10 Hated Comic Book Characters Who Were Killed Off
Killing off all the most questionable superheroes, for your viewing pleasure.
If there's one thing that comics love doing, it's killing off their characters. Fake deaths, secret deaths, permanent deaths - all can be found in the pages of some series or another, varying from entirely overdramatic, to uncomfortably realistic.
Among this cavalcade of suffering, there's one surprisingly consistent theme for comic book deaths, as it's frequently a trend for comics to get rid of characters who are disliked by the audience by killing them off - often as brutally as possible, as they know that fans will be clamouring to see a figure they hate get offed in a savage way. While Jason Todd is perhaps the most infamous example of this, there are countless examples of heroes being thrown to the wayside because they didn't quite garner fan support.
While this is often used to generate sympathy for an otherwise unloved character, it's just as easily used to get rid of the proverbial trash, as the simplest way to explain why a character is no longer in a series is to show them being stone-cold murdered.
Though they're not always entirely warranted, seeing hated characters be killed off is always interesting - even if it's for all the wrong reasons.
10. Eric O'Grady (Ant Man) - Secret Avengers #23
As far as superheroes go, Eric O'Grady was undeniably one of the sketchiest in comic history, doing more criminal actions in his time as Ant-Man than actual heroic deeds.
As such, it's likely no surprise that writers eventually sought to kill him off. In an unusual twist, they had O'Grady die in a surprisingly heroic way, giving his life to save a young girl after she was kidnapped by a team of supervillains. Eric reaches a point where he knows he isn't going to win the fight against these villains, but carries on anyway, giving it all in order to give her time to escape.
Although it would appear as though Eric hadn't legitimately died in this fray - as what appeared to be him would show up in later issues of the series - this would turn out to be an elaborate cyborg copy made by the villains the Secret Avengers were fighting against.