Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Case Files#50: Feral

Just try and put your body into this position and see how benevolent you are afterwards.

There was a time when Marvel’s X-Force was one of its hottest properties.  As drawn by Rob Liefeld, the book chronicled a group of hard-hitting mutants who believed in preemptive strikes against the bad mutants of the world, and likewise for not being so gentle and leaving them to walk away.  The original line-up has gotten a lot of mileage at Marvel, with many of the characters appearing in various X-books since the team first premiered in 1991.

So, what went wrong with Feral?

He’s Back! Do You Really Care How? The Death And Rebirth of Colossus

I think he forgot a parachute here.

Most big comics crossovers and story lines generally promise a death.  Most of the time, the death is someone nobody really cares about.  The death could be someone who rejoined the group after a sufficiently long absence, or some minor character, or someone no one really got around to liking anyway.  Sometimes readers can even eliminate a few contenders by looking to see which characters have solo books that aren’t being canceled anytime soon.  And sometimes the death is something even readers know won’t last very long, since the story itself seems to have set up a return somewhere along the line.

Then, occasionally, there’s a death that seems to come out of nowhere to a character people largely love, and in a way that just seems really cheap, with no clear path to return the character to the land of the living.  One such death would be when Colossus was killed off in the pages of Uncanny X-Men.