SHIELD would totally have whacked _______.

[DrNewGod]

I love SHIELD. It's one of my favorite Kirby creations, and I'm especially fond of its original incarnation from Strange Tales, when it was still a The Man from U.N.C.L.E. knockoff.

Every now and then, however, I find myself thinking that such a far reaching, powerful, resourced instrument of The Man, with all kinds of lethal toys at its disposal, and agents everywhere, would not likely have tolerated the kind of chaos that walks one step behind most superheroes and supervillains. So, if we took SHIELD to its logical extreme, what Marvel characters from Marvel's 1961 birth through today would SHIELD have decided needed removing?

The first, perhaps most obvious in my mind, is The Hulk. Too powerful, and too unpredictable.

Another is Dr. Doom. I don't think it would have taken more than two ventures outside his own borders for SHIELD to decide this guy needed to go.

Your candidates?

[JudicatorPrime]

If SHIELD had the power to do so, all top tier planetary villains would have been black-sited. That includes Molecule Man, Graviton, Nefaria, etc. But given that SHIELD knows full well that there are cosmic existential threats like Galactus running about, I'm not entirely sure that they would have killed anyone. You never know when you might need one of those villains to help you save the multiverse.

[DrNewGod]

If SHIELD had the power to do so, all top tier planetary villains would have been black-sited. That includes Molecule Man, Graviton, Nefaria, etc. But given that SHIELD knows full well that there are cosmic existential threats like Galactus running about, I'm not entirely sure that they would have killed anyone. You never know when you might need one of those villains to help you save the multiverse.

That aligns with my thinking. They might have decided that Iron Man was useful, and killing Thor or Blackbolt more trouble than it's worth, and might even find Captain Marvel useful. But Professor X? Brains on a wall as soon as they figured out who he was.

[Dermie]

That aligns with my thinking. They might have decided that Iron Man was useful, and killing Thor or Blackbolt more trouble than it's worth, and might even find Captain Marvel useful. But Professor X? Brains on a wall as soon as they figured out who he was.

On the other hand, as soon as the thought occurred to them to murder Xavier, he would wipe the thought from their minds. Killing a telepath on his level isn't that easy.

Same with the idea of them coming after Dr. Doom. Between Doom's genius, his technology, his resources and his mystical abilities, any attempt to assassinate him is extremely unlikely to succeed--and the response it would provoke could be worse than what they were trying to avoid by taking him out. They'd be idiots to try it.

As for The Hulk, they (and various others) HAVE tried eliminating him. But as the current Hulk series has shown, he is basically impossible to kill.

[JudicatorPrime]

The problem with organizations like SHIELD is that they almost always suffer from internal corruption. So even if their mandate was to eliminate worldly threats, it's just a matter of time before SHIELD itself would be considered that worldly threat. SHIELD would watch the supers, but there would need to be a shadow group, likely also made up of some supers, that monitors SHIELD.

I also think that SHIELD's origins would need to go back further in time. The world has seen the rise and fall of so many powerful mystical orders over the centuries. And think of all of the various objects of power in the universe, many of which go back to the dawn of civilization, like the Serpent Crown and the Darkhold. Even the Infinity Stones are older than the multiverse. It's a miracle that none of those items was used to usurp mankind for millenniums never ending. I wouldn't mind seeing a forerunner to SHIELD that had a hand in ensuring humanity would prevail against the evil forces aligned against it.