The Strangest Marvel Tradition is Faking Your Own [SPOILER]

Let’s get this out of the way: Marvel Comics characters rarely stay dead. Despite the fact that comic books love killing off characters for shock value or drama, a hero or villain’s demise is somewhat lessened by the fact that he or she will inevitably be back. Many times, the character is literally brought back from the dead through cosmic means, time travel, or powerful magic.

Other times, though, characters employ less drastic means of returning from the great beyond, by revealing they never died to begin with. Sometimes a character just wants a little extra “me” time – and what better way is there to drop out of public view by making everyone think you’re dead?

Plus, there are so many ways to fake your death, especially in the Marvel Universe, that it’s a wonder more characters aren’t doing this to give themselves an extended vacation. Morbid as the subject may be, here are some of the many creative methods Marvel superheroes and villains have used to fake their deaths.

Use A Life Model Decoy

Ever since he was first unfrozen in the 1960s, Captain America has suffered from the guilt that his best friend and sidekick Bucky Barnes died back in World War II. According to the comics, Bucky actually died in the same plane explosion that ended with Cap getting frozen, giving Steve Rogers something extra to mourn about as he got to live while Bucky died. It wasn’t until several decades had passed that Marvel Comics decided to retcon events and reveal that Bucky never died – he was just brainwashed into becoming the Winter Soldier.

Apparently, living all those years as a dead man made an impression on Bucky, because during the Fear Itself storyline, Bucky faked his death again while fighting the Red Skull’s daughter. How? Apparently, Black Widow and Nick Fury saved Bucky’s life with a dose of the Infinity Formula while allowing a SHIELD Life Model Decoy resembling the Winter Soldier to provide the Avengers with a body in Bucky’s place. At least Bucky made sure to secretly tell Cap he was still alive this time.

Those Life Model Decoys are so convincing that everyone from Nick Fury to Black Panther has used those androids at one point or another to fake their death. Given that an LMD can mimic a person’s appearance, body language, and even thought patterns, it’s easy to see why they’re so popular as body doubles.

Turn Your Evil Doppelganger Into Your Decoy

Of course, not all superheroes are fortunate enough to have SHIELD connections and a Life Model Decoy ready to take a bullet for them. In that case, some heroes have had to be more creative – like Daredevil who wound up using his own evil doppelganger to fake his own death. The doppelganger had been created by the cosmic villain the Magus as part of an evil army to take down the heroes during Marvel’s Infinity War crossover event. While most of the doppelgangers were destroyed, Daredevil’s double – named “Hellspawn” survived to plague Daredevil multiple times.

In a final battle, however, Hellspawn gets exposed to a virus that kills him while turning him into a physical copy of Matt Murdock. Daredevil, who’s going through some problems of his own, decides to take advantage of his twin corpse by passing it off as his own body and faking his death.

Brainwash A Clueless Civilian

Daredevil’s method of faking his own death might have seemed grisly, but it was nothing compared to how Spider-Man’s enemy the Hobgoblin kept his own identity a secret. Back when the Hobgoblin was introduced, only his creator Roger Stern knew his real identity. However, Stern left The Amazing Spider-Man before the Hobgoblin’s identity could be revealed, causing later writers – including Tom DeFalco, James Owsley, and Peter David to all have different ideas of who the Hobgoblin really was. Eventually, establishing that Peter Parker’s friend Ned Leeds was the Hobgoblin. Ned was killed off during the Spider-Man vs. Wolverine story, apparently ending the Hobgoblin’s story.

Except it didn’t. In 1997, Stern finally got to write the Spider-Man: Hobgoblin Lives miniseries where he was able to reveal that Hobgoblin was really corrupt businessman Roderick Kingsley, a character he had introduced while writing The Amazing Spider-Man. To explain how people could have mistaken Ned as the Hobgoblin, it was established that Kingsley had been brainwashing multiple people – including Ned and a petty thug named Lefty Donovan – into posing as the Hobgoblin and even dying in his place so he could evade suspicion. Now, that’s cold!

Employ a Shapeshifter

Back in the early days of Marvel Comics, people couldn’t simply come back from the dead – they needed a plausible explanation (well, by comics’ standards) for how they never died in the first place. This was true of Professor Charles Xavier who apparently died at the hands of the monstrous Grotesk. Later, however, Professor X re-emerged and revealed it wasn’t really him that died but a reformed shapeshifting villain with a terminal condition named The Changeling who had been posing as Xavier while the real Professor X was preparing for an alien invasion. Xavier even granted The Changeling a fraction of his own telepathic power to make the ruse more convincing.

While this was basically a variation of the “It wasn’t me, it was my twin brother” ruse so often seen in early soap operas, it did serve to bring Xavier back to the X-Men (until he was killed off – and brought back – and killed again multiple times). Considering Xavier’s real twin Cassandra Nova had tried to kill him while they were in the womb together, hiring a shapeshifter must have seemed like a safer choice…

Switch Places With A Cosmic Entity

Fans of the Dark Phoenix saga know all about how Jean Grey was exposed to massive amounts of radiation while piloting a shuttle back to Earth, only to re-emerge from the wreckage more powerful than ever as the near-omnipotent cosmic being the Phoenix. At first benevolent, Jean later becomes corrupted by her own power and decides to commit suicide, sacrificing herself once more for to save the universe.

Except she didn’t. In a bid to bring her back, later writers established that the Jean who died was actually the Phoenix Force who had taken on Jean’s form. The real Jean Grey was actually in a “healing cocoon” and remained out of commission for years until being re-awakened and rejoining the X-Men. It was a retcon that left a bad taste in the mouths of many fans, but at least Jean and Captain America now have something in common…

Clones, Clones, Clones!

When Spider-Man’s clone Ben Reilly seemingly returned from the dead, his arrival heralded the controversial “Clone Saga” that also saw the return of the clone’s dead creator Miles Warren (aka The Jackal) who tortured Peter Parker (and the reader) into wondering whether or not the Spider-Man they knew was the real Spidey. Amid all the chaos, readers almost missed working out how Ben and the Jackal were able to come back from the dead in the first place.

As it turned out, the Jackal had let a clone of himself die in his place. He also injected Ben Reilly with a chemical that made his body simulate death (meaning Spider-Man had thrown a live body into a smokestack, thinking he was dead) and saved the clone before the flames could take him. To make things more confusing, he tossed another dead clone in a Spider-Man outfit into the smokestack to make Ben and Peter wonder who had really died in that smokestack. It’s all very baffling – which is probably why when Ben came back from the dead the next time, writers simply wrote that the Jackal “brought him back.” Considering how needlessly complicated the Clone Saga was, basic resurrection was much easier for readers to swallow.