Top 5 Worst Things Mysterio Has Ever Done

Everybody has their bad days, and this was definitely Mysterio’s worst day. In a plot right out of Scooby Doo, Mysterio turned his talent for creating incredible illusions and visual effects into a half-baked real estate scheme by trying to drive out the tenants of a New York City apartment building. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, the kids in question being Power Pack, a group of pint-sized superheroes who just so happened to live in the building as well. This was definitely an all-time low for Mysterio, but at least things could only go up from here.

We’re all good at something, and in the case of Mysterio, that something is messing with people’s heads. In this early appearance, Mysterio demonstrated his ability to attack his foes psychologically when he tricked Spider-Man into thinking he was going insane. Posing as a psychiatrist, Mysterio planted the idea in Spidey’s head that his dual-identity could cause him to have a psychological break, and then plagued the webhead with illusions he mistook for hallucinations. Spidey almost revealed his identity to the public before the true culprit was revealed by none other than J. Jonah Jameson. Years later, Mysterio tried the same trick again by making Spidey think he’d caused the death of a civilian…

Nobody likes being a small fish in a big pond, so when Mysterio discovered the Ultimate Universe, a parallel world that appeared in Marvel’s “Ultimate” line of comics, it looked like a dream come true. With fewer heroes and villains, Mysterio figured he’d have it on Easy Street there. Acting through a remote-controlled body, he murdered the Ultimate Universe’s Kingpin and set himself up as the new king of the criminal underworld. It was only when the Spider-Men of both dimensions teamed up that the plot was unraveled and Mysterio’s ambitions of becoming the scourge of the Ultimate Universe were foiled. The sad part is, it wasn’t even a terrible plan.

After learning that he had contracted terminal cancer, Mysterio hatched a plan to go out with a bang. Given that Spider-Man had been replaced by a clone at the time, Mysterio decided to get the last laugh on Daredevil instead. After purchasing the secrets of Daredevil’s true identity from the Kingpin, Mysterio enacted a ridiculously convoluted scheme to drive Daredevil insane, by framing his partner Foggy for murder, making Hornhead believe he had been given care of the infant Anti-Christ, and finally tricking his longtime love Karen Page into believing she had contracted HIV before having her killed. After the plan fell apart, a despondent Mysterio shot himself.

If we were taking bets on which supervillain finally would defeat the X-Men, Mysterio wouldn’t be our first pick. But in the “Old Man Logan” timeline, the mighty team finally met their end when Mysterio used his powers to trick Wolverine into slaughtering each and every one of his beloved teammates. The trauma of the incident even led Wolverine to attempt suicide before vowing to never unsheath his claws again. Let that one sink in for a moment. The X-Men, one of Marvel’s mightiest teams, killed almost to a man not by any of their legendary villains, but by the machinations of Mysterio. We definitely wouldn’t have called that one.