Major superheroes/villains who died and have stayed dead - are there any?

I'd say Janet Van Dyne will be back, there was no body. If I was betting, I'd put it on Ultron to bring her back more than Hank Pym. Ultron hates everything pretty much but The Wasp. I'd think Ultron wouldn't be too happy with the Skrulls for killing her in the first place.

Big Marvel Villains currently dead-

Bullseye - like that one is going to stick considering that The Hand have the body.

Sabertooth - although I think him and Wolverine might be fighting in hell right now.

I think the Abomination maybe just got back from being dead or at least I saw him on the cover of a recent comic.

James Robinson has been on a big killing spree in the DC universe and has taken out quite a few B & C level characters, some of which are kind of a shame. Arnold Wesker - The Ventriloquist is probably one of the cooler ones he aced in that funky Face the Face storyline in Batman a couple of years back. Robinson also killed the 90s villain KGBeast in that same storyline. Later on he killed off with a reset button built in Grant Morrison's JLA villain Prometheus.

Abomination is still dead, but the dead are fighting the living in that Chaos War kerfuffle.

I'd say Janet Van Dyne will be back, there was no body. If I was betting, I'd put it on Ultron to bring her back more than Hank Pym. Ultron hates everything pretty much but The Wasp. I'd think Ultron wouldn't be too happy with the Skrulls for killing her in the first place.

Ultron was in that issue where they found out about Janet van Dyne's "quantum body", but he didn't seem to care about Janet's fate, in fact he was perfectly happy to replace the nervous system of the body with his own. And he seemed content enough when Jocasta offered to become his bride so he wouldn't kill everyone. That was a pretty odd resolution to the whole plot, though I haven't yet gotten to the issue of Avengers Academy where Doc Casino said the story is continued.

Thunderbird is still dead, right?

yup

I wouldn't call Thunderbird a major superhero - didn't he only appear like in two issues of X-Men?

Dude was one of the defining characters of the Silver Age X-Men and how dangerous their world was! His specter hung over the books for DECADES, even down to his little brother hooking up with the Hellfire Club.

Sure, he was DESIGNED to die, but nobody knew that until he died.

kind of like how Blink became one of the most popular characters introduced in with the Generation X kids, to the point where they brought back an alternate universe version of her and gave her a comic book (Exiles)

Speaking of Gen X, Synch and Skin are still D-E-D dead, right?

Yes, both of them! I'd say Thunderbird just barely counts - walking plot point, marked for death, but it would be a BIG DEAL if he came back because of the impact it would have on his brother and other cast members...maybe?

so are we talking about FF here or no

No way Johnny stays dead, assuming he died at all.

I know, I just heard about that today (me, reading Fantastic Four? A nation turns its head and gags...) and wanted to bump a thread

Kind of unbelievable that this is the first time he's died!

How long was Captain America "dead," about a year? I give it that long. 2 or 3 Future Foundation story arcs and then The Search for Johnny. Also the new costumes are crap.

Aren't they 12 issues away from #600?

I say 1 year.

I'm enjoying Hickman's run so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on the Johnny thing, but the white uniforms do look a bit silly.

and is spidey now a member? whut? does he only wear the white uniform on ff duties??

Waiting for the inevitable Spider-Man/Wolverine bi-weekly team-up book, because those characters really aren't used enough.

spideys been a ff member a few times prior.
human torch death won't last any longer than a year. issue 600 sounds right.

I think Banshee is still dead. Tho at this point he's kinda the exception that proves the rule and they even had a whole arc in X-Factor where Theresa refuses to accept he'll stay dead bc after all he's a super hero

Banshee was revived briefly for Claremont's wholly superfluous X-Men tie-in for the Chaos War, along with Thunderbird, Moira MacTaggert, the dead Stepford Cuckoos and a couple of Jamie's dupes (inc. the one who died of Legacy). It was basically two issues of "Hey aren't we dead? I guess that makes us perfect cannon fodder!"

fucking Claremont

Wait, Claremont is still writing canon comics? I thought they put him on that WHAT IF I ALWAYS WROTE X-MEN comic and left him there.

Well said, Mordy. Pretty sure he sneaks off to do other things but still acts like that's the basic premise.

Hickman has come up with some interesting ideas on FF, but I don't think he's good at translating them into anything with thrillpower -- at least until the Negative Zone incursion into the Baxter Building.

I like Hickman's ideas but his writing/stories are like watching paint dry. Secret Warriors has a bit more action, but the rest is pretty zzzzzzzz.

I agree with the two above posts, Hickman's has some cool ideas, and I like the way he writes Reed, but his run has lasted something like 20 issues now, he's introduced new plot elements in almost all of them, and none of those things have been resolved yet. I guess it's possible he has some grand design in his mind that is to be slowly revealed in the next 20+ issues, but at the moment it's kinda boring to read about stuff happening on top of other stuff happening without any clear story arc to it.

so basically you are saying he's like Lobdell, only with cool ideas

fucking Claremont

He co wrote it with Louise Simonson who posted online that the edtitors had dictated to them the characters they were and weren't allowed to use.

I dunno, I've never really read anything Lobdell.

Another thing that kinda bothers me in Hickman's run: I haven't read FF for a looong time, so when it first appeared, I had no idea what that weird parallel Earth that's about to sink into a black hole is, or who the characters that inhabit it are. Some of that stuff gets explained later in Hickman's run, but some of it is still a mystery to me. I miss the days when superhero comics used to have big expository panels that explained everything whenever things from earlier in the continuity reappeared. Why don't they have those panels any more? No wonder superhero comics aren't gaining any new readers, if even people like me who are relatively knowledgeable about their past get confused.

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He co wrote it with Louise Simonson who posted online that the edtitors had dictated to them the characters they were and weren't allowed to use.

lol, so which editor was the Thunderbird fanboy, because the whole thing read like tacky fan-fiction

xp: Tuomas, you never read any of the following:

* The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix (4-issue mini-series)
* Alpha Flight vol. 2 #1-12
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Fabian Nicieza) #47-59
* Daredevil #376-379
* The Darkness #23-38
* Excalibur #31, #35-41, #53, #58-60, #68-71, #75-82
* Fantastic Four #1-3, 4-5 (with Chris Claremont, 1998)
* Galaxy Quest #1-5
* Gen¹³ #45-54
* Generation X #1-28
* Ghostbusters: Displaced Aggression #1-4
* Iron Man #1-7 (1996)
* Manifest Eternity #1-6 (Wildstorm, 2006)
* Uncanny X-Men #289-349, 350 (with Steven Seagle)
* Wildcats #1-9 (1997)
* X-Factor #90-95, #106
* X-Men (vol. 2) #6-11, #46-69, #110-113

I don't think so... I pretty much stopped reading superhero comics in the early 90s, when Lee & Liefeld & Larsen & McFarlane & co started dominating the field with their "edgy" art and plots. The last issue of X-Men I read was the last issue Claremont wrote; I'd been getting more and more bored of it during the Jim Lee era, and Claremont quitting was the final straw I needed to quit the X-books. For most of the 90s Vertigo comics were the only current stuff by DC or Marvel I read (except for the occasional non-edgy titles like Starman), and I only came back to superhero comics in the early 00s. So I kinda managed to miss the "dark age" of superhero comics altogether.

Lobdell was only really the "dark age" because he didn't know how to end stories; he liked to pile situation on top of situation and sort of see where the stresses led the story.

Well also he kind of didn't understand how women act, but that's like 80% of comic book writers so I didn't give him as much shit for it as others did.

To Lobdell's credit, some of those are pretty decent.

On the other hand, the rest are some of the boringest emotionally barren comics ever.

Dan waaay OTM on the lack of understanding women.

Also, Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza were pretty much the two main X-Men writers for a while. Um, yeah.

That sort of writing technique is why I've never warmed up to Morrison's JLA as much as to his other superhero stuff... Many of the longer story arcs, like Rock of Ages or World War III, just go like this: stuff happens, other stuff happens, bigger stuff happens, BANG, the end. His shorter JLA stories tend to be structured much better than the long ones.

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Dan waaay OTM on the lack of understanding women.

It was counterbalanced by his not understanding how men act!

Anyway, Nicieza wrote Thunderbolts and Psi-Force, ergo he gets a lifetime pass from me.

(seriously, once you started viewing Lobdell's run as an extended soap opera farce, it became waaaaaaaaaaay more fun; there were also some really great set pieces like the fight between Psylocke and Sabretooth in UXM #328)

Oh god, remember the psylocke/cyclops love triangle bullshit?

I've tried to read some 90s X-Men comics a couple of times, but usually I've been scared away by the awful art. For someone who grew up reading comics drawn by John Byrne, John Romita Jr., Alan Davis, and Walt Simonson, the 90s were a pretty horrible era for superhero art. Also, since the X-books are so continuity-heavy, and I stopped reading them when Claremont left, I had little idea what was happening, or even who the characters were.

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Actually, back in the Silvestri era Psylocke used to be one of my favourite characters, but when she was turned into a bondage bikini ninja for no proper reason except fanservice, that was one of the first times I realized I was getting disillusioned by X-Men.

Actually, back in the Silvestri era Psylocke used to be one of my favourite characters, but when she was turned into a bondage bikini ninja for no proper reason except fanservice

whenever i am tempted to start reading comics properly again, this factoid reminds me i probably shouldn't. i've even enjoyed all the post-brand new day spidey comics i've read, but i know in my heart i could never go back to the x-men again. i stopped reading around the time they went to australia - actually, i think i kept reading a little longer, but i wasn't enjoying it, and didn't really have much of a clue what was going on.

but yeah, ninja pylocke just sounds like the most tragic of wank fantasies made ink.

I remember coming back to the books right when they were resolving the Psylocke/Kwannon plot and being all "... the hell???"

Ninja Psylocke doesn't really bother me at all though, mostly because Betsy at her core always had that type of icy killer personality but never had the physical stature to back it up before that mind switch (which btw happened shortly after my first comics hiatus; I basically missed Inferno through right before the Phalanx Covenant)

wasn't she always doing that ninja thing when she was in her DARK PERSONALITY or am i misremembering my old issues of excalibur?

I don't remember any "dark personality" that would've preceded the ninja era... She was kidnapped by Mojo who gave her new eyes (that were actually cameras so the folks at Mojo's world could enjoy her and the X-Men's adventures as a TV show), but that's the extent of any "darkness" that I can recall. And she certainly didn't have any ninja powers before she was turned into a Japanese bikini babe.

is it true that this ethnic transformation was a power of the Mandarin's ring? if so, did they explore it more, like have him changing tabby cats into siamese cats?

Also, I don't think Psylocke had anything to do with Excalibur before she turned into a ninja (IIRC back then Excalibur still thought the X-Men had all died while fighting the Adversary), so maybe you're remembering some later plot development?

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Both.

wut

Gail Simone brought them back as part of Secret Six in the Rebirthiverse (and it's been a long time since I typed that).

Ralph was undercover as a mob heavy, Sue turned up in about #8 after Ralph had broken cover and was moping about being away from her.