Death in Comics Part I

Remember when Dark Phoenix sacrificed herself to save the X-Men and the universe at large? Remember when Supergirl and Barry Allen, also known as the Flash, fell heroically during the turmoil of the Crisis on Infinite Earths? I sure do. I remember reading the Dark Phoenix Saga in grade five or something like that, and I remember the issues of Crisis (the only ones I read, incidentally) as being so momentous that my diehard Marvel cousin just had to buy them.

Back then, the death of comic book characters meant something. It was resonant. It was poignant. And it was done, above all else, in the name of powerful storytelling.

Nowadays, it's done for all the wrong reasons.

When Chris Claremont killed Jean Grey/Phoenix, he unleashed a fanboy shitstorm unlike any the comics world had ever seen. Supposedly the Marvel offices were inundated with hate mail. In a pre-internet age, that really says something. It took a full six years for Marvel to address the situation, and to their credit, although they did bring Jean back, they appeared to put some long and hard thought into how they would do it without making her death seem like a gimmick. Thing is, at the time Claremont killed Jean, he had no intention of brining her back.

Barry Allen, who had been Flash since the late fifties (DCphiles please correct me if I'm wrong), but the company had the cojones to kill him and keep him dead.

These are the only two deaths in the history of the medium that really mean something. Well, Gwen Stacy's death was a big deal, but even it has been retroactively tarnished of late.

These days, death in comics is done for sheer shock value, whether it's to launch an "event" storyline or to draw buzz to a book.

Last year, Marvel killed Hawkeye for the obvious shock value of it, figuring that their "Avengers Disassembled" storyline would be the more poignant for it. To my mind, it just became schlockier and now has collective Marvel fandom waiting for the editorial directive to raise him from the dead. The death of the Ant-Man, which also took place in that storyline, was cheap and uncalled for as well.

On the other side of the fence, DC killed Sue Dibny in their storyline of the year "Identity Crisis" which despite the rather sensationalist marketing campaign surrounding its launch, actually contained a pretty good storyline. Too bad they had to sully it by killing yet another secondary character this year in an attempt to launch a crossover event. To those of you who don't know who it is, let's just say Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire probably feel their JLA lineup is dwindling slowly but surely.

And then, of course, there's the old stunt of killing a character whose popularity is dwindling. This was an unfortunate, inadvertent result of the whole Phoenix Saga, which despite everything that's come after it remains one of comics' most powerful moments.

That said, the resurrection of dead characters can be done with some flourish. Kevin Smith did a good job with Green Arrow, concocting a whole afterlife scenario to help ease Oliver Queen back into the DC Universe. Joss Whedon did an even better job with Colossus in Astonishing X-Men. But these comics were already founded on solid storytelling; the resurrection basically just helped them along. And these characters' deaths early on did not feel like dime-a-dozen deals, either.

I know these characters are company property, but it really bugs me that their lives are trivialized for the sake of short-term sales spikes. I've said before that comics aren't high art, but that doesn't excuse its purveyors from attempting some sort of creativity. I for one still buy books for writers, artists and stories that I like, and not because I'm anxious to see which b-level character is hyped to buy the farm. I know in my gut that majority of the comic book fans still pay good money for quality stories and art, not for cheap tricks. I hope I'm right.

Next: the Death of Nascent Comic Companies