Firestorm blows up after accidentally impaling himself on The Shining Knight’s magic sword. (Infinite Crisis)
The villainous Endless Winter - whose powers, bizarrely enough, come from wearing the transplanted skin of the superheroine Icemaiden (who, in turn, had been flayed alive in order to affect the procedure) - dies at the end of a conflict with Batwoman. Evil mastermind Prometheus adds her to his considerable bodycount remotely. (Cry For Justice)
Victorian Wonder Woman snaps the neck of Cowboy Wonder Woman in the pages of Countdown:Arena.
The Global Guardians are off-handedly murdered in gory flashbacks provided by the villain Prometheus. Besides further trimming DC’s the ranks of DC’s non-white and non-American superheroes (Freedom Beast, an black African superhero, is murdered earlier in the series), counted among the dead is The Tasmanian Devil, one of their very few gay male characters. (Cry For Justice)
Black Adam pokes the Psycho Pirate’s eyes out of the back of his own head in what appears to be a brutally botched Three Stooges routine. (Infinite Crisis)
Slightly more baffling is why superhero The Ray is attempting to clarify the villainous Psycho Pirate’s instructions to his ally, Power Girl. “You mean you want her to beat me to death like this other superhero who was beaten to death, right? Just being clear here. Don’t want any crossed wires - Okay Power Girl, you heard the man, beat me like Bizarro did to the Human Bomb. You’ve seen the tape, right?”
The superhero Jade succumbs to a fatal lightning strike before the eyes of boyfriend Kyle Rayner, whose earlier girlfriend is immortalized for personifying DC’s trend of “Women in Refrigerators”.
Here’s a nice, big, green slaughter of tens of thousands provided in the pages of DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis. Happy St.Patrick’s Day!
Hawkgirl briefly precedes her male counterpart Hawkman in having their hearts ripped out of their bloodied and battered bodies - their murderers are the gore-hungry reincarnated shades of the Elongated Man Ralph Dibny and his wife Sue, themselves only recently murdered in the series Identity Crisis and 52. (Blackest Night)
The Joker murders his former allies, The Royal Flush Gang, in a scene where it’s also mentioned that gag villain Kite-Man has been dropped - fatally, one presumes - from a tall building. (Infinite Crisis)
Given the low profile maintained by these characters for the last several years, it seems unecessary to revive them just to kill them again. If a story-telling reason is to be found, it must be to increase the blood flow and body count.
In order to lend some gravitas to superheroic man-in-an-ape’s-body Congorilla, the African hero Freedom Beast is briefly revived and then offed. (Cry For Justice)
