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Curated playlist

Fictional assassins in comics

  • Wolverine (character)Wolverine, the Marvel Comics superhero, shares his everyday name with a mountain. Writer Chris Claremont took the name Logan from Canada's Mount Logan for an issue of X-Men in 1977. He liked the idea of the tallest mountain naming the…
  • Sabretooth (character)Sabretooth, the Marvel Comics villain whose real name is believed to be Victor Creed, makes a point of finding Wolverine on his birthday. Writer Chris Claremont described the ritual in his own words. On every one of his birthdays, he said,…
  • DeathstrokeDeathstroke wears a mask split between black and orange, and it covers a right eye that is missing. He is Slade Joseph Wilson, a mercenary and former U.S. Army soldier. Within the DC Universe he is regarded as the greatest and deadliest…
  • Kraven the HunterKraven the Hunter, born Sergei Nikolaevich Kravinoff, greeted Spider-Man with a borrowed phrase. In The Amazing Spider-Man issue 15, published in August 1964, he called the hero "the most dangerous game." The line comes from a short story…
  • Bullseye (Marvel Comics)Bullseye, the Marvel Comics assassin, once killed a man with a toothpick thrown through a window from a hundred yards away. No gun was involved, and no bomb. His menace comes from an eerie gift for turning almost any ordinary object into a…
  • Guts (Berserk)Guts, the hero of the manga Berserk, was born from his hanged mother's corpse. His adoptive father later sold him.
  • X-23X-23 is the designation of Laura Kinney, a Marvel Comics superheroine who began life on a television screen rather than a comic page. Her creator, writer Craig Kyle, described her as "Pinocchio for Marvel Comics, she's a samurai sword…
  • Spawn (character)Spawn, the antihero of Image Comics, debuted in Spawn #1 in May 1992, and that first issue sold 1.7 million copies. The hero is Albert Francis Simmons, called Al, who is better known simply as Spawn. Todd McFarlane created him. Simmons…
  • Soldier BoySoldier Boy is a superhero name worn by three different men in the comic series Herogasm and The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and John McCrea. On television, the name belongs to a single man who combines all three. One comic version is a…
  • Mystique (character)Mystique, the blue-skinned shapeshifter of Marvel Comics, has an earliest recorded appearance in her own stories that dates to the years around 1900. At that time she lived in a male guise as a consulting detective. She formed a romance…
  • Elektra (character)Elektra Natchios first appeared in Daredevil #168, a Marvel Comics issue dated January 1981, and her creator never planned for her to return. Frank Miller wrote that issue as essentially a filler story. He meant it to be her only…
  • DeadpoolDeadpool, the masked mercenary of Marvel Comics, once ended a storyline by breaking out of his own book and into the real world. There he confronted the writers and artists who were making the comic, and he turned to the reader with a…
  • Ra's al GhulRa's al Ghul, the DC Comics supervillain best known as Batman's immortal rival, once admitted that he could not keep track of his own age. In Azrael #6, from July 1995 and written by Dennis O'Neil, he tells the young hero Jean-Paul Valley:…
  • Bucky BarnesBucky Barnes is a Marvel Comics hero whose fans once turned his death into a rule of the genre. The saying went that in comics, "No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben." For many years, Bucky was the first name on that…
  • Bane (DC Comics)Bane, the DC Comics supervillain, got his name from an insult. At the age of eight, a boy inside the Peña Duro prison on the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca stabbed a criminal who was trying to use him to learn the prison's secrets. It…

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