10 Most Tragic Deaths In The History Of Marvel Comics

6. Bucky

Even with the loosey goosey approach to mortality that resulted in the coinage of Comic Book Death, there have always been two characters that readers knew would never come back from the grave. One of those was Bucky, Captain America's wartime sidekick who seemingly died in their last adventure, clinging desperately onto a Nazi drone plane armed with a bomb. Bucky managed to stop the drone from reaching its destination but was killed in the explosion, whilst Cap found himself catapulted into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, waiting to be thawed out in twenty or so years by the Avengers.

Fanboys remained certain that Bucky would never return because the guilt Steve Rogers felt over his best friend's demise was one of the most interesting and unique aspects of the character. As Captain America he was the infallible and virtuous icon of truth, justice and the American way; in his superhero guise, he carried on that tradition; in his personal life, however, Rogers was just a guy who had let down his friend when it mattered most. As time went by we were all convinced that Bucky would never come back, to the point that when all the Winter Soldier debacle went down it was a genuine surprise - at that point Private Barns had been MIA for over five decades.

This is one of those deaths that's actually become more poignant thanks to its undoing. The fate of Bucky had haunted Cap and his readers for half a century, a surprisingly mature and violent end to a partnership that began in the much more innocent and bloodless early days of comic books. Finding out that he hadn't actually died, and what had happened to him in the intervening years instead, was somehow even more tragic than if he had been lost in that drone explosion, way back in 1945.