Dr. Harleen Quinn, an unqualified psychiatrist who slept her way through medical school, gets a position at a notorious hospital for the criminally insane hoping to gather material for a tell-all book. She becomes obsessed with a clever and manipulative psychopathic serial killer who pursuades her to help him escape. He rewards her by slitting her throat.
Apaches chased John Carter into a cave. He succumbed to dehydration in the dry Arizona environment. The Apaches looted his corpse.
Billy Batson uses the magic word Shazam! to call down mystical lightning, and is promptly charred to ashes.
The hero Green Lantern’s career was short lived once criminals realized that they could just walk right though his green light-constructs and beat him up.
Unbeknownst to him, Johnny Thunder is given a Badhnesian Thunderbolt (sort of a magical Genie) who follows his commands. Unfortunately, the magic word to summon the Thunderbolt is “Btfsplk.” Since Johnny has no reason to say it accidentally, and mispronounces it anyway, he never calls on the power.
Say, you would think they’d give him a better magic word.
Steve Rogers is transformed from skinny nerd to muscular hero via a Super Soldier formula. A few weeks afterward, however, he flunks a urine test when it turns out the formula was just plain old steroids. He’s suspended for the duration of the war.
I’m thinking a prolapsed colon would be a fitting result.
What kind of idiot can’t survive on a dessert island? The hot fudge waterfall alone should supply enough calories - to say nothing of the gumdrop mountains.
Traumatized by a lifetime of abuse, Walter Kovacs becomes a paranoid with poor social skills. He wanders the streets as a homeless man before ending up in prison and subsequently meeting a violent end.
Wait a second…
Dr. William Magnus makes a stunning breakthrough in artificial intelligence by creating a “responsometer” that can animate robots constructed entirely out of single metallic elements. He very nearly succeeds in getting the funding to purchase enough gold and platinum to build human-sized robots of those metals, but his grant is ultimately denied and the entire project terminated on the grounds that his idea of constructing a robot (or anything else) out of pure liquid mercury is obviously insane.
A green-skinned shape shifting Martian becomes stranded on Earth. He spends most of his time in hiding and has as little to do with humans as possible. But enough sightings of him occur for an urban legend about the “Martian ManFleer” to arise.
World renowned surgeon Stephen Strange suffers a car accident which leaves him with a permanent tremor in his hands. Though the tremor is slight, he is unable to perform surgery, the one thing that gave his life meaning. He travels the world for a cure, but nothing works. One day, while hanging around the docks of an Asian port city he hears a tale of a Magician who lives in the Himalayas. All of Dr. Strange’s instincts and learning tell him there is no such thing as magic, but he is desperate. With nothing to lose he visits the magician in his remote enclave.
All his instincts and training were right. There is no such thing as magic. The magician was just a charlatan fleecing gullible tourists. Dr. Strange eventually accepts his condition and writes a popular book about his travels. He is now a lecturer at John’s Hopkins Medical School.
Ray Palmer stumbles on a piece of white dwarf star matter. However, it is far too heavy for him to pick up, so he ignores it and goes on to experiment on something else that has a better chance of him getting tenure.
Norrin Radd, astronomer from the planet Zenn-La, meets Galactus, who wants to destroy the planet.
Norrin pleads with Galactus to save the planet. Galactus, impressed with his argument, kills him last.
Following WWI, Lamont Cranston vanished in The Orient. He began a new life as the powerful warlord/opium dealer Ying Ko. In 1928, he allied with Chiang Kai Shek in the reunification. Following the triumph of the Communists in 1950, he was executed as an enemy of the people.
Yes, I know this is based on the movie. There are eleventy million different versions of this character and I had to pick one.
While working on occult projects under Nazi employ, an elderly Grigori Rasputin attempts a ritual designed to bring forth an apocalyptic demon. Nothing happens. Rasputin is (finally) killed during an Allied offensive taking place at approximately the same time.
Superman is here and superpowered as usual, but quickly becomes disillusioned by a lifetime of chasing down petty drug dealers and domestic abusers, only to see them back on the streets within weeks. The lack of any super-powered villains means that he has no real purpose on Earth, and so he quickly sinks into a miasma of depression and corruption until finally just holing himself up in the Fortress of Solitude and just watching internet porn all day.
Korean War hero “Ace” Morgan was transporting several celebrities – “Rocky” Davis, famed Olympic wrestling champ; “Red” Ryan, the world’s greatest mountain climber; and “Prof” Haley, scuba-diving scientist extraordinaire – when the controls seized up and their plane crashed. They didn’t expect to survive. They were right.
Jonah Hex’s face is ceremonially branded.
1866 medicine being what it was, he soon dies of a massive infection.
A crack in a reactor core causes Dr. Alex Sartorius to get “five million slivers of radioactive red-hot sand” driven into his body. Nuclear reactions caused the silicon in the sand to be booted up by one proton each, to phosphorus. Burning forever, his corpse has to be kept in a special radioactive waste storage site pending some more final means of disposal.
Matt Murdock is blinded by a radioactive substance that falls from a vehicle in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Living in a touch neighborhood like that, Murdock is the victim of intense bullying, turning him morose and bringing on an intense depression. Grown up, he lives on SSI disability in a cheap apartment.
Meanwhile, four turtles hit by the substance develop cancer.
Tenzil Kem, Luono Durgu, Reep Daggle, salu Digby, and Tinya Wazzo never leave their home planets, and, thus, never learn that they have physical abilities not possessed by natives of other planets, so they never become Matter-Eater Lad, Triplicate Girl/Duo Damsel, Chameleon Boy, Shrinking Violet, and Phantom Girl.
Chuck Taine mistakes a plastic formula for soda and drinks it. Instead of becoming Bouncing Boy, his gastro-intestinal tract fuses together, and he dies.