It can’t just be for shock value and normally it’s a discussion that we have between first the writer and the editor and then the writer and the editorial team, so the process of killing off a character really is a group decision, and it’s made always with the best story in mind.
There’s a lot of debates that happen because if a writer suggests that we should kill a character, it always has to be story driven first.
But the process of killing off a character is not an easy one, and a lot of people think death is something that we don’t take seriously in the Marvel Universe but it really is.