This article is about the term Marvel Death. For the Marvel Comics characrer Death, see Death (Marvel Comics)
The dramatic cover of X-Men #42 (1968) advertising the "death" of Professor X. The character would return months later. Art by Don Heck
Marvel Death is a term comic book fans use to refer to the killing off and predictable return of a long-running character.
Comic book writers often kill-off characters to gather publicity and dramatic tension. Occasionally, a writer will allow readers to think a character has died and conceive of a complex way to reveal that the character is actually alive within a single storyline. But more often, the publishing house intends to permanently kill off a long-running character, but fans pressure the company to bring the character back in a subsequent storyline through retconing.
The term Marvel Death is derived from Marvel Comics, whose tendency to kill-off and return long-running characters is infamous, especially within its X-Men franchise. But Marvel is certainly not the only publishing house to do so.
The prominence of Marvel Deaths has lead to the common piece of comic shop wisdom: “No one is really dead, except Bucky Barnes,” the 1940s-era sidekick of Captain America, who has remained dead for more than 50 years.
Death quickly slaughtered the demon troupe and others barring its path and continued its descent into Hell, but Satan prepared his Crystal of Torment, into which was compressed countless billions of damned souls.
Instead, he hurled the Crystal of Torment at Death; as this was exactly what it had wanted, Death used its scythe to cleave the Crystal, releasing all of the souls it contained.
The concentration of life within the souls negated Death's existence, at which point Satan realized that not only had he relinquished all of the souls in his domain, he had destroyed the means by which he would acquire any further souls.
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