10 Times Superman Was Forced To Kill

4. Imperiex And Brainiac, To Save The Universe

We've said it before and we'll say it again, but Our Worlds At War is one of our favourite modern crossovers. There's so much to revel in the sprawling multi-part comic book epics that are mainly designed to make you part from even more of your hard-earned dollars than usual, but in this case we were rewarded with a huge, cosmic event with some real stakes and lasting implications. And it was pretty much just Superman versus Galactus, the planet-eating deity from Marvel Comics, so we enjoyed it on a purely geeky fan service level, too.

In Our World At War, the Galactus analogue is Imperiex, the living embodiment of universal entropy who is slowly making his way to Earth and destroying every planet, star system, and piece of space junk he comes across during his journey. Imperiex intends to use our world as the staging ground for the "hollowing" of the entire universe, which obviously everybody's a little put out by. So much so that heroes and villains alike team up to try and stop him - even the legendary Darkseid pops up to stop this interloper from decimating the cosmos before he can get a chance.

Ultimately Brainiac, a long-term Superman villain who was also part of the resistance against Imperiex, betrayed the Earth and decided to shack up with the world destroyer, absorbing some of his new buddy's energy and vowing to use it to rule everything. Left with no choice after conventional attacks fail to halt their progress, Superman shoves them through a wormhole that takes them back to the exact moment of the Big Bang, which "spreads their consciousness across trillions of light years instantly". Which isn't exactly conventional murder, and most lawyers would have a hard time drawing up a precedent in court, but it sounds like killing to us.