Surprisingly not a riff on "The Thing," nor a jab at McFarlane's book.

This may not be 100% accurate, but there are some villains that you just expect to 'die' in an explosion or something at the end of every one of their appearances. Red Skull, perfect example. I feel like Diablo got blown up a lot, or escaped in explosions quite a bit. Maybe the Leader? But, on the other hand, there are some villains where it kinda seems like the writer is going out of their way to kill them as dead as possible. For whatever reason, they want this character as gone as they can make them. Somehow, that's what it felt like with today's book: from 1995, Thunderstrike #20, "Spawn" Written and plotted by Tom DeFalco, pencils and plot by Ron Frenz, finishes by Al Milgrom.

Avengers Black Widow and Black Panther bring Thunderstrike on a mission to an Antarctic listening station, an observation post set up by S.H.I.E.L.D. to monitor the Savage Land. Contact had been lost with the station, but the Avengers find a few survivors that had barricaded themselves in to hide from something that had arrived not from the Savage Land, but from the most recent supply plane. Exploring the station's surprisingly expansive basement, Panther and 'Strike find the culprit: Stegron, the Dinosaur Man! Who has pretty much given up on mankind and the world, and decided to take off to the Savage Land.

Stegron gives them a pretty good fight, until Thunderstrike smashes a wall and lets all the heat out. A storm was coming in, but Stegron takes off headlong into it, intent on getting to the Savage Land or dying. And it's the latter: they find him, frozen, mere feet away from a marker to the entrance. The Panther is sympathetic, suggesting Stegron was merely looking for a place to fit in; but neither of them take his body and bury it or anything. The Savage Land had itself been done away with for a few years, but this really feels like they wanted to write Stegron off for good. Maybe they felt he was silly, or that the Lizard already did his job, I don't know. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it: I guess in the first Stegron comics I read--reprinted in Marvel Treasury Edition #20--he drowns in the Hudson river or something. It does feel like a slight that his story only gets twelve pages: the rest of the issue is Eric telling his son Kevin a bedtime story about Thor, trying to work up to telling him his secret identity.