If you somehow haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War yet, spoiler alert: lots of superheroes
die.
"I'm sorry"
Anyway, in Avengers: Endgame, the remaining superheroes are gonna try and save everyone.
Sounds good, right?
Well...here's why the superheroes in Avengers: Endgame might actually be the last group of
super people you'd want defending the universe.
Like so many of the classics, Iron Man's story is about atoning for the sins of the past.
He's an ex-weapons designer who put profit over morality until the day he came face to
face with what his weapons were actually doing to people.
Then, in the span of a few days, he turned his life around and went from giving sales
pitches for ballistic missiles to shutting down his weapons division and dedicating his
life to protecting the vulnerable.
He is, at his very core, a man who knows the value of redemption.
Maybe that's what makes it so jarring when he kills pretty much everyone who gets in
his way.
From the big bad guys all the way down to their rent-a-henchmen, nobody's safe from
Tony's willingness to repulsor blast somebody's guts right out of their body.
That kinda seems like an extreme approach from a guy whose whole philosophy was changed
in an instant, and whose armored suit is definitely sophisticated enough to have some kind of
non-lethal options next to all the bombs and laser beams.
Tony Stark's hypocrisy doesn't end there.
In Captain America: Civil War, racked with guilt over the people he's accidentally killed,
the Invincible Iron Man advocates for a more transparent, lawful approach to superheroism.
How does he chase after this ideal?
By blackmailing a child, smuggling him across international borders, and forcing him to
fight superpowered demigods under threat of revealing his identity.
Thor has been a lot of things over the years, up to and including a super-powered frog.
But through it all, he's had one enduring characteristic.
He's always sort of the worst.
"Strongest Avenger."
"uh, what?"
Let's start with his anger issues.
The God of Thunder has always been a hot-head, which is part of what makes his bro-down with
the Hulk in Ragnarok so endearing.
Unfortunately, it gets much less charming when you see how far it can go.
In the comics, Thor is prone to a bad case of the godlike temper tantrums called "The
Warrior's Madness."
When this state overtakes him, he experiences hallucinations, paranoia, and bouts of smacking
his friends around.
There's one especially bleak example, when the Mighty Thor went all hammer time on a
laundry list of fellow heroes and then backhanded his fiancee, Lady Sif.
Needless to say, things didn't really work out between them.
It's also worth mentioning that Thor has a running streak of abandoning his buddies when
they need him.
Putting aside the fact that just about any of the MCU solo movie plots could've been
solved with 30 seconds of lightning smackdowns, he completely bails after Age of Ultron and
doesn't come back until Infinity War.
We're not saying the guy doesn't need some alone time, but when your best pals are trying
to kill each other, maybe check in.
Nobody's breaking new ground by saying The Hulk has anger issues.
He's the poster child for explosive rage.
"I'm always angry."
But while onscreen representations serve up Bruce Banner as the long-suffering victim
of circumstance, the truth is that the guy is mostly just a crabby jerk who loves to
let small problems become giant smash-happy green ones.
If you want to see the consequences of that kind of attitude, well, the good news is there
are plenty of alternate futures in the comics to draw from.
The bad news is that they're all just so, so bad.
The two most prominent future versions of the Hulk are both pretty rough.
One is Maestro, a hyper-intelligent Hulk who, after an apocalyptic nuclear war, took over
as sort of an enormous green Super-King.
He's an evil overlord.
He loves to kill, and even took down every single one of Marvel's other heroes, leaving
a room full of shattered souvenirs behind.
But believe it or not, the Hulk from Wolverine's distant-future Old Man Logan comics might
actually be worse.
This version, hopped up on gamma radiation, took over America's West Coast, hooked up
with his cousin, and got to making little Hulks...all of whom grew up to be giant gamma-powered
Deliverance-style members of society, just without the banjos.
In case it wasn't clear from the flashbacks to the Red Room or her constant mysterious
references to her dark past, Black Widow has a checkered history.
Starting out as a Soviet secret agent, Natasha Romanoff switched over to S.H.I.E.L.D., where
she became the go-to red herring for comic book stories where the team thought there
might be a traitor in their midst.
"Stop lying."
"I only act like I know everything, Rogers."
Flash-forward a few decades, and we have The Ultimates, a series from the early 2000s that
was meant to take a cinematic approach to the comics.
The Avengers in this story quickly turned dark and edgy and just a little bit uncomfortable
to read about.
The take on Black Widow got especially nefarious when she subverted years of Benedict Arnold
fake-outs and actually turned on the team, a betrayal that led to the gruesome deaths
of Hawkeye's wife and kids.
Talk about having red in your ledger...
On a team of super-soldiers, mega-geniuses, and literal gods, Clint Barton shoots bad
guys with a bow and arrow.
He's a superhero whose origin story is more or less that he saw Lord of the Rings and
got really into Legolas.
“We're still friends, right?”
“Depends on how hard you hit me.”
That said, like any goofy comic book character, Hawkeye was always just one weird story away
away from being truly unsettling.
Once again, we can look at The Ultimates, and find out what kind of man would dedicate
his life to becoming the most deadly person on the planet with one of the oldest weapons
there is.
The answer was "a total freak show."
After witnessing the executions of his wife and children, Hawkeye is tied up and interrogated
by a group of enemy soldiers.
Knowing that his uncanny accuracy made him a living weapon if left with anything to throw,
they stripped Clint of anything that he might chuck at them from the interrogation table.
What they didn't count on was Barton meticulously prying off his own fingernails and using them
as tiny, deadly projectiles to take out the whole crew.
You know, we take back everything we said about his weapon of choice.
It turns out the bow and arrow is a lot less gross than the alternative.
Hey, remember how the whole story behind Iron Man 2 revolved around Tony Stark not wanting
to hand his technology over to the government?
How he thought doing that would be irresponsible, since it would just wind up in the hands of
the military and contribute to a perpetual cycle of violence he himself had witnessed?
"I'm not a joiner but I'll consider Secretary of Defense, if you ask nice."
Well, here's James Rhodes, ostensibly Tony's best friend, to unapologetically steal the
Mark 2 armor and take it straight back to the military.
He's not even subtle about the fact that he's realizing Tony's greatest fear: He glues a
canon to the suit's shoulder and literally calls himself War Machine.
That's the only name more obvious than being a man in an iron suit called Iron Man.
Carol Danvers is the MCU's newest, biggest strongest Avenger, but she's been around for
decades in the comics, and it hasn't always been the best of times for her.
Back in the '80s, still going by Ms. Marvel and struggling to come to terms with her powers,
she had them abruptly yanked out of her by future X-Man Rogue, who was a supervillain
at the time.
Luckily for her, the Brood, Marvel's equivalent of the Xenomorphs from Aliens, tortured her
until she became a different laser-blasting cosmic dynamo named Binary.
That wasn't her last reinvention, either.
She'd later go by Warbird, then Ms. Marvel again, then finally settle on Captain Marvel,
and that lack of personal stability was apparently stressful enough to make her want to get drunk
and shoot a dog.
Yeah, comic book Carol had a drinking problem.
Most of the time that meant a lot of slumping over a bottle and talking about how miserable
she was.
On one very special occasion, though, it led to her getting sloshed and blasting Lockjaw,
the Inhumans' lovable teleporting pet, with a fistful of energy projection.
You know, like a hero would.
Despite being on a team with a boozy mech suit enthusiast and the angriest man in the
world, Hank Pym always managed to stand out as pretty much the grossest Avenger.
In the comics, he was responsible for the creation of Ultron.
He was physically and emotionally abusive to his wife.
He performed wacky experiments on himself, leading to further mental instability.
Further down the road, in The Ultimates' universe, he had a particularly bad day and literally
bit off Blob's head like he was snapping into a Slim Jim.
And that's the guy Scott Lang chose to emulate.
He doesn't create his own superheroic persona.
He wears the same outfit and uses the same name as the Avenger with the most publicly
horrifying personal life.
Sure, it's pretty cool to shrink or turn into a giant, but why not try literally any other
superhero on the planet as your role model?
Rocket loves two things: his best friend Groot, and committing murder.
"More incoming!"
“Good!
I want to kill some guys!"
You like violent antiheroes?
Guardians of the Galaxy has got you covered.
Despite being their fuzziest, most pocket-sized member, Rocket's so far deep into a killing
spree that it's tough to remember what makes him a good guy to begin with.
Then again, it's not like Rocket has had an easy life.
The movies make some offhanded references to the fact that he was tortured and experimented
on, but in the comics, his story is a whole lot stranger.
Rocket started life as the chief security officer on a planet-sized insane asylum where
animals were turned into cartoonish, intelligent creatures to... help comfort the patients,
maybe?
Because nothing makes you feel more sane than watching a talking, gun-toting raccoon fly
through space on rocket skates.
He's one of Marvel's longest-running characters.
He's the sentinel of liberty.
He socked Adolf Hitler square in the jaw more times than we can count.
He's Captain America, and boy is he problematic.
While he's usually portrayed as a stand-up guy, Steve Rogers hasn't always been the kind
of person you want in charge of defending the downtrodden.
He's spent a few months as a werewolf, for instance, and during the enormous bummer that
was the Secret Empire storyline, he turned out to be a Hydra operative who had been playing
the good guy as a long con that lasted for about 70 years.
Was it because of the reality-altering powers man was not meant to control?
Of course it was, but that's the problem with superheroes, isn't it?
There's always an excuse.
In what might just be his Worst Moment Ever, though, Cap once watched a character who was
heavily implied to be Richard Nixon shoot himself in the head after being revealed as
the sinister leader of the original Secret Empire.
The guilt Steve Rogers felt over the incident led to his abandoning the identity of Captain
America.
Instead, he took the name Nomad and returned to action in an old-school yellow and blue
superhero costume... and then his first move as the new character was to immediately trip
on his own cape while trying to fight some bad guys.
Should've listened to Edna Mode, and ditched the cape, Steve.
She had it right all this time.
“I understood that reference.”
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