By
Kevin Erdmann
Published 34 minutes ago
Since 2019, Kevin Erdmann has been one of Screen Rant's Senior Staff Writers, covering all kinds of Superhero and Star Wars media with Easter egg breakdowns, theory pieces, breaking news, and more. A huge Star Wars & MCU fan, Kevin also loves Batman (because he's Batman), but could talk for hours about why Nightwing is DC's greatest hero.
With 8 years of total experience covering entertainment and pop culture, Kevin has gotten the chance to interview top creatives and talent, and has also attended major media events like Disney's D23 convention.
Majoring in Cinema Studies with a minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies from the UofO, Kevin lives in Oregon with his wonderful wife, adorable dog, and sinister cat who is no doubt currently plotting his demise.
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"Evil Superman" has become a consistent trope in modern superhero storytelling, and at this point it’s practically a genre of its own. However, there have also been evil versions of Batman, with one in particular becoming more powerful than Darkseid himself.
Told in the pages of 2019's DC Black Label miniseries The Last Knight on Earth, readers were introduced to a brand-new version of The Dark Knight, one who'd become more evil and tragically twisted than we'd ever seen before. However, this particular Evil Batman also obtained some devastating power in their alternate DC universe.
Evil Superman Has Become A Classic DC Comics Trope
Evil superman from Injustice comics, surrounded by his state police.
The idea of a Superman falling from grace has been explored so often that it’s now one of DC’s most well-known alternate-universe concepts.
The Injustice universe certainly made the Evil Superman idea mainstream, depicting a Superman who becomes an authoritarian tyrant after Joker deceives the Man of Steel into killing Lois Lane (and his unborn child). The series showed what happens when Superman’s morality and hope are replaced by grief and anger.
Red Son offered another angle on the darker Superman idea, imagining a Superman whose rocket ship landed in Russia, with young Kal-El being raised under Soviet ideology. Even though that story isn’t purely about corruption, it helped cement the idea that deviations from Clark Kent's usual origins and status quo can result in radically different outcomes thanks to his immense power.
We can look at The Boys' Homelander, a clear Superman parallel who acts as an incredibly corrupt version of the Man of Steel who gradually starts claiming authority over the entire world, its people seemingly powerless to stop him.
Ultraman of the Crime Syndicate is another prime example found in DC's greater multiverse, a cruel version of the Man of Steel who seeks to terrorize and oppress.
Evil versions of Clark Kent are entertaining because they reflect the danger of Superman's power were it to go unchecked or be in the hands of a Man of Steel who didn't have humanity's best interests at heart. It's an easy What If...?/Elseworlds idea, and it's no wonder that it's been revisited so many times.
We've Also Seen Evil Batman, But "Omega" Was On A Whole Other Level
Omega Reveals Himself To Batman and Joker
In a similar vein, Batman has also been twisted into villainous versions over the years, a major favorite being the Dark Multiverse’s Batman Who Laughs (a Jokerized Dark Knight).
However, none of those interpretations arguably approach the bleakness and immense power levels of Omega, the main antagonist of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman: Last Knight on Earth. Omega isn’t just a Batman gone bad—he’s a Dark Knight who loses all faith in humanity before gaining the power to subjugate the entire world.
In this DC Black Label series, a clone of Bruce Wayne's Batman wakes in a dark, dystopian future where the Justice League has fallen, and society has completely collapsed. Learning about his own existence and the history of this world, Bruce discovers that this universe's original Batman was broken after humanity chose evil over goodness.
Beaten within an inch of his life by the very people he had sworn to protect, this original Batman became fully broken with the decision to bring order to the world through aggressive force.
Killing Darkseid, Batman took the name Omega after claiming the Anti-Life Equation, which he amplified with a modified Bat Signal and The Mobius Chair, allowing him to dominate and mind-control Gotham's entire population with plans to eventually enslave the entire globe.
Omega effectively becomes a tyrant, believing that enforcing his order is the only viable future. As such, the final confrontation between the world's surviving heroes led by this cloned Batman and Omega is one for the ages, as this new Dark Knight refuses to be broken, choosing instead to believe in humanity's capacity for good.
Regardless of Omega's defeat, the true impact of The Last Knight on Earth comes from how fully this Evil Dark Knight embodied the darkest possible version of what Batman could be, abandoning all free will, compassion, and freedom for the sake of permanent order.
A Batman Who Killed Darkseid And Took His Most-Desired Power Is Absolutely Horrifying
Even from just a power-level standpoint, Omega is terrifying not only because his origins are rooted in brutal tragedy and pain, but because he literally managed to kill Darkseid and obtain the Anti-Life Equation, sourced from the dark New God's severed head he kept on a pike.
This is also a Batman who achieved the genocide of Wonder Woman's people, left the seas boiling, and murdered countless heroes who dared stand against him (even members of his own Bat-Family).
Armed with the Anti-Life Equation and turning his own old Rogue Gallery into his followers, this Batman became something arguably worse than Darkseid himself: a tyrant whose cruelty comes from a twisted sense of compassion and righteousness, believing his methods and the full domination of every soul on Earth as the only path to truly save the world.
The dark combination of a broken Batman and Darkseid's power makes Omega uniquely terrifying in the DC multiverse. Evil Superman may be an ongoing source of entertainment, but characters like Omega certainly make the case that the DC hero with the most terrifying villain potential is Batman himself.
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