Heroic Sacrifices in the Marvel Universe.
Marvel Universe
- Avengers: No Surrender:
- The Black Order and Lethal Legion participate in a game that uses Earth as the battlefield. To earn 'points', one member of their team must grab an artifact and sacrifice themselves to score for their team. The Avengers enter as a third team, and Red Wolf gives up his life to score for the Avengers (the Human Torch does the same, but without realizing that grabbing the artifact would kill him). Of course, it's then revealed that they don't actually die, but are kept in stasis until the game is finished.
- During the climax, the Avengers must keep stable a machine that bears the weight of the entire world. They only have Hercules on hand, as Thor is needed elsewhere and Hulk also isn't available. Sunspot then reveals that, without his Power Limiter, he has strength to match Hercules and can help keep the machine in place. In doing so, however, he burns up years of his life, and at the end of the series he quits the Avengers since he doesn't know long he has left to live.
- AXIS: Carnage is affected by a Mirror Morality Machine spell and after his Heel–Face Brainwashing used his own body to suppress a Doomsday Device that would've killed every non-mutant on Earth. He survives due to his From a Single Cell ability, but loses his legs in the process.
- Doctor Strange: Jericho Drumm, aka Brother Voodoo, sacrifices himself as his final act as Sorcerer Supreme, rebelling an invasion by a major entity calling itself Agamotto.
- Captain America: Steve Roger's death was like this. Wearing power dampening handcuffs, Cap notices an infrared sniper pointer on one of his captors. Being the selfless man he is he throws himself in the line of fire and promptly gets shot. This was the villain's evil plan to begin with, so here's one for the bad guys.
- Earth X: In the last comic, the Celestials had landed on Earth and is getting ready to destroy the planet. Tony Stark knew that he had to buy time for Galactus to arrive to fight. So, he went up in a giant Iron Man suit and fought off a bunch of Gods by himself.
- And prior to that, while the Celestials were still in orbit, Black Bolt attacked them, using his Super-Scream powers at maximum to call Galactus, which shatters his body.
- Fantastic Four: In Fantastic Four #587, Johnny Storm sacrifices his life to make sure an army of Annihlus-like creatures never escaped the Negative Zone.
- Fear Itself: Tony Stark, furious that Odin refuses to aid Earth, decides to sacrifice his sobriety to get the god's attention.
- Great Lakes Avengers: Mr. Immortal did a Heroic Sacrifice in the end of Issue #4 by committing suicide. Since his power is to return from the dead, that wasn't that heroic, or much of a sacrifice to begin with. Doorman on the other hand let himself die by getting Mr. Immortal to that very place, but he returned to life as some sort of angel of death.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: In Guardians of the Galaxy (2020) #2, Peter Quill stays behind to guard an exploding black hole bomb from angry gods. He's pretty confident that he'll get better, though.
- King Thor:
- Lord Librarian Shadrak sacrifices himself by blowing up the ruins of Omnipotence City to save the Goddesses of Thunder from Loki's Necro-Ravens.
- Having been convinced to embrace his role as the God of Stories once more, Loki sacrifices himself to rekindle the Sun after it's blackened by Gorr.
- Thor departs to sacrifice himself holding back the Entropy destroying what's left of the universe for as long as he can, leaving the Goddesses of Thunder in charge.
- The Mighty Thor: In Thor #362, Skurge the Executioner sacrificed himself to buy Thor and his companions time to escape from Hel (the Norse underworld). Double points because Thor had intended to do it, and Skurge knocked him out.
- The Magnificent Ms. Marvel:
- As the Beast Legions bear down on the heroes, the wicked king Maliq Zeer, having realized the pointlessness of his tyrannical ways, stays behind to hold the line against the monsters and buy the heroes enough time to save the day.
- The Saffan magicians need to give up their lives to power their interplanetary teleportation — one of them allows himself to be consumed this way to get them to Saffa in the first place, and the sole surviving one does so again to get the Khans back to Earth.
- Secret Avengers: Eric O'Grady, The Irredeemable Ant Man, sacrifices himself to get a child to safety. Before being stomped to death, he reflects on the fact that at least he got to die doing something decent for once in his life.
- Spider-Man:
- Averted by Peter David in the The Spectacular Spider-Man storyline, The Death of Jean DeWolff. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, the story concerns the death of police officer DeWolff in the first two pages of the arc, shot while she was resting in bed. As mentioned in the introduction to the TPB, Peter David was told by his editors that he was breaking all of the conventional Comic Book tropes, particularly the one having her death as the Heroic Sacrifice at the climax of the story.
- The climax of The Clone Saga sees Ben Reilly leaps between a Goblin Glider and Peter when the Green Goblin tries to kill Peter, similar to how Norman "died" (also trying to kill Peter) during The Night Gwen Stacy Died. The 2009-2010 alternate continuity version sees a Morally Superior Copy of Norman taking Ben's place when Harry does the same thing, allowing Ben to live.
- The Amazing Spider-Man #654 has J. Jonah Jameson's own wife, Marla, sacrifice her life to save her husband. The action and resulting death is so powerful that, for probably the first time in his life J.J. can't bring himself to blame Spider-Man for something that was his own fault!
- During the storyline Spider-Island, Mr. Fantastic confronts Eddie Brock, at this point as Anti-Venom, and tells him his symbiote is the cure to the virus that's giving people Spidey's powers and turns them into the Spider Queen's army of humongous spiders, but if he does so with so many people the Anti-Venom symbiote would die. Eddie's response? He goes to a church and gathers everyone infected and cures them. After the symbiote dies, Eddie realizes that, for the first time since his hell began, he finally became the hero he saw himself to be. He was the hero of Spider-Island.
- In one issue of Marvel Adventures, Spidey has to deal with Bullseye. The latter proceeds to dominate the fight and has the former dead to rights with a throwing knife. At the last minute, Flapper, an owl that Pete's girlfriend Chat had befriended, swoops in and takes the knife to the chest.
- The Thanos Imperative: At the end, Peter Quill and Nova stay in a collapsing universe to keep an unstoppably angry Thanos from escaping and going on an omnicidal rampage.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Ultimate Spider-Man does this with style, taking a bullet to the stomach meant for Ultimate Captain America, then racing back to rescue his friends and family from the escaped Ultimate Sinister Six before he finally succumbs to his wounds.
- Ultimate Captain America sacrifices himself by slamming an airplane into Galactus during Cataclysm: The Ultimates' Last Stand.
- Also in that story Thor pushes Galactus into the Negative Zone. Tony Stark was leaving the portal open for him to return, but he had to close it: he couldn't risk that Galactus might escape instead.
- Ultimatum: Yellowjacket gathers the Madrox dupes suicide bombing the Triskellion and takes them out to sea to save the rest of the Ultimates.
- Wolverine: In Death of Wolverine, Logan sacrifices himself by slashing open a vat of molten adamantium and allowing himself to be covered in it to spare three victims of being turned into what he had been turned into.
- X-23: Laura Kinney does this. A lot. In Target: X she's prepared to willingly return to the Facility with Kimura in order to spare her cousin and aunt (Kimura decides to torture them to death anyway to punish Laura for escaping, forcing Laura to fight back). She attacks Nimrod head-on to draw its attention away from the other kids and takes a direct blast of its weapon, which overloads her Healing Factor and she only survives because of Hellion's intervention. In X-Force she takes the Legacy Virus into herself and is about to throw herself into a vat of molten steel to destroy it, and only survives because of Elixir's intervention. In Avengers Arena she makes a frontal attack against Apex (who is now controlling a Sentinel) to try protecting the other kids, and only survives when Apex grabs the Idiot Ball. Significantly, Laura is borderline suicidally depressed and has a low or non-existent sense of self-worth due to her abusive upbringing, which drives her willingness to sacrifice herself for others.
- X-Men:
- One could probably say that the event that supposedly turned Jean Grey into the Dark Phoenix was this. After all, she never expected to survive the radiation, and did it simply to save the rest of the team. In the original storyline, she did survive, but was turned into the Dark Phoenix which led to the whole The Dark Phoenix Saga. After the whole thing was retconned and the Dark Phoenix was revealed to be a separate entity posing as Jean, her original action seemed more fitting of this Trope after all. (She was Only Mostly Dead due to the intervention of the Phoenix Force.)
- In Uncanny X-Men #227, the X-Men sacrifice their lives to fuel a spell to defeat Adversary. Luckily Roma uses her powers to resurrect them soon after.
- In Astonishing X-Men, Kitty Pryde phases a giant bullet through the Earth... and then is stuck out there.
- In Uncanny X-Men #390, Colossus injects himself with the antidote to the Legacy Virus knowing it will kill him, thereby releasing the cure into the air deleting Legacy from existence.
- X-Man ended with Nate Grey destroying his body, becoming Pure Energy, and merging with every organism on the planet in order to prevent a Planet Eater alien from harvesting all mitochondria on Earth (From the alien's perspective, Nate's energy contaminated the "crop").
- He later tried something similar - though it was closer to Villain's Dying Grace, given that he'd veered into Anti-Villain/Well-Intentioned Extremist territory - in the run-up to Age of X-Man, by using his vast powers to save the world from more or less everything before he burnt out. In his words, "I'm dying, mother. I just wanted to do something good before I go." The Age of X-Man itself was this, being a genuine attempt to provide the X-Men with their perfect world to free them of their lives of pain and conflict with his last act (he essentially ascended into an energy being again in the process, but he fully expected that he would die). Given his massive collection of traumas and Control Freak tendencies, it ended up as a horrifying Crapsaccharine World - though as the X-Men admitted, with some good points - and on realising this let them go. Still, points for trying.
- Cable actually manufactured one, knowing that his Psychic Powers were going to burn him up. So he ran a whole Genghis Gambit and positioned himself as the world's saviour, before making a burnt offering of himself in a massive fight with the Silver Surfer. Since he both survived and ended up being essentially resurrected (without his powers), the sarky and sincere Jesus comparisons In-Universe only increased. Being Cable, this was All According to Plan.
- Synch from Generation X died this way, throwing himself on a bomb to save several of his Jerkass classmates.
- Young Avengers: Iron Lad, Stature, and Patriot all did this at separate occasions. Iron Lad sacrificed himself by going back to the future to restore the timeline and save everyone, even if it meant that he would become Kang The Conqueror, one of the Avengers's worst enemies. Then, later on, Patriot literally takes a bullet (or a laser shot, it's not entirely clear) to the chest to save Captain America's life. He barely survives and gains new powers thanks to a blood transfusion from his grandfather. Even later on, Stature sacrificed herself against Dr Doom, who had gained godlike powers and became nigh-unstoppable.
