10 Brilliant Marvel Characters You've Never Heard Of

2. Ulysses Bloodstone

Marvel ComicsMarvel ComicsBy all rights, Ulysses Bloodstone should be one of the most popular characters in Marvel comics. He was several thousand years old, having burst onto the scene during the Hyborian Age. He had the long flowing locks and open-chested shirt of either a pulp hero or a soft rock guitarist. He got a magic gem embedded in his chest that made him immortal. And he dedicated his never-ending life to hunting monsters. Like, actual monsters. Huge beasties and vampires and werewolves and even weirder stuff. All that despite never actually having any real superpowers, outside of the immortality. He was just a badass. Did we mention his name was Ulysses Bloodstone also? We're considering naming all our first borns that. During his career Ulysses encountered everything from living mummies and abominable snowmen to mole people and Fing Fang Foom, and he kicked them all in the face. Sadly that wasn't what the comics readers of the seventies were after - by the way, comics readers of the seventies, WHAT THE HECK WAS WRONG WITH YOU THIS IS AWESOME - and so after being dropped from his headline slot in Marvel Comics Presents he was relegated to the back-up strip in Rampaging Hulk. Even that wasn't enough to make good on Bloodstone's promise of immortality, so he was swiftly killed off in pursuit of more monsters to punch. The Bloodstone clan lived on, however, in his daughter Elsa and son Cullen, who carried on his legacy of wrestling with otherworldly monstrosities. Cullen was one of the breakout original characters in the Hunger Games-aping Avengers Arena and its follow up, Avengers Undercover, and Ulysses himself appeared in flashback in Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen's bonkers cult classic Nextwave, tossing an infant Elsa into a pit bottomless pit of creatures in order to train her into the wonderfully British, charmingly insane new breed of monster hunter. With daddy issues.
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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/