Many a superhero have been victimized by some sort of tragedy in their lives.
When you put your life on the line for the greater good, there’s bound to be some sacrifices,
but often, many of the characters we adore have endured terrible circumstances, all of
which have further informed them as the person we’re familiar with in the panels nowadays.
So today, we’re gonna dive into this subject a little further with our list of the top
10 superheroes who lost everything.
We’ll be talking about heroes who have quite tragic origin stories, and others who, because
of a series of unfortunate events, lost things or people in their lives that drastically
changed their behaviour or personality.
So with that in mind, let’s get to it!
10 Doctor Strange Here we have a case of a character who had
to lose everything he held dear in order to become the superhero he is today.
We’re talking about Doctor Stephen Strange of course.
Significantly more self centered than the other characters on our list, Strange, prior
to becoming a master of the mystical arts, was an egotistical doctor who only cared about
wealth and his impressive track record as a well known (and arguably the best) surgeon
around.
He gets into a car crash though, which shatters the bones in his hands, and causes major extensive
nerve damage, resulting in his hands having an uncontrollable tremble.
As a depressed drifter, he spends all of his wealth looking for a way to heal his hands,
and gets wind of the Ancient One (in the comics, he hears about the Ancient One when overhearing
two sailors discussing them).
You guys know the rest of the story from there.
Or at least, I hope.
9 Superman Superman may be doing alright these days,
but when the hero first realized the truth behind his origin, there was a period where
he felt really, really lost.
Sure the Kents were awesome adoptive parents, but if they hadn’t of found him, Superman
would have had nothing.
Superman’s origin story is perhaps the most well-known, aside from his DC pal Batman’s.
Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope.
When Krypton was about to implode, Superman aka Kal-El was sent off of the planet in a
last bit attempt by his parents to save their baby boy from this cruel demise.
His space shuttle pod would crash land on planet Earth, where his Kryptonian physiology
proved to be much more superior compared to the planet’s native inhabitants, us humans.
Raised as Clark Kent, he would eventually learn of his past, but still be forever grateful
to Thomas and Martha Kent for taking him in and raising them as their own.
Really, they’re the reason why Superman has the good hearted and altruistic disposition
he boasts.
8 Martian Manhunter Martian Manhunter is yet another character
who calls Earth his adoptive home.
First appearing in Detective comics issue 225 in 1955, J’on J’onzz is one of the
most powerful beings in DC’s universe, and was one of the founding members of the justice
league.
His debut story was The Strange Experiment of Dr Erdel, which depicted him as a green
skinned alien who came from Mars, pulled to Earth by an experimental teleportation beam
constructed by scientist Dr Erdel.
Erdel is unable to send him back, and the shock of the encounter causes his death.
J’onn has no way of returning home.
So he works with what he’s got, and uses his shapeshifting ability to come up with
a human identity as a detective from Middletown, USA.
In this initial silver age version, the character is not said to be the last remaining Martian,
nor is Mars a dead planet; those were developments made later on.
7 Deadman Deadman Boston Brand first appeared in Strange
Adventures issue 205 in 1967.
Before Brand became the intangible supernatural hero, he was a circus trapeze artist.
Murdered during a trapeze performance by a mysterious attacker who goes by the name of
Hook, his spirit is endowed with the ability to possess any living sentient being he desires
as a means of obtaining justice.
Here’s where it gets real tragic, though.
Deadman is a disembodied spirit.
And it’s a lonely existence.
He can’t be seen or heard by most people, with the exception of a few powerful mystics,
and his main means of communication is using other people’s bodies.
He also is unable to possess those with strong minds, like Batman, or at least, is forced
out of their bodies within a very short amount of time.
Plus, if Kingdom Come is any sort of indication, his future might not be the brightest, but
rather the boniest.
6 Cyclops When Cyclops first hit the scene in The X-Men
issue 1 in 1963, the character was the archetypal hero, the leader of the team who strived to
do what was right, following the teachings of Charles Xavier.
As time went on though, particularly, in the modern age, we slowly watched Cyclops transition
into a more militant leader, operating under more extreme ideologies and violent policies,
which would eventually be his undoing.
Now, to be fair, the dude has lost Jean Grey numerous times, married her clone and had
a kid with him, and was also possessed by the Phoenix Force, which led to him killing
his mentor Charles Xavier, with those latter two events really not helping him much in
the eyes of his peers.
Towards the end of Avengers vs X-Men, Hope Summers has to alter reality to undo all of
the terrible things Cyclops and the Phoenix Five have done, and Scott is placed in a ruby
quartz cell, where he proceeds to admit that yes, he feels horrible for killing Xavier,
but he’s happy with how the mutant race has restarted, and that he’d do it all over
again if he had the choice.
He even tries to coax Wolverine into killing him in order to become a martyr.
While he has redeemed himself in the more recent House of X, there was a period there
where things definitely weren’t coming up Milhouse for the character.
5 The Spectre Resurrection is a theme on our list today.
The Spectre is another DC character who has risen from the dead, but arguably, some could
say that he actually gained more by losing everything.
Sort of.
First appearing in More fun Comics issue 52 from 1940, he used to be a man named Jim Corrigan,
a hard-boiled cop, who was knocked off by thugs while he was on his way to his engagement
party.
He was stuffed into a barrel, the barrel filled with cement, and then dumped into water.
He’s brought back to Earth when his spirit is refused entry into the afterlife, with
an entity called the Voice returning him to the world of the living in order to seek revenge.
He kills the thugs who murdered him, and then breaks up with his fiancée.
He was later revived in the Silver Age by Julius Schwartz, leaning into that undead
spirit vibe more, with his powers vastly increasing, making him nigh-omnipotent.
So maybe he actually kind of benefited from it?
4 Jessica Jones Jessica Jones is yet another character on
our list who has a tragic origin story.
Debuting in Alias issue 1 in 2001, Jessica Campbell was a student who went to the same
high school as Peter Parker, Midtown High.
Her father had scored free tickets to Disney World, and on their way back from a family
vacation there, Jessica and her family get into a car crash.
But not a regular ol car crash.
They collide with a military convoy carrying radioactive chemicals.
Jessica’s whole family are killed, she ends up in a coma for several months, and wakes
up to the horrific news that all her loved ones are deceased.
She ends up in an orphanage, and is adopted by the Jones family, who re-enroll her at
Midtown High.
Peter, who sees her as a kindred spirit, tries to reach out to her, but she lashes out at
him, confusing his kindness for pity.
But Parker does inspire her to do something; at this point, her powers of super strength
durability and flight have manifested, and upon witnessing Spider-Man fight Sandman at
Midtown High, she’s inspired to put her own powers to good us.
And then there’s that whole thing that happened with Killgrave, the Purple Man, which didn’t
help matters, but that’s another story for another list.
3 Spawn Spawn, the demonic character created by Todd
McFarlane for Image comics who debuted in 1992, lost everything when he was murdered.
Before becoming Spawn, he was Al Simmons, a highly intelligent and physically fit CIA
agent with a past working in the Marine Corps and the Secret Service.
Working as a highly capable assassin, Al goes on a mission with his partner (and best friend,
Bruce Stinson, who betrasd him under the orders of their boss, Director Jason Wynn.
Because of the deaths he caused while he was alive, he’s sent to Hell, and ends up making
a deal with the devil to become Hellspawn and work for him, as long as he’s allowed
to see his wife Wanda one last time.
The devil, aka Malebolgia, is like, sure I can make that work.
But as most deals with the devil go, there’s some conditions that Al didn’t anticipate.
When he returns, he has no memory of his previous life except that his name was Al Simmons.
His body has been badly burned, and in addition to this, he has a demonic guardian overseeing
him, named the Violator, whose job it is to cultivate evil souls on Earth for Satan.
Anywho, the whole lack of memory thing means that Spawn doesn’t even remember his wife’s
name.
So he’s literally lost everything, because he can’t remember at first.
Of course it doesn’t stay that way, but it’s still a big loss, regardless.
2 Eric Draven Eric Draven aka the Crow has one of the most
tragic origin stories in comics.
It’s dark AF my friends.
Eric, the protagonist from the initial Crow comic, was on his way back from a romantic
getaway with his fiancée Shelly when their car breaks down on a deserted road.
A car stops, but not to help them; it’s full of rowdy men who are part of a gang.
They shoot Eric in the head, paralyzing him, and then force him to watch as they rape Shelley
and eventually murder her.
Eric then dies in the hospital a few hours later.
A year later, Eric is resurrected by The Crow, and seeks out vengeance on the gang members.
His story has been reimagined as well in an additional 10 issue series published by Image
Comics, and it isn’t any better.
This time, the thugs mistakenly murder them days before their wedding.
1 Wally West Let’s look at a character who, more recently,
in the New 52, had so much of his life stripped away.
In 2011, when DC rebooted their universe with the New 52, many were shocked to see that
the Flash, Wally West, had been written out entirely, as if he had never existed.
He would then return in DC Rebirth, in a story that explained his absence by revealing that
Wally had been lost in the Speed Force for 10 years following the events of Flashpoint,
with Barry dragging Wally out of the speed force.
Wally’s family remained wiped from existence, with no one who could remember them aside
from himself, which caused his mental health to seriously deteriorate.
And because of this, when he sought out help for the stress and pain he was enduring at
the superhero rehabilitation center Sanctuary, his feelings of isolation became too much,
something snapped, and he ended up massacring several heroes who were also at Sanctuary.
And hey, if you were trapped in the speed force for 10 years, you probably wouldn’t
be the sanest, either.
He tried to cover it up by running into the future, killing his future self and bringing
back his corpse in order to make it look like he was one of the victims, too.
But that didn’t work, and eventually, it was revealed that he was responsible.
He then willingly went with the Justice League to a prison
of theirs.