10 Comics Characters Who Randomly Disappear With No Explanation

Back in 1985, Mark Gruenwald created a character called "Scourge of the Underworld" as a plot device. His reasoning was to create a means by which the herd of unnecessary and minor Marvel villains could be thinned, and that's exactly what he was used for.

Scourge would show up, often behind a villain, and shoot them with an explosive-tipped bullet. This wasn't something a minor Marvel menace could hope to survive, and when they died, Scourge would say, "Justice is served." Scourge would take on multiple foes at once, going so far as to slaughter 18 in a single hit.

When Gruenwald was finished with him, other writers took a turn at bat, and he nearly killed Kraven the Hunter in one book. Unfortunately, Kraven was fighting Tigra at the time, and Scourge was unwilling to kill anyone other than his villainous targets.

In some ways, he was like the Punisher, but he was far less of a fleshed-out character, and more of a device used to clean up the Marvel Universe. He was busy throughout the second half of the eighties, but after a while, he disappeared.

Others have taken up the name in the intervening years since his initial appearances stopped, but the original never appeared again, nor was he unmasked in the sense that his identity was never revealed.