Thinking about the end of Fear Itself, I end up wondering about the role of superhero death these days. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there’s another death in #7 – The solicit has talked about “another hero falling” or something similar, right? – but, like the death of Bucky in #3, it’s entirely unconvincing; you end up thinking “Wait, is that it?” and “They’ll be back in a few months” simultaneously, and that seems to be a problem. Actually, the problem for Marvel is the same one that DC had, as underlined by Blackest Night: All of their major characters had “died” and come back from the dead.
In the last few years, we’ve seen Thor die during Ragnarok, only to come back thanks to JMS, Captain America die and come back thanks to timey-wimey craziness, and Iron Man die and get rebooted during World’s Most Wanted/Stark Disassembled. Hawkeye has died, Mockingbird has died, Wolverine has died (more than once?), the Human Torch has died and is awaiting a rebirth in Fantastic Four #600… Death has become so entirely devalued that it, weirdly, seems to devalue the stories that it appears in – I’ve been seeing reactions to the end of FI that are along the lines of “Yawn, another death? They couldn’t think of anything else to do?” – which seems… both heartening (The readers want something more from their comics!) and depressing (Using death as part of your story is judged lazy and cliche, which feels like it’s removing a lot of options in terms of dramatic tension).
The obvious solution is to do what Blackest Night tried to – Draw a line under the various resurrections and say “Yeah, that’s not going to happen again anytime soon,” while also pulling back on the number of deaths in your stories. Give death a chance to regain some of its dramatic power, and stop using it as a cheap way of forcing an emotional reaction to whatever tale you’re telling at that particular moment. But, even doing that, we’ll all still remember that a truly ridiculous number of characters have beaten the Grim Reaper. Is there any way that comic book death can ever be redeemed again?
October 19th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Yawn because Thor not going to be dead for long or Thor book will be canceled in couple of months.
October 19th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
It’s also hard to believe that the people of the Marvel and (previous) DC universes aren’t aware of this. Martian Manhunter’s funeral in Final Crisis was great, because the characters actually acknowledged the fact that heroes die and come back all the time.
I mean, by now it should be devalued in the fictional universe, too.
October 19th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Human Torch is coming back in Fantastic Four #600.
That right there should summarize for everybody how little value there is not only in super hero deaths these days, but also in numbering systems.
October 19th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
*points up at Silvanthalas*
That.
Right there, in that second sentence, it’s summed up beautifully.
October 19th, 2011 at 10:30 pm
I always found the obsession with comic book deaths and resurrections to be pathetic.
October 20th, 2011 at 8:14 am
Did Iron Man really die? He was braindead, but no one was under the illusion that he had actually died. Marvel didn’t promote it as such and the characters treated it as a serious medical condition, not death.
October 20th, 2011 at 9:05 am
Since we all know that these long running characters will NEVER die, of course death in their stories will never last. Knowing that, for years the writers would kill of supporting characters (Gwen Stacy, Ma & Pa Kent, Uncle Ben) but even that wouldn’t last. So where’s the drama in these stories?
There are only two ways, IMO, to solve this problem. The first is too complicated and the companies don’t have the guts to make the second one work.
1) If the companies (Marvel, DC) would decide to reboot their entire lines, oh, every 10, 15 years, they could conceivably kill a character in a story knowing that when they reboot the line again they could bring them back.
I don’t see this happening anytime soon, because I don’t think either company has the guts to do a complete, clean reboot and even then, I don’t see them sticking to their guns and not bringing back a character before the next reboot.
2) Since death of a character isn’t going to fool anyone (“oh, he’ll be back in a month or so”) how about disabling a character? Batgirl/Barbara Gordon was controversially disabled in the 1980′s and remained that way for over 20 years (and too many, became more of an interesting character). This could amp up the drama, but I don’t have the confidence that future writers and editors wont screw that up as well. See the new DC 52.