Appearing in "Culling the Hero"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Antagonists:
Other Characters:
- Spider-Man (Peter Parker)
- Beast (Hank McCoy)
- Power Man (Luke Cage)
- Iron Fist (Danny Rand)
- Daredevil (Matt Murdock)
- Phoenix (Jean Grey)
- ⏴ Deadpool (Wade Wilson) ⏵
- Invisible Woman (Sue Richards)
- Acanti
- Captain America (Styeve Rogers) (Mentioned)
- Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) (Vision or hallucination)
- Spider-Woman (Julia Carpenter) (Vision or hallucination)
- Generation X (Mentioned in narration)
- Odin (Mentioned)
- Zeus (Mentioned)
Races & Species:
- Mutants
- Humans
- Atlantean-Human Hybrids
- Human-Kree Hybrids
- Human-Olympian Hybrids
- Asgardians
- Cyborgs
- Skrulls
- Brood
- Brood Queens
- Badoon
- Acanti
Locations:
Items:
- Mjolnir
- Aegis (Breastplate)
- Ricochet's Suit
- Prodigy's Suit
- Dusk's Suit
- Hornet's Suit
- Iron Man Armor Model 16
- Spider-Man's Suit and Web-Shooters
- Hawkeye's Suit, Bow and Trick Arrows
- Daredevil's Suit and Billy Club
- Gambit's Staff
- Panther Habit
- Deadpool's Suit
Synopsis for "Culling the Hero"
Just before Scarlet Witch wins her match against Cable, he regains enough of his senses to mutter a warning about the contest being a trick, but as he vanishes away, her own fogged mind quickly forgets it and she basks in the adoration of the crowd. Her hex spheres have an unexpected wider-reaching volatile effect on the delicate spacetime surrounding the Coterie ship, and down in its jungle-like bowels where the losers are sent, a portal opens and the Night Cruiser of Rosetta Stone and Lockdown comes careening through. The car runs over a Brood that was chasing Spider-Woman, knocking both out. The adventurers have little time to analyze the situation before encountering the jungle's beastlike predators, but they're assisted by the arrival of Iron Man and a fully recovered Psylocke, who has adorned herself in armor made of the beasts' carapace. Iron Man invites the unknown heroes to team up and shares his nanite antibodies. Psylocke recognizes the Brood they ran over and figures out that they've been inside a hollowed-out Acanti the whole time and that the entire Contest is likely a ploy to take out Earth's heroes while selecting their strongest representatives for Brood embryos.
Shadowcat comes to in a chemical vat in the Brood's lab alongside Warbird. The Brood Queen Imperiatrix boasts that they intend to experiment on Carol Danvers as they did once before to turn her into Binary, but this time controlling that power towards their own ends, and expanding the experiment to discover more of Earth's heroes with even more untapped potential.
Unaware of their fate, other heroes aboard the ship continue the Contest. The New Warriors beat the Slingers in a game of basketball. Wolverine, locked in a constant berserker rage to keep him from uncovering the Brood, defeats Hercules. Spider-Man beats Beast, Domino beats Power Man, Hawkeye beats Wasp, Iron Fist beats Colossus, Daredevil beats Firestar, Phoenix beats Justice, Gambit beats Quicksilver, Black Panther beats the New Warriors, Black Widow beats Wonder Man, Deadpool beats Generation X, Invisible Woman beats Iron Fist, and Thor beats Storm.
Solicit Synopsis
- Iron Man and Psylocke wage a desperate struggle to somehow prevent the destruction of the world's greatest heroes in a prison where their super-powers don't work!