is Superman's lack of a decent rogues gallery the Silver Age's fault?

This is pretty much what Morrison's doing at the moment, no?

I don't really buy this. A handful really great villains is all anybody gets, and more than most. Seriously, to take Spidey I always though Green Goblin wasn't very interesting, so you start with Doc Ock, then there's Kingpin, Lizard, and after that even 'classic' villains like Scorpion, Vulture and Electro are pretty lame. On the other hand, you can hardly compare the mood and themes of Spidey and Supes for reasons that are too well known to bother rehashing here.

Spidey has a great group of villains - you missed out on Kraven and Venom (who might suck now due to overuse, but was pretty creepy when he first started showing up), for instance. Also, I think we should establish here a diference between villains who might have crap powers or origins, but which are nonetheless useful, and ones who are just plain bad characters. Many of the characters in, say, "Villains United" are pretty crap as far as powers go; they're second ringers, *but* because Simone was good at writing them, they've become interesting characters nonethless. So yeah, characters like Elekrto, Mysterio and the Vulture are pretty lame on paper, and certainly not particuarly scary - but I'd argue that they're still good villains, because I remember Spidey stories where their character and underdog status was used to make them more interesting, more human, and thus (of course) establish a good paralell with ol' underdog Parker himself. Compare that to, say, the Toyman, who's never (to my knowledge) been written in an even remotley interesting way. So he's rubbish not because he has a stupid gimmick and is hopelessly outmatched in a fight against supes, he's rubbish because he never adds anything to the story.

In other words, I don't think that a good rogue's gallery has to consist exclusively of particuarly brilliant or threatening individuals.

As for Batman, I don't even know who the "famous four" would be! The bad guys in Batman aren't consistently well written obv, but then I can't think of many who haven't been totally awesome at least once or twice in stuff I've read/seen. Joker, Two-Face, Ras Al' Ghul, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Man-Bat, how can you fuck with that? Mr.Freeze and the Mad Hatter were pretty awesome in the animated series; even the Penguin has had his moments, like his stint as a "Godfather" type figure in post-"No Man's Land" Gotham.

Joker's motive isn't that he's "deformed," his motive is that his id has run completely wild and he is the ultimate sociopath.

Pro-Luthor: ASS#5, duh. Even if it is just teasing out the details from a few pages in #1.

I always like when villains play the "But we're buddies!" card, in such a way that you know they would KILL the hero if conditions were reversed (cf Doctor & Master in The Sea Devils).

I like Luthor as a villain... he has a real air of nastiness to him, particularly when he is done as the billionaire plutocrat villain. John Byrne did some great stuff with him.

It occurs to me - the Earth 2 Luthor must be way sharper than the evil one we are used to, because the Crime Syndicate would just kill him if they ever got the chance, something evil Luthor does not have to worry about.

OTM. I think nearly everything that happened to Superman for like five years after the Man of Steel relaunch could be traced back to Luthor.
Was just reading in Fingeroth's Superman on the Couch about how villains, by design, MUST be more interesting than the hero. With the hero representing/defending the status quo, the villain represents a threat to such. Which is, y'know, the definition of cool.

The thing about Silver Age Supes is that there was no clean break with the Golden Age stuff. So by the late 50s/early 60s, we can sort of assume that in 20+ years, Superman has pretty much put a lid on every significant threat to law & order. So Superman must face threats of either the benignly trivial (Lori Lemaris tries to trick Supes into proposing to Lois Lane) or the awesomely cataclysmic (Brainiac is putting ENTIRE CITIES into bottles!).

Plus, remember that by the time Superheroes came into vogue again after about a decade in the wilderness, Superman had survived by adapting to the fashions of the day, especially romance comics, and downplaying the Super-ness of Superman.

Er...

Is it a thing with Luthor, say, that he has been done badly in the films - portrayed as a bit of a joke - so people do not think of him as a serious villain?

Yeah, I don't agree with this at all. Doesn't every comic based around a villain sell terribly? Are any of Spider-Man's villains more interesting than Peter Parker? Are any of Batman's villains besides the Joker (and maybe Ra's) interesting?

Which doesn't mean that they're not good villains - Spider-Man and Batman both have great rogues galleries. But when Doc Ock is robbing a bank, that doesn't seem like he's a rebel who's fighting against the status quo to me.

Er, "status quo" doesn't necessarily mean oppression/fascism, and fighting against doesn't necessarily mean rebellion in the political sense. Spider-Man tries to uphold the status quo of law and order, and Doc Ock is threatening it by doing crimes, but that doesn't Doc Ock is a revolutionary trying to bring about a better world. Or, take Dark Knight Returns for another example: in it Batman is the rebel fighting against the status quo, but he's also a leader of his own fascist militia - so it's Batman's idea of an order against a different kind of order.