THANOS

Drax the Destroyer was built for one purpose, and in Annihilation #4 (2006), by Keith Giffen and Andrea Di Vito, he finally completed it. Thanos had allied himself with Annihilus during the Annihilation Wave, but on studying the captive Galactus, the Titan realised his partner’s true endgame was the extinction of all life — a universe with nothing left for even Death to claim. Thanos turned on the alliance and set about freeing the Devourer.

He never finished the job. Drax fought through waves of Annihilus’s forces to reach him, ignored Moondragon’s pleas that Thanos was, at that moment, the one being who could stop Annihilus, and drove his fist through the Titan’s chest, ripping the heart clean out. Thanos died mid-rescue, undone by the single opponent in existence engineered to be his kryptonite.

The irony is structural: Drax’s creator, the Titan god Kronos, had fashioned him specifically to kill Thanos, so the Destroyer could bypass defences that had shrugged off gods and cosmic powers. The heroes still freed Galactus and broke the Wave without the Titan — but only just, and Thanos stayed dead until his resurrection in The Thanos Imperative.