Superhero comics have a lot of pointless, gruesome deaths. In fact, death in comics is far more pointless that most other mediums because 99% of the characters come back to life. Superhero comic fans are numb to it at this point.
Yet superhero comics have a habit of desperately trying to up the ante and having each death be more grotesque, gratuitous and shocking than the last in a desperate attempt to seem “mature”. It’s a ghoulish exercise in seeing how painting the walls with blood and organs and waving the bodies of small children in the air and saying this is “adult” when there’s really nothing more childish. The “shock value” of it all just isn’t much of a shock these days and it all just comes off as well, gross.
So let’s look at some of comics most ridiculous, pointless and disgusting deaths. Which one do you think is the worst? Are there any bad deaths you’d like to add? Obviously, the list of these is endless and ever growing, so I'll likely be doing another list.
Wasp and a ton of other characters in Ultimatum
From Ultimatum
The entire point of Ultimatum was graphically and brutally killing off most of the characters in the Ultimate Marvel Universe. That was it. That was the comic. Death for the sake of it. Quality entertainment, guys. One of the lowest points in the comic was when the Blob graphically disemboweling the Wasp and Hank Pym (the Wasp’s abusive husband) responded by growing into a giant and biting his head off. Nuthin’ like seeing a woman die so her abuser can cannibalize her murderer.
Other great highlights: Professor X just sort of letting Magneto snap his neck, Dr. Strange being murdered by a villain wrapping his cape around him really, really tightly until his head exploded (you can hear Edna Mode’s tutting) and Wolverine getting the adamantium stripped from his bones.
Stephanie Brown in Detective Comics
From Detective Comics
Stephanie Brown’s death was one that was so gross and gratuitous that it had the unexpected impact of galvanizing fans and starting a discussion about the treatment of women in comics. Basically DC needed someone to cause a gang war and die so we could have the umpteenth storyline where Batman pushes away his family to be a grim loner for a while only to change his mind later when DC decided they need the Batfamily back.
The young and perky Stephanie Brown, who acted as a hero called the Spoiler, was chosen as the victim. The writers decided they would make her the first female Robin in the main DC continuity to give her a moment to shine- but this meant that the first female Robin was only Robin for three issues before she was fired and brutally murdered. Kind of an unfortunate implication there!
Stephanie’s death was breathtakingly horrible too. This teenage girl was tortured with power drill in an extended sequence that went on for pages and pages as the villain made remarks about how she couldn’t keep up with the boys. She also was put in sexualized poses, just to make sure we knew DC wanted to make this as close to underage torture porn as they could. Stephanie escaped, only to be shot and kicked down a flight of stairs.
To top it all off, unlike the dead male Robin, Stephanie didn’t get a memorial in the Batcave and her death didn’t impact the surviving characters much at all (Her boyfriend, Tim Drake,was dealing with the death of a billion other loved ones die at the time, so shes was just another on the pile).
The grossness of it all kickstarted the community Girlwonder.org, which used her sexualized death as a starting point to discuss the treatment of female superheroes. A campaign was started to give Stephanie a memorial. Eventually DC felt the heat and retconned Stephanie’s death as having been faked and bought her back.
Orpheus in Detective Comics
From Detective Comics
Stephanie wasn’t the only one who died in the War Games crossover though, a hero called Orpheus was killed off almost as an afterthought. A big part of Orpheus’s origin was that he thought Gotham needed a black hero and I guess DC Comics just wanted to give a big resounding “NOPE” to that. Basically nobody in-universe reacted to or mourned Orpheus’s death all that much and he was a relatively little known character, so it was peak pointlessness. And unlike Stephanie, he didn’t get to come back.
Ryan Choi in Titans
From Titans
Ryan Choi (the All-New Atom) was barely around for four years before being pointlessly killed off by Deathstroke the Terminator in a brief battle in the completely awful and soon-canceled Titans book. He was impaled by a sword and his body was delivered in a matchbox. The death caused a lot of controversy as he was one of DC’s few Asian American heroes and was also pegged as lazy writing since it was just a death to show how “badass” Deathstroke it, something already well established. He was recently revealed to be alive in DC’s Convergence event and DC Rebirth bought him back.
Pantha in Infinite Crisis
From Infinite Crisis
Pantha had the ignoble death of getting her head punched off by Superboy Prime before even landing a hit on him. She wasn’t a major character, so she was basically just cannon fodder to show how powerful Superboy Prime was. The same villain later beat Earth-Two Superman to death as well.
Nightwing in Injustice: Year One
From Injustice: Year One
The Injustice: Gods Among Us comic can be expected to be filled to the brim with gratuitous deaths, since the conceit of the game the story is based on is that this is a super dark version of the DC Universe where Superman is evil because the Joker tricked him into throwing his pregnant wife, Lois Lane, into space (killing her, obviously). But the death of Nightwing in the Injustice: Year One comic is so pointless it circles around to being unintentionally hilarious.
Nightwing, a seasoned and beloved superhero, does not get the dignity of a heroic death but instead falls and hits his head on a rock.
To be completely accurate what happens is the famously temperamental Damian Wayne (Batman’s son and therefore Dick’s adopted brother) gets aggravated when Dick lectures him about beating up a villain after they’re down and throws one of his kali sticks at his head, something he is quite prone to doing. Dick somehow doesn’t see this coming and gets hit. The dazed Dick then trips over a rock, falls and hits his head on another rock. So Dick Grayson dies as a result of a teenager’s temper tantrum. What a way to go. It’s the reverse of “rocks fall, everyone dies”. The only reason this happened was so Batman would be upset enough with Damian to basically disown him. Even in this alternate continuity, Nightwing was resurrected a couple years later
Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated
From Batman Incorporated
But don’t worry, Damian doesn’t just cause gratuitous deaths, he can be the victim of them too. In the main universe, Damian is stabbed to death by his own clone. There really wasn’t much point to this story, as far as the emotional impact of the characters were concerned. We’d already seen how the death of a Robin, and the death of a son, would impact Batman and other members of the Batfamily with the death of Jason Todd (which was plenty grpss in it’s own way, but considering it actually managed to impact the Batman comics for several years, I’ll leave it off this list).
The only difference was it was ten-year-old being brutally murdered rather than a fifteen-year-old.n (I've said it before, the next dead Robin will be a toddler). Grant Morrison’s explanation was it was a metaphor for divorce or something. Right, because when a mom divorces a dad, it’s like she’s unleashed an evil clone that murders her child.
Anyway, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, Damian was barely even dead for a year before he came back, ending the whole pointless exercise.
Mystek in Justice League: Task Force
From Justice League: Task Force A little known Justice League character called Mystek was only around for like three issues before being killed off in an especially dumb way- she went into a spaceship despite being claustrophobic, then she flipped out and blasted herself out the airlock and into outer space where she died. That…sure was something.
Lian Harper in Cry for Justice
From Cry for Justice
Lian Harper was the daughter of former Teen Titan and eventual Justice League member Roy Harper. Her mother was supervillain named Cheshire. Considering she was basically raised by superheroes and came from such a complicated background, she could have grown up to be a really interesting hero in her own right. Roy Harper being a single father was also something that set him apart from other heroes. But Lian had the misfortune of being an adorable eight year old girl and DC confuses killing off small children for shock value for good storytelling. So Lian had a building fall on her in the series Cry for Justice (she hadn’t even appeared in the series before the issue she died in).
This all lead to super important storyline where Roy fell back on his former heroin addiction which caused him to hallucinate (despite that not being a thing that comes from heroin use) and beat up people with a dead cat. Clearly, this groundbreaking and important storytelling made Lian’s death worth it.
Sue Dibny in Identity Crisis
From Identity Crisis
Identity Crisis was basically DC deciding they needed to be mature and edgy now and what better way to do serious storytelling than have a superhero’s spouse be brutally murdered? I mean, that’s never been done before. So Sue Dibny was murdered to give her formerly goofy and fun husband Ralph, the Elongated Man, some angst, and to up the melodrama was pregnant. But that still wasn’t edgy enough, so the story then retroactively revealed that Sue Dibny had been raped by Dr. Light, who was previously a goofy Silver Age villain, except he really wasn’t! Comics are serious now, guys!!! Also this whole thing kickstarted a murder mystery with a solution that came out of nowhere and wasn’t built up to at all.
Ralph later died himself and DC had him and Jean become ghost detectives, only to never do anything with that idea.
Karen Page in Daredevil
From Daredevil
Karen Page was unlucky enough to be a love interest for Daredevil, which meant she was doomed from the beginning. However, she’s one love interest with a ridiculously miserable life- she ended up a heroin addict while doing pornography for one thing. And her death is really something special because she was tricked into thinking she was HIV positive but before there can even be any fall-out from that she’s murdered right in front of Daredevil at a church.
She sacrifices herself by intercepting Bullseye’s killing blow towards Daredevil. Matt was ALREADY mad at Bullseye for killing his other love interest, Elektra. So Marvel decided Bullseye being responsible for one dead DD girlfriend wasn’t enough for some reason, it needed to be TWO.
The New Gods in Death of the New Gods
DC has an entire series called The Death of the New Gods where Jack Kirby’s New Gods were brutally murdered by one by one. Again, that’s apparently entertainment It seemed to be an elaborate “screw you” to Jack Kirby, though Jim Starlin claimed he was honoring him, somehow, because nobody knew what to do with the New Gods anyway so it was better just to kill them all. Sure, Jim.
Stature in Children's Crusade
From Marvel Point-One
In Children’s Crusade, Cassie Lang, the daughter of Ant-Man, got really upset when it looked like her dad was killed and attacked his apparent murderer, Dr. Doom. Who respond.ed by killing her. But it turns out her dad wasn’t even dead! WHOOPS. The whole thing just happened to disband the Young Avengers and fulfill the “major death” quota needed for every event, it seemed. She was later bought back