Marvel Universe
Moral Event Horizon in this series.
An action so despicable it changed comics forever.
- Captain America
- For the Red Skull in the main universe it's hard to pin down when he crossed it. It actually seems like he was born in the Moral Event Horizon. He is consistently portrayed as the one supervillain that all other supervillains loathe.
- Another baddie who fits this trope is the Scarecrow (not to be confused with the Batman villain). While he was always a criminal who enjoyed scaring and robbing people, when he's captured by Captain America he goes completely over the edge and becomes a sadistic murderer, impaling innocent people with his pitchfork as a means of trying to draw Cap out to stop him. He gets the attention of Ghost Rider instead, and ends up impaled on his own pitchfork in the ensuing battle. Things went further downhill when the Scarecrow was revived as an undead zombie with the ability to cause fear in his enemies.
- Crossbones crosses it by raping Diamondback and killing her brothers when they come to rescue her. Diamondback is a teenager at this point.
- Civil War (2006) had Nitro using his powers to make a large explosion so he can escape, resulting in the deaths of 60 children at a nearby school playground and the deaths of 600 other people in the surrounding area of Stamford, Connecticut.
- The Purple Man started out as a low-grade Daredevil villain. Then came Alias (not to be confused with the TV show), in which he humiliated, abused, and tortured Jessica Jones in every non-rape way available. But he does rape people as well. Just in case there was any doubt he's a total scum bag. He kidnapped women and raped them in front of her as a way to mock her for being an ineffective superhero.
- Marvel's Loki finally achieved one of these in Journey into Mystery #645. Even the fiercely loyal Loki/Tom Hiddleston fandom was revolted when he, apparently, forcefully assimilated kid!Loki into himself so that he could achieve his plan of "changing" his role in the universe himself.
- As later revealed in Young Avengers things were a lot more complicated. Technically the Loki who took over the kid's body wasn't past Loki to begin with, that version truly seems to have died in the Siege, but a personality copy created by him for this purpose as a Cloning Gambit of sorts. The copy, however, had a conscience (among other differences), and was haunted by guilt over this. By Loki: Agent of Asgard this new Loki actively tried to pull a Becoming the Mask, against pretty much everybody. No they (other differences: like not strictly being he) haven't succeeded in that... but they did manage to avert becoming evil again. It takes some special kind of talent to screw over two versions of yourself from the grave.
- Speaking of past Loki. Some might say he crossed the moral event horizon long ago, in The Mighty Thor Annual #14, where he kills a man named Theoric, pretends to be him to manipulate his betrothed, Sigyn, and marry her, taking advantage of Asgardian law, which has no annulment or divorce agreements, to keep being married to her.
- Loki once held Eric Masterson's son, Kevin, hostage to goad Thor to fight him. When he expressed reluctance at killing his brother, Loki showed him he was very willing to kill by blasting at Kevin and his mother; while the Enchantress altered events by having Kevin's guardian Susan be vaporized instead, Kevin saw everything that happened. This act was so heinous that Thor did kill him for it.
- Interestingly, an alternate Loki averts crossing the moral event horizon as Avenger Prime in Avengers Assemble (2022). This alternate Loki's killing of everyone in his universe doesn't cause a further fall in villainy, instead it's the start of his successful Redemption Quest. It helps that his killing of his universe was an unintentional blowback from cranking up his magic to fight a horde of Eldritch Abominations and Cosmic Entities, deeply remorseful over his deed - Loki goes to pray at burial ground of dead gods from the prior universe. Loki is then entrusted to safeguard the universe and given the means to contact other realities and assemble new teams of Avengers.
- Marvel rogue Mr. Hyde was always a violent, brutal thug of a villain, but his true MEH crossing would have to be in Avengers #275 and #276, when he beat the Avengers' butler Jarvis half to death while Jarvis was tied up and helpless. Hyde did this just to hurt Captain America, who could only watch as the horrible scene played out.
- In an earlier story, Captain America #251 and #252, Hyde wanted revenge against the Cobra for betraying him, but wasn't sure where in New York he was. He decided to cut the knot by blowing up the entire city with an oil tanker even after Captain America gave himself up as per his request.
- The Incredible Hulk:
- The Leader crosses it when, in the events that led to the creation to his goon squad, the Riot Squad, he nuked Middletown with a gammy bomb, with all but five people dying, with the five becoming the bulk of the Riot Squad.
- The Abomination crosses it when he caused Betty Ross's Comnic Book Death by poisoning her.
- Miek from Planet Hulk and World War Hulk crosses it at the end of the latter when he stabs Rick Jones and reveals the truth of the bomb that destroy much of Sakarr: it was people still loyal to the late Red King, who created it, not the Illuminati — and Miek knew this and, due to a belief that it was the Hulk's destiny to be the Worldbreaker and the Warbound trying to bring peace to Sakarr by making peace, including with those who massarced much his race, he kept it to himself and allowed the explosion —and the deaths of millions, including Caiera — to happen.
- Namor the Sub-Mariner was always one of Marvel's darker Anti Heroes, but he finally crosses this threshold in the "Game of Worlds" storyline in New Avengers when he destroys the home Earth of the Great Society and all its billions of inhabitants. It can be argued that his reason for doing so was sympathetic, due to that Earth being about to collide with the main Earth, which would doom both, but the narrative clearly paints him as now beyond redemption, for two reasons: first, the Great Society's Earth was far better off than the main Earth, to the point that several of Namor's comrades seriously considered destroying their own world, and second, the very next thing he does is to join up with Thanos, Maximus the Mad, Terrax, and several other supervillains to make pre-emptive strikes on other alternate Earths.
- In Runaways, Nico cast a spell on the time-travelers Dale and Stacey Yorkes that forced them to live the rest of their lives knowing that their whole family would be wiped out and unable to do anything about it, as a punishment for their attempt to nuke Manhattan in 1907. In-universe, her decision to use the "Settle Down" spell on Klara is regarded as a grave offense by Molly, due to its similarities to the things Molly's evil parents used to do to her.
- This is pretty much what almost all of The Punisher's antagonists do to justify their violent and horrific demises. The MAX series in particular has a few examples that stand out compared to the rest of the villains on this subpage.
- Nicky Cavella was at first just a more sadistic and efficient mafiosi than what Frank is used to, then he pissed on Frank's family's grave to cement how tasteless he is and his backstory revealed he killed his whole family at eight, just to show how depraved and psychotic he was.
- General Zakharov in Afghanistan throwing a baby off a cliff.
- The cabal of generals first introduced in Mother Russia. To provide a smokescreen for an illegal operation in Russia, they have a team of Arab terrorists they secretly trained for taking out targets inside friendly countries hijack a passenger plane and attempt a suicide bombing on Moscow, only for the plane to be shot down by the missile defenses.
- If William Rawlins didn't cross it when he threw his wife overboard to the Taliban—resulting in her being repeatedly raped—he definitely crossed it when he creates a terrorist cell to create false flag attacks.
- The Slavers were already far over the horizon, what with kidnapping young girls and beating and gang-raping them to break their spirits, but when Viorica escapes with her baby and seeks refuge with Jen Cooke, they track her down to Cooke's apartment and steal the baby back, then later send an e-mail with a photo of the baby's corpse.
- Barracuda may have crossed so many times that it's difficult to mention a single example; however, most could agree that his most monstrous actions were during his time in Nicaragua, where the corruption gave him the chance to go completely wild. Other fans believe that he became completely unsympathetic when he kidnapped Frank's infant daughter with the intention of torturing her to death.
- Kingpin — Faced with his old enemies holding his son at knifepoint and forced to choose between saving his little boy's life and killing the last people standing in his way, he coldly shoots them, not showing a hint of emotion as his rival cuts the boy's throat. He then embraces his wife and tells her "we can have another". Even allowing that Kingpin didn't actually had much of a choice there, Kingpin's reaction to the Sadistic Choice was not I Did What I Had to Do or a Drowning My Sorrows but rather a reflection on how much he didn't really love his son after all.
- Sabretooth is well-known in the MU for his hideous cruelty and boundless sadism and has done far, far too many awful things in his career to list, but his worst example involved his befriending Daken and playing the role of the father figure that Daken so desperately yearned for, all the while slowly grooming him for a confrontation with Wolverine. That confrontation did indeed occur, and Wolverine was forced to kill his own son as a result. Why did Creed do this, again? Simple: he just wanted to hurt Logan on the absolute deepest level possible, and forcing Logan to kill his own son accomplished just that. Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but Creed feigned every single bit of affection and saw Daken as nothing more than a means with which to hurt Logan, and he made it clear that he would have unceremoniously murdered Daken himself had he sensed that his manipulations weren't taking.
- It wasn't just Daken. This storyline involved Sabretooth manipulating Daken into abusing and torturing the teenage clone of Apocalypse, who, again, was a thirteen-year-old boy. Note the only reason Sabretooth did any of this was to screw with Wolverine. He risked creating another Apocalypse and destroying the world as we know it just to screw with Wolverine.
- Secret Invasion (2008) has the Skrull Queen Veranke making Wasp into a bio-bomb which would kill everyone around her, forcing Thor to Mercy Kill her. All the heroes and villains want to get Veranke's head for this with Norman Osborn, of all people, going for the kill shot.
- Either The Sentry or Void, as we don't know for sure which side of his mind was in charge, crossed the MEH when he ripped Ares, God Of War in half — suddenly all discussions over the Internet about if he should be a member of Avengers after the end of Dark Reign were replaced with discussions about how he should be killed or why having him anywhere near Avengers is a bad joke.
- Spider-Man
- Green Goblin very famously crossed it when he killed Spidey's girlfriend Gwen Stacy just to hurt him. It gets worse in the very next issue, when he dismisses her as a "useless female" who was only a waste of space. Spidey responds by attacking him, and Norman gets Hoist by His Own Petard that very issue.
- Doctor Octopus and the rest of the Sinister Six, Spider-Man's recurring Villain Team-Up, have all murdered a few times over the decades, but it usually happened to Asshole Victims, so most readers could shrug it off and continue to at least partially root for them. Then came the early 90's storyline, Revenge Of The Sinister Six (not to be confused with the novel of the same name). As part of their plan to take over the world, they invade another dimension and steal the highly-advanced weaponry they find there. And to test it out, they kill over 143,000 of that dimension's natives. Spidey himself is stunned, noting that the Six rarely if ever kill. Their bloody campaign continues when they return to Earth, killing at the bare minimum four dozen people (an explicitly given body count), and Octopus threatens to blow-up the world with orbiting weapon satellites if the assembled heroes don't stop fighting him. By the time it's over, a clearly soul-weary Spidey notes that way too many people are heading to the hospital or morgue.
- An interesting example for another villain, Kraven the Hunter. Kraven claimed to have a code of honor, and didn't (usually) pursue enemies he believed to be beneath his prowess. When he killed himself at the end of "Kraven's Last Hunt", he seemed to validate his claims of being an honorable (if unhinged) man. Years later, when his previously unknown family starts showing up, we get a different image of Kraven, particularly after they resurrect him in Grim Hunt. Specifically, he kills his wife, and was implied to have abused her in the past. The worst, though, has to be what he did to his remaining children, Alyosha and Ana. He pits them against each other in a battle to the death, and it's revealed that Ana won. Although Ana initially seems fine with this, when she gets into a rematch with the Scarlet Spider, she's shown to have a death wish from the guilt she carries of murdering her older brother. Father of the Year, Kraven certainly isn't.
- Kraven still looks like a saint compared to his family. He never asked to be resurrected, and in fact that resurrection entailed a whole slew of murders, including Madame Web, Mattie Franklin, Kaine, the wife of the original Rhino, a mentally ill man who wanted to become the Rhino, and Bill Connors, the son of the Lizard.
- The Lizard crossed the Moral Event Horizon when it ate Billy Connors, Curt Connors's son. This sent Curt's personality flying across the Despair Event Horizon into outright oblivion, leaving only the Lizard personality intact even when he was restored to human form. Even the Lizard seems to realize that it crossed the line and is plagued with guilt over Billy's death.
- Connors appeared to cross the line himself in an earlier story, when he revealed that he'd always been in charge of the Lizard's actions (which included killing a lot of people). However, this story also had him act like he knew that Peter Parker was Spider-man, something he'd never known, and was so poorly received that it's been ignored by every subsequent author.
- Also, his MEH crosses with another : the aforementioned Kravinoff family manipulated Lizard into killing Billy, as part of a larger, sicker scheme to corrupt Spider-Man.
- Mysterio was an egotistical, second tier villain with Large Ham tendencies. Then came Kevin Smith's Daredevil arc "Guardian Devil", where Mysterio tries to drive Daredevil to madness in a scheme that involved the murders of an innocent teenage girl, her parents, a prostitute, framing Foggy for the murder (and falsified rape) of said hooker and (indirectly), DD's girlfriend Karen Page. To top it all off, Mysterio planned to push Daredevil over the MEH himself by getting him to kill a baby Mysterio had set up as The Antichrist. At the end of the arc, Mysterio commits suicide, so we don't know if this new status would have stuck. To implicate the baby as the Anti-Christ, he impregnated the aforementioned virgin teenage girl while she was doped up to see angels. Fortunately, the exact method was not specified. And his motive for all of this? He was dying of cancer at the time, and wanted to die fighting a superhero. At the time, he came up with the scheme his real nemesis Spider-Man was AWOL and he didn't think fighting a clone was satisfactory. So he picked Daredevil instead because Daredevil had stopped one of his insurance fraud schemes in the past. His real goal in the end was to get Daredevil to kill him and give him the death he wanted.
- An exquisitely cruel one in the Old Man Logan non-canon miniseries: he tricks Wolvie into seeing all the other X-Men as an invading army of supervillains. Wolvie kills them all. You could argue the real MEH crossing is the illusion being lifted in time for him to see the dying Jubilee saying, "Why?"
- What Roderick Kingsley did to Betty Brant and Ned Leeds was completely unjustified.
- Mephisto destroying Peter and MJ's marriage in One More Day. Though considering he's one of Marvel's premier Devils, he's no doubt crossed with so, so many times in the past.
- The Ultimates: Ultimate Red Skull was shown to be a typical evil bad guy, and then he threw a baby out the window. Immediately afterward it's heavily implied he had his henchmen rape the mother. Immediately before this he had told the mother that he'd let the baby live if she would be so kind as to kill her own husband with a pair of dull scissors. And he shot JFK.
- Ultron was always a threat, but he crossed this line in Ultron Unlimited when he laid waste to the country of Slorenia, killing every living creature in it. Among others are mind controlling Victor Mancha and killing his mother, conquering and assimilating the Kree empire with his sights on Earth.
- In Uncanny X-Force, Archangel, corrupted by the "Death Seed" Apocalypse placed in him way back in the original run of X-Factor, crosses when he kills Autumn Rolfson, a frail, likely sexually-abused anorexic woman, and one of his own followers, for objecting to him raising her son, a radiation-powered mutant, to be a mass-murderer. This somehow ends up having more gravitas than when he depopulated a town 2 issues earlier.
- Miek of the Warbound crossed it during World War Hulk when he stabbed Rick Jones. Also, he is the one responsible for the destruction of Sakaar (he didn't cause the explosion, but he knew it would happen and said nothing) so that the Hulk would go back to being the Worldbreaker.
- The X-Men books have a problem with having key members of their titular band of mutant heroes cross the MEH for the purpose of cheap shock value. Read the following examples and make a note of how many of them are produced by X-Men:
- The Dark Phoenix Saga did this to the titular character, to the point that it knocked the story off-course. It was planned that Jean would return to sanity after her cosmic rampage, but during said cosmic rampage, she consumed a star, which resulted in the death of the entire population of an inhabited planet, said to number over five billion. At that point, Marvel editor Jim Shooter put his foot down and declared that Jean couldn't return to the X-Men without paying for her crimes in a big way, which ultimately led to the story's tragic ending. In fact, this was what prompted the reveal that Jean and the Phoenix weren't the same entity, as it was the only way for her to go back to being an X-Men member without making her teammates seem seriously irresponsible.
- Some time during the X-Men: Messiah Complex crossover for Bishop. The major incidents are recounted here allowing you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions. It could be that the whole crossover event is one giant Moral Event Horizon for Bishop.
- He waited until the other adult X-Men were away from the mansion pursuing the new mutant baby, the Marauders, and the Purifiers. He then stole some of Cassandra Nova's nano-sentinels and had them take over the O.N.E. Sentinels and set them against the mansion. The kids had to defend themselves against an attempted genocide. Bishop blamed that on Cable.
- Then he, in secret, made it to Dallas, attacked Forge, stole time travel tech, attacked Cable, and blamed Cable for the attack. The attack on Cable is directly responsible for the Marauders getting baby Hope. The panels imply that had the Marauders not attacked, he would have killed baby Hope right then and there.
- Bishop also lied to the X-Men and blamed Cable for his actions, and tried to murder Cable and the baby again and again on Muir Island. His last attack (just after Cable and Hope time-slid away) nearly killed Professor Xavier. And in the subsequent Cable and X-Force titles, He Got Worse.
- Cassandra Nova sending the Sentinels to destroy Genosha. This act instantly made Nova one of the most heinous mass murderers the X-universe has ever seen, with over 16 million mutants dying because of it.
- The Avengers vs. X-Men event did this for Cyclops (Well, what they intended to be one, at least, considering there's a reason "Cyclops Was Right" became a memetic phrase in the community after this.) by having him follow in his longtime lover's footsteps, going mad with the power of the Phoenix Force and then surpassing Jean by causing cataclysmic destruction around the world, and, oh yeah, killing the X-Men's founder. Unlike with Jean, the Marvel editorial didn't initially realize what a problem this would create for them down the line and tried to keep Scott around, but there was no coming back from an MEH like that and he was eventually Killed Off for Real and replaced with a younger counterpart. And to complete the circle, just like Jean, Cyclops was eventually revived in a strange inversion of Redemption Earns Life.
- In the Planet X storyline, Grant Morrison tried to do this with Magneto, whom he considered a "mad old terrorist twat." Not surprisingly, it didn't take, and was quickly retconned away. Morrison at least had the decency, however, to explain Magneto's Out of Character behavior: possession by John Sublime. Discounting this, however, he still has his interplanetary EMP strike in the Fatal Attractions (Marvel Comics) story, which shut down electronics around the world and killed thousands if not millions of people (planes crashes, life-saving devices failing, etc).
- In the Ultimate Universe Magneto crossed it for good when he brings about the events of Ultimatum and kills millions of innocent people, including numerous mutants. Just to make it clear to the audience that he's too far gone to be redeemed, he callously kills Multiple Man when Multiple Man tries to stand up to him. His actions are so atrocious that Cyclops snaps and breaks his no killing rule for the first and only time and blows his head off out of disgust.
- Remember that time in the early 2000s when Weapon X came back and opened mutant concentration camps? Yeah, you can thank Director Malcolm Colcord for that. A rank-and-file soldier of the first, not so evil Weapon X program, he was horrifically scarred by a rampaging Wolverine. This caused him to develop psychotic Fantastic Racism for all mutants, leading him to acts of mass mutant murder so heinous that not even William Stryker or Donald Pierce can compare.
- Being one of the most popular X-villains means she's always Easily Forgiven, and the mutant resurrection revolving door certainly helps too, but Mystique has done some pretty despicable stuff over the years. A lifetime of work as a spy, saboteur and assassin puts plenty of blood on her hands, but rising above that casual villainy are acts like the murder of Moira MacTaggert (eventually retconned), stabbing her adopted daughter Rogue, slitting Banshee's throat, and assassinating her own son Graydon Creed (not even for his Fantastic Racist hate-mongering, which would be at least a little understandable, but as "revenge" for Destiny's murder which Graydon didn't even have anything to do with).
- Stryfe rose above the ranks of generic Evil Counterpart villain territory with his posthumous release of the Legacy virus, a bioengineered plague that is basically the X-universe's version of AIDS. This disease hung over the X-books for most of the '90s, killed off several characters, and was impactful enough that the basic idea of it has been recycled repeatedly in later storylines (M-Pox, Reaver virus, etc).
- If Vulcan didn't cross the Horizon when he killed Banshee as well as a lot of other people, then he definitely crossed it when he murdered his own father Corsair..
- Ironically enough given the above, the Deadly Genesis story that introduced Vulcan revealed that Professor X had a hell of a MEH he was hiding: Way back during the events of Giant-Sized X-Men #1 (1975), Xavier sent a secret third squad of mutants to save his earlier students when throwing just two squads at the problem wasn't enough. Unlike the first two squads, these mutants were barely trained (having received only an hour-long "psychic Danger Room" cram session from Chuck) and when they (seemingly) died, Charles decided to wipe the memories of all the other X-Men to forget the third squad existed, which in the process wiped all Scott's memories of meeting or even having a third brother. This fateful act was the first step that led Cyclops and Vulcan to their own MEH moments, and it tainted Xavier forever after. Part of why he was killed off in Avengers Vs. X-Men was that his Big Good cred was forever destroyed by the events of this story.
- Arcade crossed it in Avengers Arena when he kidnapped numerous teen heroes and placed them in his incredibly deadly Murderworld and pit themselves against each other to the death for his amusement. In-universe, he crossed the MEH as well, as the superhero AND supervillain communities now despise him.
