Every good superhero has their weakness, an achilles heel to make up for all those larger-than-life abilities they're blessed with. Superman has kryptonite, Green Lantern has the colour yellow, Martian Manhunter has fire. Spider-Man's is a little harder to quantify, and a little more abstract: the only real downside to Peter Parker being a masked wall crawler, and the only way that you can really "beat" him? Kill off one of his loved ones. Seriously. It happens all the time. So often, in fact, that we reckon it does count as a weakness, the amount of these friends and family members that supervillains (more often than not) are bumping off. The death of people around him is a key concept with Spider-Man. It's probably his defining character trait, aside from the bad jokes and the webs. It was the murder of his Uncle Ben that set him off on the path to become a superhero in the first place, and another famous demise is so well-known that most of us needn't have bothered staying for the end of the most recent movie. We all knew what was going to happen. The same thing that always happens to whoever Peter Parker gets close to. They die. Good luck getting a decent insurance rate if you associate with this death magnet. Not that the regularity of the Spider-Man supporting cast getting bumped off makes it any easier, though. We're not monsters. We can still feel, so long as it's about a fictional character on a comic book page. Despite all the murders, illnesses and accidents we've seen people endure in Peter Parker's life, we're still no desensitised to them. Just desensitised enough to make an itemised list from most to least heartbreaking, though! Okay, so we're kinda monsters, but we guarantee we sobbed just a little whilst putting together the ten most tragic deaths in the history of Spider-Man.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
