Marvel Comics has been telling amazing stories since the Golden Age, but we wouldn’t get the Marvel Universe until the Silver Age, when the Fantastic Four’s debut led to the best new heroes of the ’60s. Since then, readers have seen some of the most insane events in superhero comics. We’ve seen massive battles between heroes and villains, wars that have raged across the stars, and disasters at an unimaginable scale. These catastrophes have fueled some of the biggest stories in comic history, challenging the heroes in a variety of ways. The Marvel Universe’s history is calamitous, and that’s being nice about it.
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These disasters have often changed the face of the universe. They have led to years of stories, and have destroyed more lives than we could imagine in the real world at times. These seven disasters are the biggest in Marvel history, calamities that sometimes boggle the mind.
7) The Stamford Incident
Civil War is the most important ’00s Marvel event, even if fans nowadays have numerous (often valid) complaints about the story, and it never would have happened without the Stamford Incident. The New Warriors went after a house full of villains and Nitro used his powers to explode and ended up vaporizing most of a neighborhood, killing 600 people, including 60 children. While the casualties numbers are lower than some other Marvel disasters, the whole thing led to numerous catastrophes down the road, including the superhero civil war. Casualties aren’t everything in a disaster and the Stamford Incident proves it.
6) M-Day
House of M has always been hot garbage, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t important. It ended with one of the greatest disasters in Marvel history, the little event known as M-Day. Scarlet Witch created a world where mutants were king, the heroes got their memories back, and then tried to undo her work. After Magneto got his memory back and tried to kill Quicksilver, who gave Wanda the idea in the first place, she decided that mutants were the problem and said three worlds – “No more mutants.” The world went back to normal, but suddenly the vast majority of the mutant race loss their powers. This was genocide, plain and simple, and while a lot of people like to pretend no one died, how many mutants have powers their lives depend on? How many were flying when they lost their powers? Thousands almost certainly died and it led to the mutant race being more endangered than ever.
5) The Destruction of Genosha
Genosha was a country that enslaved mutants, even creating mutates to bolster their slave labor force. The X-Men broke their old government and eventually it was handed to Magneto after he threatened the world, creating a mutant nation that tried one attack on humanity that the X-Men also stopped. Cassandra Nova, the secret evil twin of Charles Xavier, was able to use the DNA of Donald Trask III, relative of Sentinel creator Bolivar Trask, to take control of a Master Mold and unleash three Mega-Sentinels on the nation. Sixteen million mutants died in minutes, one of the largest mass casualty events in Marvel history.
4) The Destruction of the Skrull Homeworld
Galactus is the World-Devourer and has consumed many worlds over the years. He’s always been stopped from destroying the Earth, but other worlds weren’t so lucky, like the Skrull Homeworld. The Skrulls couldn’t vie with the power of the cosmic titan and the Skrull Empire was destroyed. While this might not seem like all that big of a deal, it led to Veranke marshaling her people and becoming the new empress. This led to the event book Secret Invasion, where the Skrull forces, using techniques mastered after taking the Illuminati hostage to gain powers, replacing heroes, villains, and members of SHIELD. They attacked humanity, meaning to take the planet, and many died before the heroes could stop it.
3) The Annihilation Wave
The Annihilation Wave was one of the most cataclysmic events in Marvel history. Out of nowhere, a massive force appeared in space and began moving inexorably forward, destroying everything in its way. A force of cosmic heroes and villains banded together to try to stop the destruction, eventually discovering that it was under the command of Annihilus and hailed from the Negative Zone. Countless billions died, but the Wave did eventually do some good, helping fight against the Builders in Infinity.
2) Thanos’s Snap
Infinity Gauntlet is one of the most important event comics ever, as the MCU would use it as the endgame (ha bloody ha) for their most popular years. Much like the movies, Thanos used the Gauntlet to snap away half the universe, but it was much worse than the movie one. Planets all over the universe started suffering terrible natural disasters, killing trillions, and then people just started disappearing, like in the movies. While it was all undone, for a time the planets of the universe didn’t know if they were going to see the next day or not.
1) The Incursions
Jonathan Hickman’s run on the Avengers was the last time the team was great and it revolved around the worst disaster of them all: the Incursions. The Beyonders began to destroy the multiverse as part of an experiment, with Earths colliding with each other and destroying their entire universes, with the Illuminati, the Cabal, and Doctor Doom all trying their own methods to stop them. We use the word “countless” a lot, but in this case it works – countless beings died, as entire universes burned away to nothing. It was a disaster on another level, one that would lead to the birth of a new multiverse.
What do you think is the worst Marvel disaster? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
