One thing I like about Marvel's stable of villains is that they have a lot that are considered line-wide villains. At DC, once you get past Darkseid, there aren't too many villains that can make that claim. Dr. Doom started with the FF, but he has had major story lines with many other big guns (and not so big guns) of the Marvel Universe. Thanos, Kingpin and the Wrecking Crew will pop up in a wide variety of titles. Mephisto is in this group as well. I have read cool stories pitting him against the Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange, The Fantastic Four, even Daredevil. And of course one very notorious story with Spider-Man that is still quite controversial. So it was only a matter of time before he vexed Batman...
The Mephisto on this cover is by Marvel legend John Buscema - probably the artist I most relate to the company because of the How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way! book that I spent many many hours of my youth studying.
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On the topic of the lack of "Line Wide Villains" at DC, I did like the idea of the controversial Infinite Crisis that superheros take issue with each other if any other hero interacts with "their" villain. Closest I saw outside of that was Lex Luthor in Swamp Thing. Where any other writer would automatically have him say "White Kryptonite", Moore had Lex say a bunch of technobabble that the government cashed in on to nearly kill swampy in that issue. Leading to the wild followup, "My Blue Heaven". What's beautiful about it is, the sociopath's in government, recruited the genius psychopath, to take out our anti-hero - who was clearly in the wrong and they were in the right doing their patriotic duty to protect America from this terrorist monster's attack on Gotham.
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