10 Best Marvel And DC Supervillains Who've Debuted Since 2000

1. The Frightful Four/Marvel Zombies

Marvel Zombies Captain America
Marvel Comics

What if zombies could fly? What if they could punch through buildings, shoot lasers from their eyes and climb walls?

That's the premise of Marvel Zombies, an immensely popular five-issue limited series published by Marvel in 2005 and 2006. As the name suggests, the series features zombie versions of popular Marvel heroes such as Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine.

But here's what many don't know: The series actually spun off from a story in the pages of the Ultimate Fantastic Four, the retelling of the Fantastic Four story that was part of Marvel's alternate Ultimate universe.

In the original story, the undead version of the Fantastic Four, the Frightful Four-all four of whom come from an alternate zombie universe-transport themselves into the Ultimate universe by tricking the Ultimate version of Reed Richards into opening a dimensional portal. The reason? Zombie Earth, it seems, has run out of people to eat.

Best Moment: 

Near the end of the Marvel Zombies storyline, several super-powered zombies, incuding undead versions of the Hulk, spider-Man and Wolverine, actually overpower and devour the Marvel Universe's biggest, baddest villain, Galactus. In doing so, they fuse together to become a zombified version of the planet-eating villain. 

Like Galactus before them, they head off to space to find other worlds to devour.

Contributor

Dan Rafter has worked as a freelance journalist for more than 20 years. He has written for everyone from the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune to Mental Floss, BusinessWeek Online and Consumers Digest. You can find more by him at his comic's Web site, CareersinComics.