10 Most Tragic Deaths In The History Of Marvel Comics

5. Gertrude Yorkes

Hoo boy. This one's going to be difficult to write. Runaways is one of our favourite (and eternally underrated) titles here at WhatCulture's comics section - it's just there, next to the gaming section, no through that door, yeah it might have been the caretaker's closet once - and that's mostly down to the wonderful, horrible Brian K Vaughan. Now best known for his indie titles like Saga and Ex Machina, the one thing that has coloured Vaughan's writing career, besides the consistent quality, is that he is a complete monster who makes you fall in love with characters only to cruelly snatch them away. Seriously, he keeps doing it and we keep falling for it. If only his stories weren't so darn good...

That was the case with Runaways, a loose team of Californian kids who found out their parents were actually a supercriminal dynasty called The Pride, who controlled all illegal activities in LA and frequently sacrificed young girls in order to satiate the otherworldly beings that gave them their power. It was a none-too-subtle metaphor for the way teenagers tend to hate and misunderstand their parents, but it was a great one, and seeing this mismatched collection of adolescents trying to figure out both their burgeoning superpowers and their hormones was a delight.

Perhaps most delightful was Gert, the slightly geeky, slightly chubby brains of the operation who didn't have any powers to speak of. We mean, besides her psychic link to a giant velociraptor from the future. Gert, along with boyfriend Chase (whose own power was "a poor upbringing"), formed the heart of the team, after initially being pretty cynical and tough to read. Her development as a character and relationship with Chase served to make it all the more tragic when she gets murdered protecting her squeeze from a new incarnation of The Pride. Curse you, Vaughan, you've done it again.