good as the Hawk and the Dove look nder Ditko's pen, the design of the Vulture captures "birdishness" far more skillfully.

He was a perfect foe, visually, for Spider-Man, especially as drawn by Ditko: the aerial acrobatics, the graceful poses, the swoopes and dives, and the danger he posed by being even more free and at home in the air than Spider-Man. Ditko might as well have been drawing air battles between two World War One air aces. (I'll have to see if Ditko ever did that kind of story...)

I think that's a point in his favor. He is your grandfather's super-villain!

8.Scorpio - by Jim Steranko




Of course it works in his favor that hes menacing one of the sexiest woman in comics, La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine.


There is every chance that my love for the character and his design is due to the mindboggling visuals of Steranko. However the eternal conflict between siblings gives us yet another tragedy, played out in psychedelic grandeur.
Always dug groups like Zodiac and the Royal Flush Gang(posted by someone the other day, good one mate) and really loved them using just one of the gang here. 

This page is brilliant!

8. Midnight

design by Jim Starlin



I love the "hat and cloak" design that I suppose must have originated with The Shadow and has been used to good effect on characters like the Phantom Stranger. I almost chose another Marvel villain, Death-Stalker, from Daredevil, but Midnight's nearly featureless, dead-black form beneath the cloak takes the design to another level of coolness, in my book. Like pretty much every one of my picks, I think this design is so powerful it should warrant making him a major character, just on the look alone, which is so important in a visual medium like comics

#8
Reed My Lips - It's Annihilus

His signature look by Kirby--nightmarish face, the armour, those shoulder spikes, the wings--was first seen back in 1968's FF Annual #6 and has endured.




Kirby's design is classic, but in FF #140 John Buscema and writer Gerry Conway went further and showed us what Annihilus originally looked like sans all that paraphernalia. Great design