7 Marvel Villains with Massive Body Counts (Including the MCU’s Next Big Bad)

Skip to content Add Us On Google Marvel Comics has some of the most iconic supervillains in comic book history. While the company is often defined by its nuanced, tragic villains with understandable goals, Marvel also has plenty of evildoers who just want to kill. In a universe with so many all-powerful entities running around, everyday civilians are at constant risk of being slaughtered in massive disasters. The Marvel Multiverse has had countless genocides of cosmic proportions in which billions and even trillions of people have died. And the perpetrators of these mass murders are some of Marvel’s most powerful and sadistic villains whose body counts are beyond imagination.

When superheroes fail to stop the bad guy, innocent people die. And nowhere is that more clear than the mass graves created by Marvel’s most notorious supervillains.

The ancient, all-powerful alien race known as the Celestials may have created the Marvel Multiverse, but they also hold no qualms with spreading mass death and destruction throughout the universe. Traveling across the cosmos, Celestials frequently experiment on different alien races. After leaving their creations alone for thousands, if not millions, of years, the Celestials return to the planet to pass judgement. If the lifeforms are deemed too weak and unworthy of life, the Celestials will eradicate the planet without hesitation like wrathful gods. Countless worlds and alien races over the eons have been given an unworthy verdict and reduced to ashes. Even worse, in some universes a new Celestial can be born only by hatching out and destroying like an egg a densely populated planet. Celestials are the textbook definition of uncaring deities because they look upon worlds teeming with life only as test subjects that must reach the Celestials’ standards or risk annihilation.

Galactus is less of a malevolent villain and more of a force of nature. When the old multiverse died, the scientist Galan was transformed into a being comprised of the infinite Power Cosmic. But because of all his power expenditure, Galactus needs to consume a tremendous amount of energy to survive. So, just as a wolf kills to eat, Galactus consumes entire planets teeming with life to ensure his own survival. Galactus has been eating worlds for billions of years; so many, that he has lost count of the number he has consumed. Galactus is essentially a living extinction level event. But the insurmountable deaths that Galactus causes aren’t born from malice or selfishness. Instead, like predators in ecosystems, Galactus maintains universal balance by letting some worlds die so others can develop in their place. Still, Galactus is terrifying because when he appears, a planet’s inhabitants are likely to be wiped out to satiate his eternal hunger.

The Mad Titan Thanos is among the most feared beings in the Marvel Universe because of his cosmic-level kill count. Obsessed with winning Lady Death’s affection, Thanos tries to honor her by wiping out all life in existence. His sadistic crusade has led to him slaughtering countless people and annihilating their worlds. And of course, Thanos committed the most iconic genocide in comic book history in the Infinity Gauntlet story arc. After collecting the six Infinity Stones, Thanos used their unlimited power to erase half of all life in the universe with the snap of his fingers. He would then use the Gauntlet to massacre all the surviving heroes who tried to avenge the trillions of people who perished. And although the end of the arc undid all these deaths, Thanos still managed, for at least a short time, to commit genocide on a near-unrivaled scale. But even without the Gauntlet, Thanos is a villain who won’t rest until he kills everyone.

Thanos may have wiped out half of all life in a universe, but Doctor Doom destroyed an entire universe. Normally, Doctor Doom wouldn’t partake in something as barbaric as genocide because he views it as beneath him. However, that changed in Doctor Doom #10, when the ruler of Latveria was transported to an alternate universe. In this world, a benevolent Doom fixed his face, got married, and had two kids. As the Minister of the World, this version of Doom brought peace and prosperity not just to Earth, but to the entire universe. When the original Doctor Doom asked how his counterpart achieved this utopia, the variant told him he forgave Reed Richards. This revelation made Doctor Doom snap, and he responded not just by killing his heroic counterpart, but by annihilating the entire alternate universe with an assortment of doomsday weapons. For just the thought of letting go of his ego and deeply nurtured resentment for Richards was enough for Doom to exterminate trillions of innocent lives.

Before there was light or matter, there was Amatsu-Mikaboshi, aka the Chaos King. As the God of Evil and Chaos, his attempts to conquer the multiverse were initially thwarted by Marvel’s pantheon of gods. When he finally broke free, the Chaos King sought revenge on the gods and the multiverse. With his omnipotent power of pure destruction, the Chaos King slaughtered or corrupted almost every deity in the Marvel Multiverse, including Zeus, the Impossible Man, Satan, Death, and Eternity. But the Chaos King didn’t stop by massacring the pantheons. This was just the beginning of his cosmic rampage. He went on to spread his destructive power across infinite universes. The Chaos King’s path of annihilation saw him conquer and destroy countless universes and dimensions to remake the multiverse in his image. By the time Hercules stopped and undid his crusade, the Chaos King had wiped out 98% of the infinite multiverse, leaving a kill count impossible to comprehend.

The Beyonders are a nigh-omnipotent race of beings who exist outside the multiverse. But despite their power to reshape entire universes like clay, the Beyonders felt threatened when they foresaw the emergence of a multiversal villain called Enigma. To beat Enigma to the punch, the Beyonders decided to destroy the multiverse and remake it without him. Their plan involved creating the villain Molecule Man and planting versions of him in every universe as doomsday bombs. Additionally, the Beyonders triggered countless incursion events, where universes crashed into each other and killed trillions of people. With their immeasurable power, the Beyonders successfully wiped out almost all of existence. Only by stealing their power did Doctor Doom save a few pieces of the remaining Earths to create the patchwork planet Battleworld. When there’s only enough of the infinite multiverse and its people to make one planet, that’s a surefire sign that the Beyonders are genocidal villains.

While other villains on this list came close to killing everyone in the infinite multiverse, only one succeeded: the Black Winter. Just as Galactus eats planets, the Black Winter consumes entire multiverses to usher in a new one to replace them. Its origin is shrouded in mystery, but this omnipotent eldritch god devoured the sixth iteration of the multiverse that preceded the current Marvel Multiverse. Every living thing in this multiverse died slow and agonizing deaths as the Black Winter consumed their stars and worlds while also spreading lethal radiation. By the end of its feast, the Black Winter had killed all but one being in the infinite Sixth Cosmos: Galan. Because Galan was the last living thing in the Sixth Cosmos, the Black Winter rewarded him by making him its herald, Galactus. The Black Winter is destruction incarnate, and the threat of it consuming the Seventh Cosmos is always present.

What do you think? Leave a Comment below and join the conversation in the ComicBook Forum!