5 Real News Items That May Be Supervillain Origin Stories

Famous Villain Equivalent:

The Swarm is a Marvel villain comprised entirely of irradiated sentient bees, which is so close to reality that it's almost prophetic. And sure, by comic book standards the "bee guy" is a walking punchline, but that's only because you have Iron Man there with his wide-angle Repulsor Beams mocking him through the medium of energy blasts. In the real world, the best quip you're likely to come up with is a can of Raid and suicide pills.

Crimson Skies for an afternoon. He actually got in an aircraft and took it up into the sky because he'd played a game about it before. To put that into perspective, that's like starting a war because you beat the first level of Halo.

Welp, that should do it. I'm ready to fight Russia.

It gets even crazier: He uses stolen thermal vision goggles to hunt  at night, and he mostly just steals things he can use like blankets, food and medical supplies. He once made-off by driving a car into a gas storage tank and using the explosion as a distraction to escape, another time by crash-landing a plane into a forest clearing and another time by slipping through the dragnet of largest manhunt in a decade.  The FBI and police coordinated their efforts and cordoned off an entire island just to catch him. The result? Two policemen say they "think they saw him once" but that he "disappeared right in front of their eyes." Basically, he's a feral hillbilly criminal Batman. Famous Villain Equivalent:

There's no such thing as an actual hill-folk Batman... yet (I'm available for talks, DC). The closest equivalent to Colton is Marvel's Hawkeye. Most people remember him as an Avenger, but Hawkeye started out a villain. Not a very good one, mind you, as is plainly evidenced by the above panel. The worst thing he did was tie up people's butlers and then shoot them free, which is like the eighth  least practical way to untie a knot, way behind "using fingers" and "cutting with a knife," but just slightly ahead of "prayer" and "seduction." Hawkeye, like Colton, seems drastically outmatched. They both have to rely on their resourcefulness and extraordinary luck to get them out of life or death situations they are not remotely qualified for: Colton flies planes on the basis that he is good at video games; Hawkeye fights guys that eat suns on the basis that he owns a bow and arrow.

Pictured: The Nuclear Child Molester's trusty steed, the Veloci-pedo!

That's right: There was actually a radioactive pedophile professor roaming the Earth at one point in history. That's right again: Roaming the Earth. He escaped, you see. He was being escorted to jail on a ferry to Ireland, when he mysteriously slipped away from his captors and disappeared. In response to this, a judge issued an arrest warrant at which point he actually had to say these words in all seriousness: "Warn the officers that when he is arrested, he might be radioactive." That's a decree by a real court official: Beware the radioactive pedophile. That doesn't sound just sound unbelievable, the words themselves seem to defy understanding. It sounds less like a warning and more like a polite case of Tourette's. Famous Villain Equivalent:

There's all sorts of radioactive-powered supervillains in pop culture, but there are very few child molesters. However, there is one perfect analogue for Professor Nuclear Pedophilia: Captain Sunshine, from the Venture Brothers . He's technically a hero in that universe but, well, it's always the ones you don't expect, isn't it?