10 Moments Marvel Have Chosen To Ignore

In comics, Heaven has a revolving door and nowhere is this more true than in the long-running X-Men franchise. At least 90% of the characters, either in the main book or a spin-off have died AT LEAST once. The only deaths that have any value are those that are tied directly to a significant characters origin story, but only when retconning the death would damage a piece of pop-culture folklore. Martha and Thomas Wayne aren't coming back from the grave. Ditto, Uncle Ben.

Sometimes though the notion of "Immortality" is brought up and the plot gets even stranger. Writers must come up with ways to temporarily kill a seemingly unkillable character. Look at the recently returned Wolverine as an excellent example of this particular trope. Why creators felt the need to explicitly state a character is immortal is another matter entirely; it introduces a Gordian knot into continuity.

Back in the 90s however there was an EXTREMELY popular X-Men spin-off called X-Force. They were a paramilitary mutant strike team that used Magneto tactics to make Xavier's dream a reality. The team's field commander was a young mutant from Kentucky called Cannonball, who was all down-home charm and boy next door good looks. He was a member of the New Mutants for nearly a decade. He has since served as both a fully-fledged member of the X-Men and the Avengers.

Creators have had him battle from one end of the universe to the other while showing that despite his mutant power making him temporarily invulnerable while in "flight" he could still be hurt or even killed.

The problem is that a Morlock called Masque already "killed" Cannonball back at the beginning of X-Force. Only for readers to discover that Samuel Guthrie is part of an immortal sub-set of mutants called Externals. Cable, a time traveller, tells him that he will live for thousands of years and become a "High lord" in a distant war against Apocalypse.

But that inconvenient truth only makes any sense of peril redundant and who wants that?