In Marvel Zombies: Dead Days, Professor X is unceremoniously, and somewhat implausibly, torn to pieces off-panel by rabid Canadians. This is a necessary handwave, because although the original Marvel Zombies run was famously unconcerned with any of the silver-bullet asspulls from within Marvel continuity that could be used to undo the zombie apocalypse, Professor X was too prominent a character to ignore outright but also too powerful a psychic to have in a plot where the apocalyptic threats are specifically vulnerable to having their brains fried. For there to be a story, Charles Xavier had to die.

In Earth X by Alex Ross, Jim Kreuger and John Paul Leon, a major figure in the worldbuilding of near-future Earth is The Skull. The Skull is the most powerful psychic left on earth, capable of immediately psychically enslaving anyone who comes within a certain range of his person. He's one of the major threats of the series, as his entourage slowly moves cross-country, assimilating all superhuman resistance before marching on New York City. The Skull's psychic abilities were so potent that upon his empowerment, he emitted a psychic shockwave that killed every other telepath on earth, including Professor X.

It's eventually revealed that this wasn't an accident. The meta-plot of Earth X concerns the discovery that all forms of superhumanity on Earth are directly or indirectly derived from the immune system of a gestating Celestial, which grants power to the indigenous lifeforms of the planet it's growing inside so that they can defend it from spaceborne threats long enough for it to hatch. The birth of The Skull is revealed to be a pre-planned step in the wind-down phase of this biological cycle; his unknowing purpose is to neutralize all psychics powerful enough to catch wind of what's actually going on, and then assimilate as many superhumans of note as possible into his retinue so that they won't be able to co-ordinate an effective response to the planet-killing birth of the Celestial. Between the machinations of The Celestials, and the extent to which Earth X is heavily threaded through with secretive superhumans working at cross-purposes to promote their respective agendas in the run-up to the apocalypse, one takeaway is clear; the existence of a benevolent, competent telepath as powerful as Professor X is a complication that cannot be abided by the narrative. For there to be a story, Charles Xavier had to die.

In Worm by Wildbow, "true" human psychics are an absence noted in-universe by scientists studying superhumanity; the lack of any superhumans with "conventional" telepathy is pseudoscientifically chalked up to the physiological inability of the human brain to process another brain's worth of information, despite the fact that superpowers observably violate all other limits of their user's physiology all the time. Out-of-universe, this is partly due to the setting's aesthetic aversion to the mysticism implicit with Marvel-style psychics- the "psychic plane" as a quasi-physical dimension, "psychic energy," and similar ideas. But In-universe, the lack of psychics is extremely deliberate. Such a powerset is trivially mechanically possible- numerous heroes and villains possess abilities that represent individual facets of what a "true" psychic can do at Marvel and DC. But nobody gets the entire package because superpowers are the result of malevolent alien intelligences running experiments on human society, and they're loathe to distribute powersets that could potentially result in their test subjects figuring out what's going on and coordinating an effective response. As a result of all this, the closest thing to a "conventional" comic book psychic in the setting is a malevolent, indestructible Kaiju who devotes her abilities to fomenting chaos and targeting the best and brightest of humanity. For there to be a story, Charles Xavier could never be born at all. In The Power Fantasy, Etienne Lux

If I had a nickel for every Robert Kirkman thing where a murderous cannibal goes on a self-justifying monologue about it I’d have at least three nickels. And I don’t think it would be weird it happened that many times I think he’s just aesthetically fixated on the harrowing disconnect between the eloquence and the brutality of the act

Alright four and a half

So this was a one-and-done beat from Marvel Zombies 4, by Fred Van Lente and Kev Walker, which featured a zombie outbreak in the quote-unquote "regular" Marvel Universe, on the fictional Caribbean island of Taino (not sure if this is a deliberate historical reference or not.) Two panels after being introduced, these three are annihilated by an airborne cloud of zombie virus and stitched together into a shambling monster that rambles about how it fights for Truth, Justice, and the Corporate Way. That's ancillary to the point. Ignore that. What this gets me thinking about again is this concept that I have of Super Hero "Dark Matter" worldbuilding, which is the fact that basically every horrible deconstructive beat, every subversive cynical implication of the existence of superheroes you can think of, everything you'd associate by default with The Boys or Invincible (or, on the lighter end of the spectrum, Astro City,) all of that is probably already canon within the DC and Marvel Universes; canonized in niche little miniseries or cult-classic runs of niche characters. Often, canonized in ways that imply the existence of common, broad dynamics that exist within the world, outside the protagonist-centered provincialism of New York or Gotham or Metropolis; all sorts of shit going on that we don't see until it comes into fleeting contact with Spider-Man's knuckles. In this case, the logic is that if superhumans exist- indeed, if superheroes exist- then superhuman-backed neocolonialism would follow. These three aren't here to protect Taino; they're here to protect a fucking resort from the people of Taino, in the event that the American tourists need to leave in a hurry. They work for Roxxon, which is the by-default evil Marvel corporation, the name they break out whenever they want to quickly signal that they're doing a story about corporate malfeasance; what are the odds that these were the only three like this that Roxxon had on Payroll? The one corporate holding being protected this way? That'd be a hell of a coincidence. You can infer an entire ecosystem of these corporate thugs floating around in the background of Marvel, becoming an explicit presence in ones and twos when Mark Waid or Al Ewing need some vile corporate sellouts for a quote-unquote "real" hero (someone with their name on the cover) to beat within an inch of their life. But you start doing the numbers on how many times this kind of plot beat comes up, and you start to come to the conclusion that the Marvel and DC universes have, in fact, always been exactly as dystopian and fucked up as something like The Boys. It's just that in a single-author dedicated deconstruction, the story is allowed to actually notice and remember.