In Marvel’s Infernal Hulk #7 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and artist Adam Gorham, the monstrous Hulk tangles with the X-Men… And one 32-year-old character doesn’t make it out alive. Spoilers past this point, but midway through the issue The Hulk kills Marrow.
To give a bit of the circumstances, Infernal Hulk is looking for Leech, the tiny Morlock who has the power to shut down other mutant powers. Hulk does corrupt Leech and uses him to get something away from the main X-Men team later in the issue. But other Morlock’s rally to stop Hulk. Hoss, a character that personally I’ve never heard of, gets smushed first by Hulk, who then confronts Leech. Marrow, Pyro, and Erg — a Morlock who bizarrely looks a lot like former Morlock leader Calisto, but is not — tell Leech to run.
Hulk then immediately slams Erg into the ground, and knocks Pyro into a carousel. But he saves the worst for Marrow.
“Kill… me?” says The Hulk. “I bore witness when your wretched forebears wriggled out of the sea. Those such as you, who respect power shoulw know when you have none.”
Then he picks up Marrow, and literally folds her in half, her blood and internal organs spilling out everywhere. This is accompanied by the sound effects “SNAPPP,” “SLURRRRRP” and in the second panel that shows Marrow, dead, ripped in half, “SHLUPPP.”
Hulk does get Leech, and we don’t find out if Erg and Pyro were similarly killed. But what’s so shocking about this, beyond the act itself, is to see a character who has been around so long dispatched of so callously. That’s the point, of course, this Hulk is literally a monster. And mind you, it’s not like Marrow has been a top tier character since she was introduced in 1994 (though it wasn’t until 1995 that we met her as Marrow). But it is a character some people like, and you don’t expect an X-Men character of her stature to be disposed of in a Hulk book, of all places. Also, when the X-Men show up later, they seem to have no idea Marrow is dead. Read the news, X-Men!
Are there ways of bringing Marrow back? Of course, we’re dealing with a demonic Hulk who has some sort of hold/ties to mutants, so he could resurrect her as his bone lieutenant or something. But for now, at least this month: RIP, Marrow.
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