8 Superheroes Who Saw The End Of The World

4. The X-Men... Like, A Lot

Moira Powers of X 6
Marvel Comics / R.B. Silva & Pepe Larraz

As mentioned earlier the X-Men are pretty much the undisputed kings of the post-apocalypse. It's a good thing, then, that most of these stories also happen to be some of the comic's best, with Days of Future Past and Age of Apocalypse by far the two most prominent.

Although the former doesn't represent the end of the world for mankind as a whole, it does spell the end for mutants, who've all been hunted down by the sentinels. Kitty Pryde has to be sent back in time to avert the timeline, and the X-Men get to breathe a sigh of relief until the next inevitable time-travelling mishap occurs.

Age of Apocalypse was arguably just as messy. When Professor X's son, David Haller, tries to pull a Skynet by going back in time to kill Magneto, he accidentally kills his father instead. This leads to a reality where Apocalypse is able to take over the Earth unopposed by the X-Men, with En Sabah Nur's survival of the fittest doctrine leading to many deaths and some brutal reimaginings of beloved X-characters.

More recently, in Jonathan Hickman, R.B. Silva, Pepe Larraz and Marte Garcia's House of X/Powers of X, it was revealed how Moira MacTaggert was herself a mutant with the specific ability of reincarnation. She lives through nine lives, all of which end in some terrifying future where humanity or some other force wipes out mutantkind, and so in her tenth, she resolves to unite Professor X and Magneto so that they can hopefully avert disaster.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.