WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Daredevil #17, by Chip Czdarsky, Jorge Fornes, Nolan Woodward, and VC's Clayton Cowles, on sale now.
Some comic book characters are just too strange to be forgotten, but they're also just a little too strange to be taken seriously. Usually, these characters are mostly relegated to the background of places like the Marvel Universe, where they maintain a fairly steady presence.
One of these characters is the classic Spider-Man villain Hammerhead, a superpowered crime boss with a really thick skull, literally. While his steel and later adamantium skull implants didn't give him the most impressive abilities, they still gave him a head that was seemingly unbreakable.
However, Daredevil #17 proves that Hammerhead's skull wasn't as invulnerable as it seemed when the villain is seemingly killed by a bullet to the head. Hot on the heels of the Hell's Kitchen gang wars Hammerhead is killed by off his men who have in turn been bought off by the new underworld powerhouse Izzy Libris.
While most of Spider-Man's classic villains share an animal theme, Hammerhead doesn't really take much inspiration from the hammerhead sharks, aside from his unusually flat head. Instead, this Gerry Conway and John Romita Sr. creation dresses and acts like a prohibition-era wise-guy, almost always wearing a suit. To add to the oddness of the character, his backstory points out that his family immigrated from the Soviet Union to Italy so that he is effectively both a Russian and Italian gangster; as if straddling the fence between the two stereotypes.
For years, Hammerhead has used his thick skull to head-butt Spider-Man and various people well or break down walls by running into them head-first. Considering the reality-reshaping powers that some Marvel heroes have, the ability to burst into a room like the Kool-Aid Man isn't all that impressive.
This issue, however, shows that Hammerhead's theoretically unbreakable head is not impervious to bullets, and he's reduced to another casualty of Hell's Kitchen's gang wars.
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While the issue doesn't go out of its way to explain how this happened, there are a few ways in which this would be possible, even with Hammerhead's abilities. Hammerhead's entire skull is made of metal, but a shot directly into his eye or mouth could theoretically kill him.
Alternatively, the gunman could've also used an adamantium bullet and/or a specialized gun. In Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez's Defenders #7, Hammerhead was briefly killed one of his crew betrayed him and executed him with a particularly high-caliber handgun.
However it may have been carried out, Hammerhead's death signals another major shakeup in the underworld of Marvel's universe. Hammerhead's killer, Izzy has now taken out a prominent member of Marvel's established criminal element and that suggests that she is likely on the rise and probably puts her on a crash course with Daredevil in the very near future.