Congrats! When It Comes To Bad Dads, The Marvel Universe Has Some of The Worst

[[{“value”:”

Not every parent can be perfect, but some of Marvel
’s dads are about the worst parents a kid could ask for. From abusive tirades to neglectful abandonment, too many of Marvel’s father figures have done some serious damage to their children. To make matters worse, even superheroes have proven to be super-bad dads. But among all the awful fathers in the Marvel Universe, these are among the worst of them.

Now, to be fair, not every Marvel dad is a horrendous monster. But for every Uncle Ben or Luke Cage, there is, unfortunately, a disastrously worse father to balance the scales. But these sub-par parents are important to the comics. Many of Marvel’s worst villains began their descent into crime at the hands of an abusive or criminal father. There are heroes who, despite saving the world, can’t be there for their kids. These actions have consequences, giving way to more complex and dynamic stories. Even so, you can’t help but feel bad for the kids of these fatherly failures.

10

Norman Osborn

Harry Always Came Second to Peter Parker

Norman Osborn is about one of the worst fathers there is. From the very beginning, Norman Osborn ruined his reputation as a good dad. When his son Harry was only a boy, Norman sold Harry’s soul to Mephisto in exchange for a lavishly wealthy life. As a result of this deal, Harry’s life was destined for tragedy, emptiness, and pain. With Harry’s harrowing fate of Hell ahead of him, his father made sure to make every second of his son’s life a living Hell too. For Norman, this meant severe psychological abuse.

When Norman wasn’t giving his attention to Oscorp, he spent his time belittling his son, always ensuring Harry felt like an incompetent failure. He constantly
compares Harry to Peter
, blaming his son for being weak. To escape Norman’s severe abuse, Harry fell into drug addiction. When Norman had learned of his son’s state, he actually did a fatherly thing and offered his son help. Sadly, this was immediately cut short when Norman revealed he only helped Harry to protect the Osborn legacy. Harry Osborn now burns in Hell, not for his own sins, but for the sins of his father.

The Creator of the Incredible Hulk

There would be no Hulk without the horrifically violent abuse of Brian Banner. Long before Bruce Banner ever turned green, the Hulks were born within Bruce’s fractured childhood mind. Brian was an alcoholic who would viciously berate his son and wife. Like his son, Brian Banner studied gamma waves. After injecting himself with an experimental super-soldier serum, Brian believed he had passed on a “monster gene” to his son. As a result, Brain saw Bruce’s intelligence as monstrous; beating and yelling at Bruce for the crime of being born.

To escape from Brian’s horrific torment, Bruce’s mind split as a child. The trauma of his upbringing caused the appearance of two dissociative alters, the Savage Hulk and
the Devil Hulk
. When Bruce’s mother, Rebecca, decided to leave with Bruce, Brian lethally smashed his wife’s face into the driveway in front of their son. Even in death, Brian remains an actively awful parent. Brian’s soul was sent to the Below-Place where he later merged with the One Below All, Marvel’s cosmically ultimate evil.

8

Professor X

Xavier Used the X-Men to Replace His Own Kid

While
Professor Charles Xavier
has traditionally been seen as a wise and noble leader to his students and his X-Men, his parenting skills couldn’t be any worse. While he isn’t as outright abusive as the previous entries, his crimes are more subtle. For most of his life, Xavier did not realize he even had a son, only learning of his existence after 20 years of X-Men comics. Sadly, David’s mutant abilities fostered dissociative identities, and when he finally met Charles, Professor X only saw his offspring as a problem.

However, Xavier is an even worse father to his X-Men. Charles is a textbook manipulator. While he preaches peace and free will, he has been known to erase and alter his students’ memories to “protect” them. His school is a direct funnel into a paramilitary organization. And the most mundane sin of all: he plays favorites. Early on, Xavier put an extreme amount of pressure on Cyclops but often treated him with more warmth than the others. While some former students may remember Xavier for being distant, Cyclops only feels the crushing weight his adoptive father placed on him.

7

Cyclops

He Abandoned His Wife and Son For Another Woman?

The prodigal
son of Charles Xavier
also has his problems. Immediately, Cyclops’s biggest failure was abandoning his family. While unknown to Scott, Jean Grey had been replace by Mister Sinister with a clone. Cyclops and the clone, who now calls herself Madelyn, had a happy life together and gave birth to a son. However, shortly after his son’s birth, the original Jean returned. Scott promptly abandoned both Madelyn and the infant Nathan, despite Nathan still being Scott’s biological son. Even when Cable was infected with the techno-organic virus, Scott rarely looked back after Nathan was sent to the future.

Scott’s other complicated children, Rachel, Nate, and his granddaughter Hope, have all felt the X-Man’s cold shoulder. Because of the unyielding pressure Xavier placed on Cyclops, Scott was left an emotional husk. He bottles up his feelings and distances himself away from any trauma. This, in turn, has created a callously distant father who prioritizes his missions over his family. Like Xavier, Cyclops is too busy leading the X-Men to raise a family.

6

Kingpin

Great at Crime, Bad at Parenting

To escape his own traumatic upbringing, Wilson Fisk buried his pain underneath a mountain of rage and violence. While he presents himself as an eloquent and cultured man, he is nothing but a hulking brute to all, even his own son. Kingpin treats his son, Richard, as a tool or obstacle to his conquest. Like Kraven, Fisk sees his child as a chance to extend his legacy. However, when Richard rejected his father’s criminal empire, Fisk’s high expectations warped into deep loathing.

As expected, Kingpin’s love is purely conditional, and any time Richard has tried to defy his father, he has been met with lethal force. When Richard tried to leave the business outright, Kingpin arranged for his child’s assassination simply to teach the boy a lesson. Fisk has grown into an eerie reflection of his abusive father but with considerably more power. Richard Fisk has never known a single moment of
true affection from the Kingpin
but instead, disappointment, disgust, and pity.

5

Wolverine

This X-Man Has Too Many Kids to Count

Admittedly, Wolverine has come around in recent years. For both his biological son Akihiro and his adopted daughters Laura and Gabby, Wolverine has become a genuine and supportive father figure in his own way. However, three children out of the countless other kids Wolverine has sired is far too few to
call Wolverine a good dad
. Logan has always been known to be a bit of a playboy. After hundreds of years of existence, he’s bound to have had a few hot flings on his worldly journeys.

However, Logan rarely stays in one place for too long. Behind his travels, he has left numerous children without a father and him without a care in the world. It should also be noted how many of his children have turned out to be villains. While Wolverine can’t be entirely blamed, seeing as he wasn’t there to raise any of his kids, you can’t help but feel he’s still to blame. However, even when he tries, he fails to break past his trauma and his children’s, leading to a stoic and emotionally distant relationship in the family.

4

Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross

Everything Has to Be Under His Control

Ross is an unusually harsh, critiquing, and commanding father. Thunderbolt Ross needs to be in charge of everything to the utmost degree. Throughout his daughter Betty’s life, Ross constantly monitored and interfered with Betty’s choices, especially her relationship with Bruce. After the explosive birth of the Hulk, Ross transformed into an entirely different parent. His previous control over Betty had been sidelined for the Hulk. Despite Betty’s begging, Ross refuses to see Bruce with anything but lethal intent. He has even used Betty to bait the Green Behemoth a few times, risking his daughter’s life in the process.

In his rage, Thaddeus is unable to see the adverse effects he has on others. It blinds him from reason, resulting in nothing but pain for those closest to him. In the Death of Betty Ross storyline, Ross’s actions directly led to her torture, death, and subsequent rebirth as
the Red She-Hulk
. Through his stubborn and unyielding anger, his supposedly dearest daughter has become a monstrous reflection of her father’s anger. Once again, the child is forced to carry the sins of the father.

3

Craig Sinclair

A Religious Extremist With a Heavy Hand

While Reverend Craig Sinclair may not be as well-known a name on this list, he’s just as poor of a father. Sinclair’s daughter, Rahne, aka Wolfsbane, is the product of an unintended pregnancy between Sinclair and a sex worker. When he discovered his daughter’s existence, he had her true parentage covered up while he posed as her adopted father instead. After Rahne’s mutant powers developed, her father’s religious devotion created a living Hell for the young mutant. As rumors of a werewolf disperse among their small town, an angry mob rallied under Sinclair’s leadership against Rahne.

The young girl fled from her father’s twisted and violent lies, leaving Reverend Sinclair to develop a new hatred for mutants. In time, Sinclair found himself as part of an
anti-mutant extremist group
that planned to eradicate all mutants. In his eyes, Rahne was nothing but an unsightly abomination who did not deserve to live. In their final confrontation, Rahne became overwhelmed with deep feelings of abandonment, resentment, and hatred. Boiling over, Rahne viciously mauled her father to death like the monster he had always treated her as.

2

Kraven the Hunter

He Was Excited When His Children Died

Because Kraven is
obsessed with Spider-Man
, some could believe that he is primarily a neglectful father. If only that were the case. Kraven is a man more obsessed with legacy. He desires nothing more than to prove himself the world’s greatest hunter, and he’s made sure his kids do too. To Kraven, his sons were nothing but a means to extend his own legacy. In an attempt to hone their strength, Kraven savagely beat his children into submission. Kraven’s eldest son, Alyosha, faced the worst of his father’s physical cruelty.

His fixation with his own self-image makes everything and everyone else a comparative failure in his eyes. Following his first death and subsequent resurrection, Kraven unleashed lethal fury against his children and wife for desecrating his death. Having killed all his children but one daughter, Kraven hired the High Evolutionary to create eighty-seven perfect clones of the hunter. Of his clone sons, only one rose above the others after slaughtering every one of his brothers. Instead of anger, Kraven was overjoyed that one of his sons had finally proven themself worthy of Kraven’s name.

1

Thanos

A Villain This Evil Will Never Be a Good Dad

Thanos is a next-level horrific excuse of a father. Throughout Thanos’s genocidal conquest of the galaxy, the Mad Titan has ensured to pass on his profane existence to future generations. There are potentially countless numbers of
Thanos’s biological children
across the stars, but given his reputation, most of his kids may not have been conceived willingly. From some of the worlds consumed by his conquest, Thanos has plucked the occasional child from the dying masses to raise as his living weapon of conquest.

He has displayed unfathomable physical and emotional abuse towards his adopted children. Nebula especially found herself on the other side of her father’s destructive manipulations. She was excruciatingly mutilated to meet
Thanos’s violent expectations
. Like many of this list’s awful dads, Thanos’s kin is nothing more than a means to his conquest. However, when Thanos discovered the existence of his biological son Thane, the Titan enacted yet another galactic genocide in his search to find and kill his only known biological son. Topping this list of dishearteningly awful fathers, Thanos could easily take the crown for Marvel’s worst dad.

“}]] These bad dads are truly evil parents.  Read More