The crux of the character was sadism, as pure and unadulterated as they could make it. He's killed everyone in a vast number of universes now, leaving just a few alive each time to torture before killing them and moving on. He killed the sun in the next dimension over (humorously called Earth One Dimension Away) and implored his new apprentice to make her scream as they killed it.

He tried to get Reed to choose between his loved ones as to which would be killed. Tried to get Sue to choose between her kids, and when Ben made a wisecrack about his aunt, Millar's character transported himself and Ben into her kitchen and made Ben watch her die.

Because comics are fun.

Like the recent Spider-Man alternate reality massacres (including the characters from Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends) or Bizarro hitting the Human Bomb "until the pretty lights go out." Black Adam tearing the limbs and faces off of his opponents and Mary Marvel being possessed by Desaad, of all people.

Seriously, I have to ask what sick, twisted ass enjoys this type of story? Is it all just a matter of "raising the stakes" so the heroes have a decent reason to go bad-ass at the end? Was "Seven" the best thing ever, ever, ever, and now all fiction, or at least all comic-book fiction, MUST mimic it or be deemed pathetic and juvenile by the comic-buying cognoscenti? If you don't kill a version of the hero and his surrounding alternate universe at least 40 times before our version of the hero shows up, do editors no longer read your scripts, leaving you and your family to starve...?

And most of all, why does this same story get rewritten over and over and over again without someone saying, "We've done this already?"