Avalanche

Dominikos Ilias Petrakis is a Greek mercenary with an earthquake in each hand. He generates seismic waves that travel out through whatever he touches, shaking the molecular bonds of stone, steel and concrete until they simply stop holding together. Buildings come apart. Roads fold. Bridges resign. What he cannot do is hurt you directly, because living tissue absorbs the vibration harmlessly, and that single limitation shaped his entire career. Avalanche is not an assassin. He is demolition, and he has spent forty years being hired by people who need a wall, a vault or a city block to stop existing.

Claremont and Byrne dropped him into Days of Future Past as part of Mystique's Brotherhood, sent to kill Senator Robert Kelly, and he has been paired with Pyro and the Blob ever since, the muscle and the flame supplying what he lacks. When Mystique turned the Brotherhood into the federally sanctioned Freedom Force, he took the badge and the paycheque without much apparent soul-searching. Later he signed on with Mister Sinister's Marauders and drifted through assorted Brotherhood revivals, always for money, never for the cause. In a genre full of true believers, his professionalism is the point.

Avalanche exists because the Brotherhood needed a wrecking ball, and he has been quietly excellent at that job since Days of Future Past in 1981. Claremont used him as one of the load-bearing members of Mystique's team, then carried him through Freedom Force's government years, where the Brotherhood's villains fought Avengers and monsters under federal authority. From there he became reliable connective tissue for the X-books, turning up in Marauders line-ups and Brotherhood reunions whenever a story needs somebody who can level a structure on schedule. He is a permanent working-class fixture of mutant crime, and X-Men: Evolution's teenage reinvention of him is the version most non-comics readers know.