Between movies, TV shows, and of course, comics, there’s more superhero media than ever and
unfortunately for our favorite comic book characters, that comes with a pretty high
body count.
They might come back after a few years, but in the meantime, we’re taking a moment to
remember their loss.
From obscure alternate universes to shockingly short-lived movie stars, and all the way to
everyone’s favorite super-powered dog, here are some superheroes we've lost in 2018.
Half of the Avengers
Let's talk about the Thanos in the room: Avengers: Infinity War ended with the darkest cliffhanger
in Marvel history.
"You should have gone for the head."
It's devastating… and much more horrific than the comic book source material, where
people just blinked out of existence.
On the big screen, they feel what's coming before it hits, and they're slowly erased
inch by inch until there's nothing left.
By the time the credits roll we watch Bucky, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Black Panther, Spider-Man,
Groot, Star-Lord, Drax, Mantis, and Doctor Strange all get erased from reality.
In the film's one and only post-credits scene, we see similar fates befall Maria Hill and
Nick Fury.
With sequels in the works for many of these heroes, it's a safe bet that not all of these
dusty deaths will stick.
But if they do get reversed, it likely won't be until next year's Avengers sequel and we
won't know until then who will come back and who won't.
The Mighty Scragg
In 2017’s Venomverse, the Marvel Multiverse was introduced to an alien race called the
Poisons who were hunting down venom symbiotes from alternate realities.
This year, they hit Marvel’s Earth in an event called Venomized, and set their sights
on... the Mighty Scragg?
Scragg was a product of Kid Kaiju, a super-powered inhuman introduced during the Monsters Unleashed
crossover, who had the power to summon gigantic monsters by drawing them.
Scragg, one of Kaiju's creations, was an insectoid giant who became infected by the Poison during
their invasion.
Scragg went on a rampage, and while the infection could be stopped by the symbiote-based hero
Anti-Venom, removing the parasites from him had lethal consequences.
Without any choice, the heroes did what they had to do, and Scragg died... but not before
telling Kid Kaiju that he loved him.
Hey, we’re not crying!
You’re crying!
Robert Brink
The six-part miniseries New Challengers is a reimagining of the Silver Age Challengers
of the Unknown.
Unlike earlier incarnations of the characters, however, the quartet in this series aren’t
superheroic adventurers.
Instead, they’re essentially post-mortem prisoners.
Trina Alvarez, Moses Barber, Robert Brink, and a big guy who goes by "Krunch" all appear
before a mysterious benefactor called Prof and are told they’ve all just died.
Before he can get any further into explaining the premise, though, one of the Challengers
dies before he even goes on his first mission.
Robert Brink gets a little too impatient and hops in a portal, and immediately begins to
melt.
Whenever the Challengers leave their base of operations known only as "The Mountain,"
they're on borrowed time, and if they’re gone too long, they’ll share Brink’s fate.
Seconds after his death, we meet his replacement: Bethany Hopkins.
With that, we get our actual team of New Challengers, who will probably listen a little more carefully
than poor Robert.
X-Force
In spite of being featured in the trailers for Deadpool 2, Bedlam was the first member
of X-Force to kick the bucket, and didn’t even get the chance to throw a punch before
it happened.
Played by Terry Crews, Bedlam is part of the X-Force team that Deadpool puts together for
a high-stakes airdrop onto a prison convoy.
When high speed winds blow them off course, the entire roster of X-Force aside from Deadpool
and Domino are killed and Bedlam’s blown face-first into a bus.
In the darkly hilarious carnage that followed, the most surprising death was Shatterstar.
A long-time X-Force member in the comics, Shatterstar was heavily featured in the trailers,
but sadly wound up on the wrong end of a helicopter and got chopped to pieces.
Moviegoers didn’t even get to see his cool swords!
They have two blades!
Next was the Vanisher.
He was one of the X-Men’s earliest comic book villains, but when he showed up (or didn’t)
in Deadpool 2, no one was really sure if Telford Porter, the teleporting mutant with what might
be the worst name in comics history, actually existed.
Eventually, though, it turned out that he was a full-fledged member of the team, and
moviegoers got a glimpse at just who was behind his less-than-visible presence.
"really!?"
As his parachute strayed into electrical wires, we actually got to see the Vanisher just as
he was being electrocuted, with the unmistakable face of Brad Pitt.
In the comics, Zeitgeist is the leader of a reality-show celebrity version of X-Force
who dies in the same issue where he makes his first appearance, so if nothing else,
Deadpool 2 has that bit of accuracy to its source material going for it.
Also accurate: his extremely gross super-power of barfing acid, which we only get to see
as he dies in a woodchipper.
"Tripping Motherf----- billies!"
X-Men Origins Deadpool
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is often considered a low point for Deadpool fans, mostly because
it turned the famously talkative Wade Wilson into into a mouthless, murderous Mortal Kombat
ripoff.
As much as you may hate that movie, Ryan Reynolds has shown us that he probably hates it more,
parodying that movie’s action in Deadpool 2.
If that wasn’t enough, he proved it once and for all in the mid-credits sequence of
Deadpool 2 when he used Cable's time travel device to go back and fire bullet after bullet
into the earlier version of himself.
Flash Thompson
The 800th issue of Amazing Spider-Man brought fans a climactic battle between Spider-Man
and Norman Osborn, who had bonded with the Carnage symbiote to form the Red Goblin.
Osborn waged war on Peter Parker the way he always had, by going after Spider-Man’s
friends and family.
Fortunately, Flash Thompson, Peter’s high school bully turned close friend, was there
to help out with his abilities as the hero Anti-Venom, using his power to neutralize
shards of the Carnage symbiote that Osborn had left behind in Aunt May, Mary Jane, and
Spidey’s other loved ones.
His help came with a cost, though.
When Anti-Venom foiled Osborn’s contingency plans, the Red Goblin’s retribution was
swift and lethal.
The Human Dynamo
In Deathstroke #32, Slade Wilson goes to war with Batman, but unsurprisingly, neither one
of them is the one who dies.
Instead, the Dark Knight tries to stop Wilson from assassinating his latest target, an obscure
hero named Ace Masterson: The Human Dynamo.
The twist?
It was actually Masterson himself who hired Deathstroke, due to worries that the onset
of dementia would make him too dangerous to live with his explosive powers.
Rather than find out for himself, he hired Deathstroke to help him go out in a blaze
of glory.
Batman tried to stop the hit from happening, but eventually, Deathstroke just shot Masterson
in the head.
Pretty grim for a guy who used to be on a team called the Justice Experience.
Sinestro
Sinestro isn't often considered a hero, but in the ongoing comics tying into the Injustice
video games,
the former villain rejoined the Green Lantern Corps, just in time to fall
protecting Oa from an assault by Atrocitus, the Red Lanterns, and a possessed Green Lantern
Corps in Injustice 2 #64.
And just to make things a little bit worse, he was killed by his own daughter, Soranik,
who then took up Sinestro’s ring as his replacement.
Triton
A series with a title like Death of the Inhumans is bound to contain its share of dead superheroes,
and the first came from Triton, one of the original Inhumans who first appeared in 1965.
While investigating a group of slaughtered Inhumans who were murdered by their alien
creators, the Kree, Triton discovers a bomb hidden in a corpse.
While the rest of the Inhumans are able to teleport to safety, Triton’s not so lucky.
He was the first Inhuman killed in the series, but he would not be the last.
Lockjaw
Lockjaw is arguably the most beloved of all Inhumans, for good reason.
He’s the goodest boy in the whole Marvel Universe!
C’mon, who doesn’t love a giant, teleporting dog?
The answer, it seems, is a “super-Inhuman” named Vox, the villain behind Death of the
Inhumans, who has the powers of every other Inhuman and wants nothing more than to destroy
the whole group and their very large dog, too.
After Lockjaw rescues the often-villainous Maximus the Mad from Vox, the two of them
make one final stand… before they’re vaporized when Vox uses Black Bolt’s devastating voice
to destroy them.
Hank Pym & the van Dynes
While most of Ant-Man and the Wasp takes place before the events of Avengers: Infinity War,
the post-credits scenes caught up to the Avengers' battle with Thanos.
In those, we learned that the original Ant-Man and both women who went by the codename Wasp
were victims of Thanos' infamous "snap,” leaving Scott Lang floating in the Quantum
Realm with what appears to be no way out.
Booster Gold
Only two issues after Sinestro died defending Oa, Injustice 2 #66 claimed another hero's
life in its cosmic war.
This time, though, it wasn’t the casualty that the good guys thought it would be.
While Blue Beetle was prepared to sacrifice his life to stop Starro, Booster Gold made
a last-minute switch to keep the younger hero alive.
The last thing he saw was the second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, Ted had previously died
himself, but was brought to Booster’s side by time travel so that the two best friends
could see each other in Booster’s final moments.
The Challengers of the Unknown
Things in the miniseries New Challengers didn’t take long to get pretty complicated, and the
old school Challengers of the Unknown fell victim to one of those complications.
See if you can follow this one: New Challengers #2 ended with the original team confronting
their successors, and shooting their leader, Prof, in the head.
Since one of the original Challengers is named Prof, they assumed this new one was an impostor,
but he turned out to be a Prof from another dimension with the surprising ability to recover
from being shot in the head.
To make matters even more complicated, the original Challengers then encountered someone
who they thought was the new Prof, only to find a third prof... who turned out to be
a murderous cybernetic mummy.
Did you get all that?
No!
That's okay.
Just remember Prof is dead… long live the other Profs.
Bloodstorm
Hailing from an alternate reality where she was bitten by Dracula, Bloodstorm is a vampiric
version of the X-Men’s weather-controlling Storm.
More recently, she’s been serving on the team in the core universe, but unfortunately,
this led to her fighting against the mutant-hunting Ahab in the pages of Extermination.
Ahab came prepared, too, taking Bloodstorm with a silver harpoon that he brought just
in case a vampire X-Man showed up.
It might seem unlikely that someone would make preparations for that exact eventuality,
but hey, it’s the Marvel Universe.
That’s the sort of thing that happens a lot.
Cable
The second mutant to fall in Extermination was Cable, who was executed by a mysterious
hooded figure who traveled back from the future.
The twist?
It turned out that Cable’s killer was a younger, leaner version of Cable himself,
who has set his sights on the time-traveling original five X-Men.
Nakia
Fans of the MCU may remember Nakia as T'Challa's love interest in 2017's Black Panther, where
she was played by Lupita N’yong’o but in the comics, she’s a very different character.
Nakia was one of the first of the Dora Milaje that readers met in 1998's Black Panther #1.
Eventually, thanks partly to some meddling from the demonic Mephisto, Nakia became obsessed
with T'Challa and eventually left the Dora Milaje, becoming a villain called Malice,
powered by a mystical herb.
In the Wakanda Forever event, we learn that continued exposure to the herb that gave her
powers is slowly killing Nakia
In Wakanda Forever: Avengers #1, Nakia reunited with the Dora Milaje to defeat a Wakandan
weapon called Mimic-27 that created doppelgängers of superhumans.
She convinced it to let go of the hatred it felt for her sisters, and managed to release
that same hatred from herself before succumbing to the herb’s effects.
She died, but was buried with honor among other fallen Dora Milaje.