No one likes to lose.
I’d imagine if you were a superhero, you REALLY wouldn’t like to lose, since it’s
more than just your ego or your pride on the line.
It’s usually the lives of innocent civilians and the greater good on the line, and effing
that up ain’t much fun.
So today, we’re mulling over that sad fate even further with our list of the top 10 superheroes
who lost, part two!
Since y’all requested it so much.
Also be sure to stick around till the end – some of these numbers were plucked from
suggestions you all left in the comments, so there’s a few shout outs you might not
wanna miss.
Oh and maybe bonus content?
There might be bonus content.
Also, heads up friends, there’s some mega spoilers for some iconic comics on this list,
and we talk a bit about the MCU (from Infinity War onwards), so you’ve been warned.
10 Thor losing to Beta Ray Bill Let’s start off our list with a defeat that
was suggested to us by user Peter Tyson; that time that Beta Ray Bill whooped Thor’s butt.
Bill, who first appeared in The Mighty Thor issue 337 back in 1983, was depicted as a
monster who turns out to be a hero.
He was the first character introduced outside of Norse themed characters that had proven
to be worthy to lift Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir.
But let’s backtrack a sec; Thor was sent on a mission by SHIELD to go investigate an
alien fleet that was passing through Earth’s galaxy.
Thor finds the ship, perceives it as a threat, and spits Beta Ray Bill out of it to fight
Thor.
Thanks to a silly hang up that Mjolnir used to have (Thor would turn back into his mortal
persona if he was separated from the hammer for more than 60 seconds), Bill as able to
defeat Thor, and eventually, it becomes obvious the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.
But still super embarrassing for Thor.
Thor would get Mjolnir back, and as a consolation for all of this Bill was gifted storm breaker;
the weapon that Thor helped craft in Avengers Infinity War.
9 US Agent loses arm and leg There’s a lot of instances where superheroes
have lost a leg or a limb or a body part when defeated; fighting crime is risky business,
friends.
Even US Agent, the mean dollar store version of Captain America, has gotten maimed in combat.
US Agent aka John Walker was one of the ‘heroes’ who tried to combat Norman Osborn during the
Siege event, and in Mighty Avengers issue 36, he tried to stop the Thunderbolts from
stealing Odin’s spear.
That didn’t go too well for Walker; Nuke managed to get his hands on the weapon first,
and used it to chop off Walker’s left arm and leg.
In the aftermath, Walker refuses to use prosthetic limbs, and prefers to move around in a wheelchair,
although he would eventually be ‘healed’.
Somehow.
Still counts as a major defeat though.
8 Captain Marvel beat Iron Man into a coma This one actually comes as a suggestion from
blackphoenix77 – that time Captain Marvel Carol Danvers beat Iron Man into a coma.
In 2016, Civil War 2 came to fruition.
Similar to its predecessor, it saw the super powered individuals on Earth facing off against
each other thanks to a clashing of opinions and perspectives.
Rather than Captain america versus Iron Man, it was Captain Marvel Carol Danvers versus
Tony this time around when an Inhuman named Ulyssess with a power to perceive the future
shows up.
Carol thinks it should be used to prevent crime whereas Tony is all for free will.
The story concluded with Carol and Tony duking it out, with Carol essentially beating him
into a coma in the process.
Tony would disappear from the Marvel universe for about two years, returning to Invincible
Iron Man in 2018.
7 Invincible Invincible is a series created by Robert Kirkman
for Image Comics that ran from 2002 to 2003.
It followed the son of a hero named Omni-Man, an alien from the Viltrumite race with super
strength, invulnerability, enhanced healing and flight who devoted his life to protecting
earth.
The son is a hero named Invincible, whose got the same skill set as daddy dearest but
is having trouble adjusting to his new found skills.
Flash forward to later on in the story, where the narrative takes us to a story arc concerning
the Viltrumite War.
A villain by he name of Conquest challenges Invincible for control over Earth, and turns
out, dude is way too powerful for our hero.
They end up having a rematch of sorts, and Invincible decides he’s going to go for
the kill, strangling him.
But Conquest outsmarts him by punching a hole through Invincible body, and pulling out his
intestines and other bodily bits.
Now Invinicble manages to hold on and strangles Conquest to death, but it takes him a whole
10 months to recover from his insides literally being pulled outside of his body.
And yeah, it’s a gruesome series of panels, that’s for sure.
6 Wolverine ripped in half The Hulk and Wolverine have been rivals of
sorts ever since Wolverine first hit the panels in the brooding mutant debuted in Incredible
Hulk issue 180 in 1974.
Although they’re both on the side of good, the two have butted heads a bunch over the
years.
So it makes sense that in the Ultimate universe, on Earth 1610, we’d see a different form
of that rivalry emerge; for starters, the Ultimate universe has a tendency to be more
volatile than the 616.
Characters are significantly more crude, the Hulk especially.
He’s pretty much a cannibal on this earth.
Now, let’s jump over to Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, a 6 issue mini series that has Logan
travel to the Himalayas to assassinate Hulk for SHIELD.
As you can tell from the title of our number, that didn’t go well.
Issue one of the series begins with Wolverine literally dragging his upper half through
the snow, and over the course of the series, we get to see more of the grisly details of
their battle and the aftermath.
Getting ripped in half is definitely a defeat.
5 Dying Wish Big thanks to user Doug Rosengard for suggesting
this one.
Back in 2012, Marvel caused quite the stir with their Amazing Spider-Man issue 700 with
a storyline titled Dying Wish.
In it, Spider-Man was replaced with the Superior Spider-Man under some pretty intense and baffling
circumstances.
Leading up to this issue, we saw Otto Octavius, aka Doc Ock, come up with a terrible scheme
to switch bodies with Peter Parker.
He was practically on his death bed, and he managed to science his way into swapping with
Parker, with Peter being forced into Otto’s decaying body.
Now that’s a brutal way to be defeated.
After a whole lot of backlash and a complex story line, Peter was eventually restored
to his body, but Otto would still manage to pull this off for over a year (which, to be
fair, led to some interesting character development, but still).
4 Batman beats Superman The dark knight and the man of steel have
fought numerous times, but perhaps the most influential and iconic brawl of theirs comes
at the hand of Frank Miller and his Dark Knight Returns series.
It features an aging Bruce Wayne, who, seeing Gotham being tormented by a new gang of ultra
violent hoodlums, returns to his vigilante ways.
Eventually, Superman is called in to intervene, a tool of the government’s now, and Batman
takes him on.
He dons an exoskeleton suit with synthetic kryptonite and even has Green Arrow shoot
the man of steel with a kryptonite arrow (of course) and he pretty much has Clark defeated
when he, himself ‘dies’.
It’s then revealed that Bruce faked his own death, becoming a martyr of sorts, and
working with his resistance underground; something that Clark eventually figures out on his own
after he revives himself with some sweet, sweet sunlight.
Sure, Clark held back a little, but Bruce could have definitely killed Superman if he
wanted to, and still managed to outsmart him, making it a pretty memorable defeat for the
man of steel.
3 Kingdom Come Big shout out to Kingdom Come Superman who
dropped this suggestion in the comments of our part 1.
Kingdom Come, a four issue series penned by Alex Ross and Mark Waid under the Elseworlds
imprint, was released in 1996 to rave reviews.
The story, a deconstructionist tale set in the future, follows the increasing conflict
between traditional superheroes of the past and a new generation of metahumans taking
their place; they’re amoral and irresponsible, and some of them are the children of previous
heroes, to boot.
Major spoilers to follow if you haven’t read it yet slash want to.
In the end, the United Nations ends up deploying three nuclear warheads against the metahuman
threat.
Batman and Wonder Woman manage to stop two of them, and the last one still blows up,
but does considerably less damage thanks to Captain Marvel Billy Batson.
Most of the metahumans are killed in this explosion, and Superman ends up flying over
to the UN, threatening to destroy it as punishment for the massacre they caused.
Luckily he calms down and agrees to be an advisor for the UN in the future.
But still, talk about a major loss.
2 The Infinity Gauntlet In 1991, Jim Starlin penned a six issue limited
series that put his creation Thanos in the forefront of a massive Marvel conflict that
spanned the entire universe.
Starlin had been gearing up to this with Thanos, who was hunting down the infinity gems in
order to become omnipotent in the name of the entity Death, whom he loved.
He was going to prove his love to her by eliminating half of all living being in the universe,
which he did.
And yes, he snapped to do it.
But unlike the MCU version, Thanos had collected all of the gems, built himself a nifty little
HQ in space, kidnapped his brother and his grand daughter Nebula, tortured them, and
THEN had to deal with Adam Warlock gathering all of the remaining superheroes who hadn’t
disappeared, along with a bunch of cosmic entities and other powerful beings to take
on Thanos in an epic onslaught.
Thanos would crush them all though, and it wasn’t until he let his guard down did Nebula
manage to to swipe the gauntlet from him, eventually leading to his (temporary) downfall.
But regardless, that epic battle we mentioned?
It resulted in some of the most brutal defeats.
Vision had his insides yanked out.
Cyclops’ head was stuck in an indestructible box as he tried to use his optic blasts, incinerating
his head.
Wolverine’s adamantium bone was turned into rubber and Cap?
Thanos just kind of b*tch slapped him.
1 MCU Avengers Infinity War Speaking of Infinity Gauntlet, let’s take
a look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe adaptation of it (or rather, the story line that was
largely informed by it) in Avengers Infinity War.
For starters, fans of the comic and the films will already know this – the stories are
not the same.
Infinity War mainly adapts elements from the Infinity Gauntlet comic, and a wee bit of
stuff from the more recent Infinity storyline (specifically, Thanos’ Black Order).
The big loss in that film is basically a giant spoiler for the entire movie, and basically
played with elements of the original – instead of all of the heroes going after Thanos after
he snapped, they all try to stop him from getting the infinity stones, and fail.
Thanos snaps, and bam, there goes half of all living things in the universe.
It was a very bold choice for an ending as far as Marvel Studios was concerned.
It was bleak, heart wrenching, and set them up to make a CRAP TON of money with the film’s
follow up, Avengers Endgame.
And in that film, well, let’s just say there’s a resolution (in case you’re one of the
only people on the planet who hasn’t seen that film).
There we have it friends!
What other major superhero losses can you all think of?
Give us a shout in those comments below and perhaps we’ll do a part three!
THREEEEE.
Thanks again to all of our viewers who made suggestions in the comments last time around,
and especially thanks to the ones who made it into the part 2 list.
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Anywho, thanks for watching friends!
I’ll catch you all in the next video!