This is "Out of Sight," a feature where I explore notable comic book moments that occurred off-panel. When I say "off-panel," I'm mostly talking about a character not being around and then showing up and us learning that something dramatic happened to them off-panel. However, I'm willing to be flexible about the definition of this feature, so when my pal Mik B. wanted me to feature the death of a major superhero team that happened between panels during an Avengers story arc, I figured, what the heck, we can work it in there!

Okay, let us set the stage, shall we? There was this crossover event called House of M. When Brian Michael Bendis took over writing the Avengers, he had Scarlet Witch effectively snap and use her reality-altering powers to create all sorts of foes to attack the Avengers. It seems that she forgot that she had had kids (which turned out to be stolen bits of souls that her reality-altering powers turned into kids) and when the Wasp casually mentioned them, the Scarlet Witch was all, "Oh no, screw you guys. This is your fault" and decided to tear down the team she blamed for the loss of her kids (later, we found out that when she was reminded of her kids she went to Doctor Doom for help and he got her hooked up with this powerful entity that took control of her and that is why she became violent - it was essentially her version of Parallax possessing Hal Jordan. Nothing is ever a superhero's fault, people! Except Earth-2 Dick Grayson flirting with Bruce Wayne's daughter. That's all Dick's fault). That Scarlet Witch goes nuts storyline ended with Scarlet Witch's dad, Magneto, showing up and taking her to his home in Genosha for safe-keeping, with the theory being that hey, who else was better suited to keep an eye on her?

Well, House of M opened with the Avengers and the X-Men debating whether they liked the idea of just leaving her with Magneto. So they flew out to Genosha to see what they could do. Wolverine, as is his wont, suggested that they just kill her. Well, Scarlet Witch's brother, Quicksilver, was there and he freaked out and he ran to her and told her to use her reality-altering powers to change the world so that mutants were in charge. You'd think he's just say, "Hey, change the world so that they don't want to kill you," but I dunno, I guess he has a limited imagination. So she did that, creating the "House of M," where mutants ruled the world and Magneto was the top dog.

So the other heroes slowly regained their memories from the previous reality and they all teamed up to make her change things back to the way things were before. Scarlet Witch, being heavily unstable, freaked out in the middle of all of this and just decided that mutants were the problem. So she used her reality-altering powers to say "No More Mutants" and instantly, millions of mutants stopped having the X-Gene.

The series (by Bendis, Olivier Coipel and Mark Morales) ended with Beast pontificating about what happened to all of that mutant energy that is now just gone (note that Doctor Strange used his powers to keep all of the mutants from losing their powers. He saved about a thousand, including pretty much every relevant mutant around)...

We would soon find out what happened to that excess energy. Some went to an X-Men comic and some to an Avengers comic. The X-Men comic saw a seemingly dead hero named Vulcan revived and powered up to the extreme. He blamed the X-Men for his death and he sought out revenge. The rest of the energy ended up in a mutant mailman in Alaska in New Avengers #16 (by Brian Michael Bendis, Steve McNiven and Dexter Vines)...

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Which%20Superhero%20Team%20Felt%20His%20Wrath?']

Okay, so this is still early in the era of the NEW Avengers, and the Avengers and SHIELD were at odds with each other and SHIELD Director Maria Hill did not want to call them in on this new disaster. Instead, since the incident happened near Canada, they brought in Alpha Flight and, well, things did not go well...

Yes, Alpha Flight just got killed BETWEEN PAGES in the comic book! Daaang, that's messed up.

The next issue (now drawn by Mike Deodato and Joe Pimentel), DOES allow a quick flashback at the fight (look how awesome of a job Deodato does with Wolverine's reaction to the deaths of Alpha Flight. It's hard to nail that look like he does there. Great work)...

But the main point remains, Alpha Flight was slaughtered off panel. It doesn't matter if later on they showed what happened.

By the way, the reason the guy was so powerful is that he absorbed the powers of hundreds of mutants who lost their powers. This dude even had Jubilee's powers, people! THE Jubilee!

I am going to now assume that Jubilee can single-handedly destroy Alpha Flight, Wasp/X-Men style.

Okay, that's it for this installment of Out of Sight! Thanks for the suggestion, Mik! Everyone else, e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have other suggestions for future Out of Sight columns!