STAR-LORD

Long before the Guardians made Peter Quill a charming rogue, the comics gave him a number he could never outrun. The Fallen One, Galactus's first and most corrupted herald, was rampaging across space destroying worlds his former master might feed on, trying to starve the Devourer out. Quill and Ship had fought him and lost, and Ship's sensors had uncovered the one weakness in the rampage: the life energy released by the Fallen One's own destruction caused the herald pain.

So they weaponised it. As recounted in Thanos #12 (2004) and retold in Annihilation: Conquest — Star-Lord #1 (2007), Quill and Ship deliberately decimated a mining colony and funnelled the resulting surge of life energy through Ship's ordnance matrix, straight into the Fallen One. The overload knocked the herald unconscious and saved the millions living on Avaleen-4. The bill came to more than 350,000 lives — and the channeling burned Ship herself out in the process, killing the partner who had flown beside him since his first day as Star-Lord.

Quill did not run from the arithmetic. Believing the trade had been necessary and unforgivable in equal measure, he handed himself — and the captive Fallen One — over to the Nova Corps to face judgement, and was imprisoned in the intergalactic penitentiary called the Kyln. The guilt never left the character: the haunted, soldierly Quill who later fought through Annihilation was a man still serving a sentence he had imposed on himself, long after the prison walls were gone.