It's rare that an ongoing superhero story has a seriously depressing ending. Heroically tragic? Sure. Bittersweet? All the time. But to leave the reader genuinely feeling down, even disappointed in the characters as people, is rare for both Marvel and DC. Thankfully, when the Hulk hit the Heroes for Hire with a downer ending of their own, it was one the Z-List Marvel heroes truly earned.
Running 2006-2007 (and created by Justin Grey, Jimmy Palmiotti, Billy Tucci, and Tom Palmer), Heroes for Hire followed Misty Knight as she picked up the slack of those traditional superheroes embroiled in Marvel's Civil War event. The difference? The Heroes for Hire worked for a price, and that's where things went wrong.
The roster changed over the series' run, but Misty Knight was the team's permanent leader, backed up by Colleen Wing (who fans might remember from the Iron Fist TV adaptation), cat burglar the Black Cat, super-skilled mercenary Paladin, upcoming MCU star Shang-Chi, anti-hero Tarantula, and former Z-list villain Humbug, among others. The team weren't much to look at, but they held steadfast to one rule: they were heroes, yes, but they were there to get paid. As might be expected, things quickly fell apart for the Heroes for Hire. Members died, jobs turned rotten, and right when they were finally about to make big bucks by retrieving the hominid hero Moon-Boy from the Savage Land, World War Hulk hit Earth.
World War Hulk was a crossover event from 2007 in which the Hulk - having been marooned in space by a council of Earth's heroes - returned to exact vengeance on major Marvel figures such as Black Bolt, Tony Stark, and Reed Richards. Hulk arrived in a vast interstellar Stone Ship with his Warbound - a group of gladiator aliens bound together by their suffering on the brutal planet Sakaar - and proceeded to seize New York as a theater of vengeance. Unable to collect their Moon-Boy bounty from SHIELD due to the chaos, and spurred on by teammate Humbug, the Heroes for Hire agree to help stop the Hulk.
Their plan is a failure from the start. Having killed a young 'hiveling' to disguise the group's scent, Humbug is quickly overwhelmed by the chemical dominance of Hulk's insectoid allies Miek and No-Name of the Brood, and he turns traitor. Teammates Colleen Wing and Tarantula are blamed for the killing and sentenced to "the pain-skin" - a writhing sea of maggots who exponentially multiply any pain felt by their victims. Shang-Chi - who has been agonizing over whether his affair with Tarantula has rekindled his natural instincts as a killer - murders Humbug out of rage, and while Colleen and Tarantula are quickly rescued, the pain-skin has stretched out their agony, and they emerge asking how many years (rather than hours) have passed.
The final insult comes when Paladin demands Moon-Boy as his payment for helping in the rescue, intending to sell him for vivisection. Black Cat, who had been developing a romantic connection with Paladin, tries to reason with him, but he kicks her out of the cockpit of the team's vehicle and drives off, shattering the Heroes for Hire. Barely recovered from what she perceived as years of agonizing pain, Colleen Wings delivers the final lines of the series:
Look at us. We sold the stuff inside us that made us good. We went bad, Misty. Somewhere along the way, we went bad. ... We never should have been Heroes for Hire, Misty. We should have just been heroes.
As World War Hulk went on to prove, the Hulk vastly underestimated his allies' potential for cruelty when he set them on Earth's heroes. Miek would eventually be revealed as the true villain of the story, having adopted the Hulk's newfound mantra of "Never stop making them pay" as an almost religious instruction. Nevertheless, in seizing New York and giving his allies dominion over the pseudo-heroic team, the Hulk helped give the Heroes for Hire exactly the downer ending they had coming.
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