10 Comic Book Characters You Wish You Could Be

10. Death Of The Endless

Created for Neil Gaiman’s seminal Sandman series for DC/Vertigo, Death is the older sister of Dream, the Sandman of the title. Along with her six brothers and sisters, she represents the anthropomorphic personification of a primal force - in this case, death itself. She’s one of the most powerful beings in the universe… but that’s not the appeal of the character.

Gaiman’s thing with the Endless was to have their personalities subvert expectations - so Despair is loyal and oddly sweet, Destruction is full of creativity, warmth and life, and Dream, king of stories, is hidebound and a little dull. Well, by turns wise, flippant, solemn and frivolous, Death is the perfect no-nonsense but caring big sister.

When she first appears in issue 8, Dream has regained his freedom after seven decades of captivity and is sitting in the square feeding the pigeons and sulking, because he has no idea what to do next. So she takes him to work with her, illustrating to him the importance of their role in the world, refreshing and restoring his spirit.

That’s what Death does: she looks after people. She’s the person everyone really wants to meet when they finally kick the bucket: someone warm, calm and sweet, who’ll take their hand as she leads them away to wherever they need to be.

Created at the tail end of the post-goth 1980s, a wave of female comics readers suddenly found themselves wearing ankhs around their necks and backcombing their hair again. Nearly three decades later, she’s still coming near the top of lists of the sexiest women in comics