The 100 best Marvel characters ranked: 40-21
Ant-Man, Thanos, Valkyrie, and Kingpin are among the favorites as we enter the Top 40 on our massive Marvel countdown
Film Features Vin Diesel
The A.V. Club’s countdown of the top 100 Marvel characters continues today with a look at the heroes, sidekicks, and villains who earned spot from 40-21 on our list. Read on to see where the likes of Ant-Man, Thanos, Kingpin, and Valkyrie land.
And to check out the previous installments of the countdown, click on the big Marvel-red buttons below:
61 Comments
I say this is a big, bleeding heart liberal: We get it, you give women and people of color the respect they deserve. Congratulations. Now do a list based on actual character quality.
In lieu of actual content, the AV Club is proud to present a 100-slide slideshow, split into five separate posts and stretched out over as many days.
I don’t mind the serialisation: reading all 100 in one go would get tiresome. Also, arguing over placements in a list of 100 is too much to follow.But the slideshow format must die; it simply must.
Wong should appear like 4 or 5 times on this list in different places.
Also, don’t you dare disparage Blade: Trinity motherfucker
I now expect Topher Grace’s Venom to be #1.
I’m just excited to see that we’ll have both Justin Hammer AND Whiplash in the top 20!
The fact that Kirsten Dunst’s MJ, one of the worst characters, lists higher above Cartoon Wolverine or is even in the same tier as Blade is a complete joke.
Casting director Sarah Halley Finn doesn’t get enough credit for populating the MCU…I’ve long maintained the two most underappreciated people who made the MCU what it is are Dan Lebental (Iron Man’s editor, who worked with Jon Favreau on most things) and Finn (who… basically had all of the pitch-perfect casting from the MCU).Without those two, it’s more likely than not the entire enterprise fails…
She’s the MCU’s equivalent to the early DCAU’s Andrea Romano.
Wright’s anti-vax controversy notwithstanding, it’s exciting to think about her character’s potential evolution into a leadership role for her people in Wakanda Forever.“Notwithstanding” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there…
That one word dismisses harder than a middle school teacher at the end of the last day of school.
It would be pretty troublesome if she was any solid player in an ensemble… but the fact that she’s playing one of the smartest people in the world…
Toby is light years better than Holland and I want my fucking Spectacular Spider-man as the top Spidey and not fucking Miles Morales!
That’s right, you’re wrong! Dick
One of the single most important lines I’ve ever heard in a movie (superhero or otherwise) was from Romjin’s Mystique in (the still fucking amazing) X2:“Why not stay disguised all the time?” “Because we shouldn’t have to.”This shook me, a 20 year old ignorant straight white privileged man child, to my core.
Nebula should be higher, she might have the best character arc of any Marvel character. And it is amazing that even bald, blue, and made largely of spare parts, Karen Gillan can get it
If you had asked me who the MVP of Endgame would be before I saw the movie, Nebula would’ve been one of my last guesses, but good god was she great in that movie.(The runner-up, of course, is the rat.)
I think the character would make my top-10. Gillan is so unrecognizable in the role, it feels like she doesn’t get as much credit as she should because people just don’t know it’s her.
Peggy Carter, the absolute best. I hope they are bringing Hayley Atwell back (somehow) even if it is as a new version of the character, which would open up new story possibilities now that I think about it
I demand more Captain Carter!
This list was made blindfolded throwing darts at a board right?
Recently re-watched the first two Blade movies and have to agree, honestly, he could even be higher on this list.
Yeah, Blade and Blade 2 kick ass.
Should be way higher on the list. Blade kicks ass.
Absolutely. And no one will ever Blade better than Snipes.
Agree, I just rewatched Blade and Snipes is just too cool.
It’s like they just threw darts at the wall to come up with this list. Universally-beloved Peggy Carter being one spot below Kate Bishop? Listen, I thought she was great on Hawkeye, but she only has the one thing under her belt.
Listen, I thought she was great on Hawkeye, but she only has the one thing under her belt.
Now that’s just plain sexist.
Eh, ranked lists. Shit like this is why I refuse to ever do them.
I’m wondering why Raimi-verse Mary Jane is so high on the overall list.
As for Peggy, I’m assuming it’s because most people don’t even remember the Agent Carter TV show.
Let me guess… Iron Man #1 and Captain America #2 or #3 next to Thor or Loki.
Probably half of this set I would have put in the top twenty…but I see this as a sign this overall list is improving.
My assumption is that Cap and Tony are #1/2 in some order and then we go from there…
Fair call.
Im legitimately starting to fear Zemo might not be on this list at all.Not because I don’t believe he deserves to be in the top 20, but that we’re running out of slots for more widely loved characters and this listing is already nonsense.
Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Give them a movie.
HER, motherfucker!
I’d be surprised if NTW and Colossus didn’t get their own Disney+ spin-off series.
That would be refreshing.
Kate Bishop should be somewhere in the 90s. I struggled to finish Hawkeye
I’m picturing a writer’s room where everyone is debating who should be #23 and Saloni Gajjar is just repeating, “Kate Bishop is guy, bro.”
I have a (not very) brief treatise on Blade:Blade was at one time kind of like Iron Man, a C-tier Marvel character who nobody was invested in. He wasn’t all that popular in the comics and there was little expectation from the fanbase for a movie about him. This made him a great candidate for an experiment in more mature or serious-minded superhero stories, which was a gamble at a time when Batman & Robin defined the genre.And Blade was so goddamn good, it made a case for adapting the big boys – Spider-Man and the X-Men. Those movies skewed younger (PG-13 instead of R), with higher budgets, but they wouldn’t exist without Blade. And the MCU wouldn’t exist without them. Blade deserves this spot as a seminal classic: it’s the reason for all of this, and is still one of the best superhero movies ever made.The 1998 movie itself is a noir-ish action-horror hybrid that combines rock-solid martial arts choreo (a year before The Matrix) with a plot and tone I can best describe as revisionist Blaxploitation. The world of the film is controlled by a cabal of anemic legacy vampires, pale white parasites who leech off of a world of oblivious slaves. But they spend their days fretting in windowless boardrooms over Blade, a powerful and uncontrollable Black man who has all their strengths but none of their weaknesses.He’s a bogeyman to vampires, and an untouchable vigilante who clowns on and beats up cops who serve the vampiric order. His “love” interest, Karen, is herself a strong and highly-educated Black woman who’s introduced shutting down a thirsty white man who won’t take No for an answer. Together, they work to defeat Deacon Frost, a non-legacy vampire who’s essentially a 90’s take on what would become the alt-right: a radical supremacist who thinks the existing power structure treats humanity too well. But even after becoming a god, Frost is no match for the drive and competence of Blade. “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill.” It’s pulpy as fuck and it rules.People claim Black Panther is Marvel’s “first Black superhero movie,” and that isn’t true. Blade is right there, a movie centering Black Excellence in a way I compare most closely to Django Unchained. It interplays themes of predatory systems of power and policing with some truly wild Hotep ideas about Black people’s relationship to white oppressors. It’s unapologetic and well-made and still great.Blade deserves a way better ranking.
Smart casting played a huge roll in Blade’s success.Wesley was at the top of his game at this point, having already proven to be both a capable, charismatic action star while bringing both dramatic and comedic acting chops to the table as well.
To some, Blade was a make or break gamble. To others, they knew exactly what they were doing and the world was ready.
Yes, agreed. Snipes brought an energy to the character that no other working actor could’ve. Not just the demeanor and delivery, but the precise and balletic fight scenes.Apparently Snipes has trained in Shotokan karate and hapkido for decades. As a result, Blade’s fight scenes hold the fuck up, better than most things in the genre even today. Turns out, filming an actor who can actually pull shit off looks way better than cutting around the fact they can’t.
Blade II is awesome too.
Blade II is also really good, yeah. I think it’s less of a masterpiece than the first, but is pure Guillermo del Toro in its production design and sensibility. Which always kicks ass.It’s also interesting because it shifts vampirism from a white supremacy metaphor, to more of a metaphor for HIV / AIDS. Central to the story is the panic among the vampire elite over Nomak’s variant form of vampirism, a monstrous version of it that evokes transience, drug addiction, and predatory queerness.Of course, the reveal is that Nomak isn’t some pure villain, but is actually the result of institutional neglect – a literal forgotten son – whose attack on the vampire ruling structure is more of a reckoning.
This is the best review/discussion of Blade I’ve ever read. Bravo.
(And thanks for pointing out a very important fact that I often reverse in my mind: this came out before the Matrix, hitting some of the same beats and aesthetics that made that movie so popular and culturally significant).
Thanos and Kingpin should be #1 and #2
Nah, Bucky still sucks. I appreciate the attempt at promoting him from an agency-less sad sack to something approaching an actual character, but that was still probably the worst D+ MCU show.
Every utterly empty listicle or lazily snarky news aggregation should come with this article in the comments: https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2022/7/7/what-the-hell-is-happening-over-at-the-av-club
Kudos to Kinja for a five part slideshow. Someone post a list when it’s complete.
So long as Matt Murdock is in the top 10
Wait, Groot charts higher than Rocket? “I am Groot,” I say to this in the snidest and most obscene way possible. Man, people flipped over that opening/ELO scene in GotG2 … so much so that you would think the franchise topped out right then.
I don’t care that much about the rankings usually but I thought that the big majority of that list were characters ranked way too high.
Dunst nailed it, though; her Mary Jane, despite having to pull occasional damsel duties
“Occasional”? Have you re-watched those films recently and counted the number of times she needed to be rescued? This character was Raimi’s Achille heel; he never figured out how to integrate a love interest in the story than by having her being rescued, which means that Spider-man didn’t look as selfless as he should because he spends most of this trilogy rescuing people he knows.The fact that Kirsten Dunst is such a good actress (she had already proven it at that point) is just salt on the wounds.
Yea MJ in the Raimi movies as a top-40 character seems insane to me.
40-21 Review: You guys gotta calm down over Agatha.Valkyrie ahead of Blade…
For the fourth straight day, these rankings seem so random. Like Kate Bishop was a solid character in Hawkeye, but higher than Peggy Carter already? How? Because of recency bias? I guess that’s why Agatha Harkness is on here too…I mean I liked Agatha just fine because I like Kathryn Hahn. But is there anything special about the character yet aside from being played by Hahn?Raimi MJ in the top-40? What? All of her stories are about her romantic entanglements and needing to be rescued. She’s a better character than Maria Hill?
Crazy way to admit you haven’t watched those Raimi Spider-Man movies in a while. Dunst is great but MJ in those is awful. Just a constant rescue target who spends 90% of her screen time screaming directly at the camera and the other 10% screaming at by far the most milquetoast of the Peters. I know everyone seems to love “I am taking a shit as evidenced by all my facial expressions” Toby for some reason, but frankly people obsessed with Spidey being a mumbly sad sack high school student forever are the worst.
This.Dunst’s MJ gave me flashbacks to Vicki Vale in that way. (Also, I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just write the role as Gwen Stacy).
And Tobey’s perma-glum grated on me. I have to say Maguire’s re-appearance in No Way Home rehabilitated his Parker for me a bit. It doesn’t retroactively improve the decision to sad-sack him, but the chill, resigned, largely at-peace mood acknowledged that that needed to balance out and the “youth pastor” vibe seemed about the right fit for where he’d be, having gotten his shit together in his late 20s and now pushing 40.
Love the “How can anyone possibly expect to live up to Wesley Snipes’ perfect Blade performance” paired with a picture of him in the movie he was so antagonistic towards that they allegedly had to CGI his eyes open in one scene.