Batman and Doctor Doom Take Home Top Honors in This Year’s Ringo Awards Fan Favorite Categories

Comic book fandom has never been shy about crowning its favorites, and every fall the industry gets a fresh reminder of just how passionate that fanbase really is. One weekend in Baltimore has become the unofficial barometer for exactly that kind of enthusiasm.

The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards, better known simply as the Ringo Awards, returned for their tenth year as part of Baltimore Comic-Con, honoring both the industry’s professional talent and, notably, the characters readers simply can’t stop rooting for.

Among this year’s headline results, Batman was voted Best Fan Favorite Hero, while Doctor Doom took home Best Fan Favorite Villain, giving DC and Marvel each a marquee win in the categories decided entirely by open fan voting.

The Ringo Awards ceremony took place Saturday, September 26, marking the tenth anniversary of an event named in honor of the late artist Mike Wieringo, the co-creator of ‘Tellos’ who also contributed to major DC and Marvel titles before his death in 2007. The ceremony has become a fixture of Baltimore Comic-Con’s convention weekend at the Inner Harbor’s Baltimore Convention Center.

Unlike most of the Ringo Awards’ more than twenty categories, which combine input from both fans and a professional jury, the Favorite Hero and Favorite Villain categories belong to a smaller group of fan-only awards. Those categories are decided purely through open voting rather than any jury deliberation, giving them a distinctly different flavor from the show’s more craft-focused honors.

That fan-only group also includes Favorite New Series, Favorite New Talent, and Favorite Publisher, each determined the same way, through voting open to the wider comics community rather than filtered through industry judges. One quirk of the format is that a character or creator who wins a Fan Favorite category one year becomes ineligible to be nominated in that same category the following year, keeping the field fresh from cycle to cycle.

Batman’s win continues a decades-long trend of the character dominating fan-driven polls across the industry, a status that tracks with his ongoing presence across multiple ongoing DC titles. Doctor Doom’s win similarly reflects the character’s continued relevance within Marvel’s current lineup, reinforcing his status as one of the publisher’s most enduring antagonists.

This year’s ceremony followed a nomination process that opened earlier in 2026, with fan and professional voting periods running through the spring and summer before a final ballot was revealed in July. Voting on the broader Fan and Pro categories was restricted to members of the comic book industry’s creative community, while the Fan-Only Favorites remained open to the wider public throughout the process.

Beyond the two headline fan-favorite wins, the ceremony also included other recurring honors such as the Mike Wieringo Spirit Award, chosen by a panel of perennial jurors, along with the Hero Initiative Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dick Giordano Humanitarian Award, both selected independently by the Hero Initiative organization.

For an industry built on decades of rivalry between its two biggest publishers, having Batman and Doctor Doom split top honors in the same ceremony captures something fitting about where fan enthusiasm currently sits. It’s a reminder that even amid an endless wave of new titles and characters, some legacy figures still command attention above nearly everyone else.

With the tenth anniversary Ringo Awards now in the books, all eyes will likely turn toward next year’s nomination cycle to see whether either character can defend their crown, or whether the ineligibility rule opens the door for a fresh fan favorite to break through.

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