Ruby Thursday

Ruby Thursday is a scientist who replaced her own head with a malleable red sphere of organic plastic that she can reshape and weaponize at will. She first clashed with the Defenders after joining the nihilistic Headmen, a group of criminals united by their extreme bodily self-modifications.

Few Marvel villains make a first impression quite like Ruby Thursday — debuting in The Defenders #76 in 1979, this Bronze Age original brought something genuinely strange to the House of Ideas, and strange has a way of sticking around. Created by Steven Grant and Herb Trimpe, she's kept unsettling company across four-plus decades, sharing pages with the likes of Wolverine, Gorilla-Man, and the enigmatic Dr. Arthur Nagan in titles ranging from The Defenders to Heroes for Hire to Deathlok. Twenty catalog appearances spread across 46 years tells the story of a character who never quite goes away — a cult favorite lurking at the weirder edges of the Marvel Universe, exactly the kind of deep-cut discovery that makes bronze-age digging so rewarding.