Who Wants To Live Forever / Comic Books

Examples by publisher:

Dark Horse Comics

• The Conan the Barbarian story "The Forever Phial" is about an immortal wizard who has grown tired of his endless, meaningless life. He wants to die, and since his immortality does not prevent him from being killed, he uses his powers to lure Conan to his tower and force a confrontation. Soon enough, Conan hacks his way through the tower's defenders and gives the wizard what he wants.
• In Empowered, the Caged Demonwolf tells Ninjette that normally he thinks Living Forever Is Awesome. But since Ninjette is a mortal woman and she will die eventually, he will miss and remember her until the end of the universe.
• In the Hellboy story "Darkness Calls" HB's main enemy is Koshchei the Deathless, a Russian warlord whose soul was hidden in an egg (that's inside a rabbit, that's inside a duck, that's inside a goat) by the Baba Yaga. When we meet him, he is sitting on his throne covered in cobwebs just because he no longer gives a damn. The only way that Koshchei agrees to go after Hellboy is the Baba Yaga promises to let him die if he does.

DC Comics

General/Unsorted

• Challengers of the Unknown: Multi-Man is "sort of" immortal. Any time he is killed, he comes back to life with a new superpower. It's never explicitly stated whether or not this can happen throughout eternity, or if he will otherwise have an ordinary lifespan. Other super villains frequently take advantage of this, killing him repeatedly until they get a power they want, most notably the Joker during Joker's Last Laugh and Shilo Norman. Needless to say, Multi-Man is pretty traumatized by his power.
• Great Ten: The Seven Deadly Brothers' powers are derived from a curse placed upon him, that he would have seven lifetimes of mastery in the martial arts. This gave him the ability to split into seven bodies that are each unparalleled grandmasters of a different style, but he is fated to live out all seven of those lifetimes. When he is one person, his mind is a jumble, housing so many different personae that all want different things; only when split and in combat does he know peace. He's been living with this for over 300 years and he's got a lot more mileage in him yet. He admits, however, that he feels he deserves it.
  • Contrast Immortal Man in Darkness, who will eventually be killed by the technology of the Dragonwing and replaced by another pilot. There are dozens of men waiting desperately in the wings for the chance.
• Hellblazer: John Constantine's Cromwellian ancestor Harry Constantine wound up cursed with immortality by a supernatural entity. It wasn't a particularly strong curse though, so he was buried alive to keep anyone from ever finishing the job. Over three centuries later, he would be exhumed by his descendant twice, with the second time resulting in his death. Having been left underground for so long to the point that his body was half-rotten and festering with worms, he gladly submitted when John took his head off with a shovel.
• Justice League of America:
  • Professor Anthony Ivo, an old foe, started out an Immortality Seeker and successfully came up with a viable Immortality Inducer. However, while he succeeded in making himself immortal, the serum he came up with had the serious drawback of progressively and painfully hardening his body to the point of immobility. These days he pingpongs between this trope and Immortality Seeker — while he's terrified of living forever in pain, he's just as equally terrified of dying.
  • From the same book, the Grey Man was a Middle Ages sorcerer who figured a way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence high enough to be noticed by the Lords of Order, who set him to the task of collecting the remains of energy dropped by dreaming minds across the globe. After centuries of doing this, he was dreadfully bored of his existence to the point of carrying out a Big Bad-worthy plan to recreate the original ritual and demand the Lords lift their punishment and let him die. It turned out they had been impressed by the original ritual and his existence was supposed to be a gift. They offered to rescind it, and the tearful Grey Man's existence ended, with the Lords barely fazed by the entire hoopla.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The comic eventually makes this a plot point with Mina Harker and Alan Quatermain after they become immortal and eternally young after the events of Volume 2 (by bathing in the Fire of Immortality from She). Unlike fellow immortal Orlando, who's well over 3000 years old in present day and personifies Living Forever Is Awesome, Mina and Alan barely make it past 100 years before the pressure starts getting to them. In Alan's case it's even worse because he was already well into his 70's before he got his youth back and had been dealing with drug addiction for years on top of that.
  • Mina believes that Orlando has gone slightly insane from the events of his life and all he has experienced and is manic rather than happy. As shown in Century: 2009, she might be on to something as Orlando is showing symptoms of PTSD.
• Lucifer: A minor character from one issue is cursed with immortality by her gods several thousand years ago. Every day, her body is reverted to the way it was the moment of the curse, which means that she has had the same miscarriage every day for thousands of years.
• Resurrection Man: Ressurection Man has the power not only to come back to life after dying, but also manifest a new power related to prevent the last thing that killed him from killing him again. He went through the 'repeated killings' technique, thanks to Hitman, three years before Multi-Man.
• The Sandman (1989):
  • "Facade" depicts Elemental Girl as a washed-up superhero who takes no joy from life, but finds it impossible to commit suicide due to her powers.
  • The demons of Hell while away their endless time in Hell by coming up with wordplay and slang to use when speaking to each other and the damned. (e.g., speaking only in iambic pentameter).
  • The trope is, however, averted by Hob Gadling, a regular man who was granted the gift of immortality. He has his ups and downs, but he persistently refuses the offer of death, because dying would be stupid when there's always so much more to see and do.
  • In "A Winter's Tale", Death says that at some point in her younger days she got so tired at living creatures getting angry at her when their time was up so that she quit her job and let everyone live. She later changed her mind after seeing that the alternative to things dying "wasn't very nice".
• Superman:
  • In The Immortal Superman, Superman cannot die of old age, and he has become all but indestructible because of several well-meaning aliens removing his usual weaknesses. By the end of the story, Superman has lived one million years, and everybody who he has cared for has been dead for a very long while.
  Master Healer Robot: At last... You nearly died... but I saved your life!
  Superman: What? Why did you do a fool thing like that? I'm over a million years old... I've outlived everything and everybody I cared for! I wanted to die!
  • Superboy 1980: In issue #1, two aliens called Byrn and Myla make themselves immortal by accident while developing a cure for an alien plague. Several millions of years of aimless wandering, loneliness and boredom later, they deem their immortality to be a curse.
  • In the The Adventures of Superboy comic-book series tie-in, the title character and his friend Lana Lang meet Ponce de Leon in the modern age, who was cursed with immortality, and ended up dying at the end of a story where he leads somebody to the fabled Fountain of Youth and gets shot because its waters actually had no power to revert or stop aging.
  • The Cyborg Superman seeks to end his life after the loss of his human body and suicide of his wife. An immortal Energy Being, he is able to survive any injury, including disintegration or being thrown into a black hole, without being destroyed. As such, he purposely antagonizes Superman, Green Lantern and other powerful beings in the hope that one of them will find a way to kill him. The whole reason he agreed to join the Sinestro Corps in the Sinestro Corps War was because the Anti-Monitor promised to kill him. After that whole fiasco, he actually did die, only to be revived by the Manhunters.
  • In "Superman: Red Son" this is the ultimate fate of the Earth, which turns out to be Krypton. After defeating Superman Lex Luthor brings about such an age of prosperity as to solve all the world's problems, increasing the individual lifespan to centuries and then to millenia; and leaves Earth civilization with "nothing left to do but die" which it eventually accomplishes only after a billion years, when its people allow the Sun to destroy their planet via complete inaction except for one scientist, who sticks his infant son in a space ship and sends him back in time ...
  • In Superman vs. Shazam!, Karmang manages to make himself immortal, but in the process he accidentally kills one billion of Martians whose souls become bonded to him, and who will haunt him forever unless he finds a way to set them free.
  • In Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Mxyzptlk says that one problem with immortality is that one becomes bored. The first two thousand years he tried doing nothing, being carried on inertia, the next two he was good and after that another two thousand years of being mischievous (as usually portrayed). Things go very bad when he gets bored again and tries to be plain evil.
• The Warlord: The eponymous character is fond of reminding the less valiant warriors around him that they never wanted to live forever anyway, during the heat of battle. This is particularly prevalent in his more suicidal periods.
• Watchmen: One of the reasons Dr. Manhattan isn't all there anymore. The other one being his non-linear sense of time.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Dalma is able to find a whole contingent of Amazons who want to give up their immortality with her and leave Paradise Island to live in the wider world. None of them are permitted to, being treated as criminals by Aphrodite and locked in Venus Girdles to brainwash them into enjoying their position.
  • Wonder Woman: Black and Gold: Discussed in "I'm Ageless", with Batman and Wonder Woman having a back-and-forth on how serious she actually takes being a superhero given that her immortality makes it so that she'll outlive virtually every friend, ally, and even enemy she'll ever know. At the end of the story she passes Batman's grave on her way to put flowers on the headstone of an even older friend.
• Xombi: Dumaka is an African Xombi who finds despair in how his eternal life has resulted in him outliving all his loved ones over the centuries. Fortunately, Xombis apparently die once they lose the will to keep living.

Disney

• The whole plot of a particular Disney Ducks Comic Universe story with Scrooge McDuck revolves around a character who claims to be hundreds of years old. It turns out to be a true claim, and Scrooge is the key to finding the antidote to his immortality, which he is seeking because he is so tired of living. During the story it is revealed he gained his immortality via eating a mysterious blue powder.
  Scrooge: Hey, there's nothing in here but a vial of grey powder.
  Khan Khan: The chemical antidote to a blue powder I foolishly swallowed, too many years ago. [swallows the grey powder]

Image Comics

• The Goddamned: Cain's cursed mark gives him a Healing Factor and Resurrective Immortality, having wandered the Earth for over 1,600 years since he "invented murder." He has since spent that entire time surviving monsters and monstrous humans, trying and failing to die at every opportunity.
• Invincible once visited a future, where, after some serious cataclysm, the Immortal saved remains of humanity and become their leader. However, years later he get tired of his life, and immortality right to the point he decided to turn into a merciless dictator, hoping that the oppressed people will form a resistance and find a way to kill him. Invincible also isn't exactly crazy about his half-Viltrumite life expectancy far exceeding that of his human friends.
• The revivers of Revival regenerate most injuries within a few minutes. Most of them are emotionally detached from everything, unable to feel joy or accomplishment and without any remaining goals. Their families are unable to grieve and in several cases shun them.

Marvel Comics

• The Avengers:
  • The Elders of the Universe are immortal due to their fanatical devotion to a specific aspect of life (gardening, playing games, running, fighting). While none of them seem depressed, they're pretty much irretrievably insane.
  • Played with during The Avengers (Kurt Busiek). Thor states that as a god, he realizes he's destined to outlive most of his friends on the team, but that doesn't stop him from going absolutely berserk when he thinks that Captain America, Black Knight and Quicksilver have been killed by the Presence. He then advises Firebird (who at least may possess some form of immortality herself) to be careful about forming bonds, as it will only be that much more painful when her friends and family inevitably pass away.
  • The Vision suffers from similar feelings in The Avengers (Mark Waid). Hercules is the one to pull him out of his funk, telling him that as long as he remembers and cherishes his friends, their memories will make them immortal long after they are dead.
• Deadpool: Deadpool falls in love with the cosmic entity representing Death and is cursed to never die by a magic-using mercenary named T-Ray. In one comic, Deadpool waits in a refrigerator for nearly 1000 years, spawning a second personality out of boredom to play hangman with. On several occasions, many characters talk about how Deadpool despises his own immortality. His psychologist Doctor Bong states that he is afraid to live. Deadpool himself says "You know what else is boring? Immortality." Meanwhile, he throws a bucket of blood to the sea and dives for a little shark fishing.
• Fantastic Four:
  • Doctor Doom achieved immortality at one point with the intention of trading it away — as he put it,
    "My years already feel like eons. I fear the eons themselves cannot be endured."
    • He may have done it again, if indeed it's not the same case. He became immortal just to use it up so that he could vanquish his only real opponent — his own conscience.
  • After dedicating his entire villainous career to cheating death by killing anything in the universe that might be a threat to him (which is everything), Annihilus's latest incarnation has come around to this line of thought. As it turns out, in the Negative Zone, the endless cycle of death and resurrection gets old fast.
• The Eternals: In Eternals (2006), Sprite (the only child Eternal) goes to enormous lengths to make the Eternals into normal people who age (and can die) because he's sick of being stuck at the same age. (In the end, he only makes himself mortal, the others are restored by the Dreaming Celestial). A later Marvel handbook would say that Sprite was suffering a form of dementia for Eternals called Mahd Wy'ry, which is described as being due to the fact that they're made to be immortal but psychologically are still human enough to eventually break under it. Periodic Uni-Minds are intended to stave this off.
• Great Lakes Avengers: Mister Immortal has tried suicide numerous times using increasingly drastic means. It's not until he finds out his true destiny that he finally accepts his "condition".
• Spider-Man: In the graphic novel Hooky, Spider-man meets a sorceress named Mandy who is cursed not only with immortality, but eternal childhood, and she hates it. Every now and then, she leaves her home dimension to educate herself, and finds a family to adopt her, but eventually, people realize that she isn't aging, at which point they either give her hormone treatment or try to burn her at the stake (depending on which dimension she's in) forcing her to flee and start over again. During the course of the story, she and Spider-Man face and ultimately defeat a creature that she believes was sent by an enemy of her family to kill her; in truth, defeating it breaks the curse, and she is able to start growing up.
• The Thanos Imperative: At the end, Thanos goes on a rampage when he realizes that one of the consequences of his Thanatos Gambit to defeat the Cancerverse is that he can never die. Since he is in love with the Anthropomorphic Personification of Death, the idea of eternal unending life forever apart from her drives him mad. He eventually decides on a much worse tack than usual in his madness.
• The Tomb of Dracula: Varnae, the first vampire in the Marvel Universe, ultimately succumbed to this. Choosing Dracula as his successor in 1459, Varnae passed on nearly all of his power to the young vampire before committing suicide via sunlight.
• Venom: In Venom: The End, Venom is doomed to tragically outlive every, especially Eddie Brock, after years of desperately trying to extend his life.
• X-23: Downplayed: Laura has yet to seriously examine the fact that she will remain young and live on long after her friends and loved ones grow old and die. However it does get subtly referenced when, while trying to cope with Logan's death during her focus issue of The Logan Legacy, Laura remarks to Kitty how she thought Logan would always be there for her because of his (and thus by extension her) mutation making him functionally immortal. His death severely rocks her view of her own future as a result, not least of which because it leaves her feeling alone.
• X-Men: Averted with Moira McTaggart in The Krakoan Age, what she really hates about her power is the "Groundhog Day" Loop effect of her so-called Resurrective Immortality (she only has 10 lives and lost her first one to old age). She became extremely pissed when her power was permanently removed even though she doesn't have any extra lives remaining. Moira is in fact very pleased to find herself being uploaded into an immortal, powerful robotic body.

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Other comics/creators:

• Alpha Gods: Cravely's main motivation for serving Malak is so that he can honor his end of their bargain and finally be allowed to die.
• Anderson: Psi-Division: The traiterous Judge Fauster unleashes the Half-Life virus on Mega-City One so he can get access to immortality. After he's arrested for being responsible for over a million deaths, he gloats that he'll still be there when the city has crumbled into dust. Chief Hershey orders him locked up for eternity so he won't get to enjoy it.
• Zzed, a supervillain from Golden Age Airboy series and its 1980s revival, has been immortal for tens of thousands of years. Although originally, he enjoyed the possibilities eternal life afforded him, he eventually grew sick of seeing people around him dying and set out to find a way to end his life. As technology progressed, he took increasingly drastic measures, until, in the Total Eclipse crossover, he set out to destroy the multiverse.
• Vogelein in A Clockwork Faerie is, a clockwork fairy who must be wound every thirty-six hours to stay alive. So she's passed from caregiver to caregiver like an heirloom. She's basically tied to each guardian and has to stay a secret, so when one dies without passing her on...
• Suspense: In Issue #14, "Death and Doctor Parker", the titular doctor injects himself with an immortality serum, planning to Take Over the World, but finds that first loneliness gets to him, and then eventually humans evolve to large-headed beings who regard him the way modern humans might regard a living example of Homo erectus; he ends up in a zoo. He outlives even those beings and ends up "ruling" over a planet that has no sapient life. By the end, having long since been driven insane by his isolation, Parker gleefully runs into a swarm of giant wasps and lets himself be torn to pieces — but only goes on living as a pile of dismembered body parts.
• In Doctor Who Magazine, this happens particularly badly to Sato Katsura, a 17th century Samurai who the Doctor accidentally gave immortality to when healing him with nanites, though what Sato wants most is an honourable death, leading him to hate the Doctor. He ends up living for 4 centuries, not enjoying fighting as he knows he will win, allows himself to be captured by the Spanish Inquisition and spend 50 years imprisoned. Finally, when Kroton the good Cyberman becomes Keeper of the Glory, he enables Sato to die.
• ElfQuest: Any elf not descended from Timmorn Yellow-Eyes is by default immortal. They react in different ways as the years progress; Rayek's reaction was to eventually perfect the art of angsting about it.
• A Harvey Comics Golden Age villain who called himself Satan was originally a 16th century Spanish explorer who discovered the Fountain of Youth. Upon drinking from it, he was turned into a devil-like creature, so he became a villain in hopes that someone would eventually kill him. None of the heroes ever succeed, but not for the lack of trying.
• In Lori Lovecraft, Amma Ton is a priest from ancient times who attempted to kill the gods for taking his love from him. The gods punished him by trapping him a dimension were he does not age, but also cannot leave. He becomes an intermediary for humans looking to make deals with demons, and hates his unending existence until he encounters Lori (whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his true love) and she reminds him of the better man he used to be.
• In Phil Foglio's Comic-Book Adaptation of Myth Adventures (but not the original novel), the villain's motivation is to get enough power to cancel the immortality enchantment on him. He never specifies exactly why he wants to die, but apparently he's been trying for a long time.
• The protagonist of Drew Hayes's Poison Elves mentions in one episode that elves find it difficult to care deeply for anything or anyone, because of their long lifespans. Of course he's something of a Sociopathic Hero so his outlook may not really reflect the psychology of the elven race in general.
• In the EC Comics story "The Precious Years", a perfect future society has extended people's lifespans indefinitely by giving them all rejuvenation shots. The 550-year-old protagonist, who looks 25, has had enough of it all.
• Occurs frequently enough in Transformers comics that writer Simon Furman has made a Furmanism out of "Never did want to live forever!"
• Warren Ellis' Lazarus Churchyard, a comic book character, was unable to kill himself because his brain was trapped in an indestructible body.
• In Scott McCloud's Zot!, deranged cyborg Dekko turns 13 people into robots without their knowledge or consent specifically to make them effectively immortal. As they come to realize what had happened to them, not a one of them accepts or likes the change, a fact that broke what used to be Dekko's heart. Dekko himself, however, does want to live forever, one of the many indicators of how far removed from his humanity he is.

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