Robert Kirkman on Invincible #100′s death – and what it has to do with superhero comics as a whole. There are spoilers, so it’s under the jump:
I like to play with the familiar tropes of comics with “Invincible.” That’s been our motif over the last six, seven years. I think comic readers have grown a little bit tired — or at least I have, as a fan — of the whole, “Hey, the main character is going to die and we’re going to do six months worth of marketing about the fact that the main character is going to die and then at the end of that story the main character is going to die which is the thing we’ve been telling you for six months and also we’re going to bring him back in six months anyway so this whole thing was kind of ridiculous.”
I thought it would be really fun and a different way of doing things if I did the marketing and made everybody think the main character was going to die and then the main character did die — but instead of waiting six months, I brought him back in the exact same issue, so the character didn’t actually die at all.
The statement I was trying to make — and I guess it’s up to the fans to judge whether or not it worked, and maybe it didn’t — I just wanted to say you can do a monumental, series-changing issue without killing off the main character, or doing something extremely drastic. Let’s try to tell an interesting story, let’s try to do something different with the characters. Killing characters and bringing back characters has gotten to be a bit too much of a crutch in superhero comics. I thought it would be a little bit of fun to play with those tropes.
Hear hear. I’d love to see death put to bed as a fake threat for DC and especially Marvel for awhile.
January 31st, 2013 at 10:29 am
Man, this Kirkman guy should read The Walking Dead.
January 31st, 2013 at 11:47 am
So who died?
January 31st, 2013 at 12:10 pm
No one – that is the point of the article. We discover the character has superhealing powers in about six months when he returns…so once again no one dies. Comics, yo.
February 1st, 2013 at 2:56 am
@justsaying
That’s not what he said, or what happened, at all.
Invincible “died” on the first page of the book, but it was revealed within a couple pages that it wasn’t actually his body that we saw get torn apart (as Kirkman said above, “instead of waiting six months, I brought him back in the exact same issue”).
It was a pretty standard (though fun) story fake-out/twist, but what made it “comics, yo” was all the hype and marketing surrounding the issue, making it look like it was going to be an enormous deadly event. Kirkman’s point was to subvert that, to make waves with promises of death but in fact deliver a big, series-altering event that was all about a change in attitude, instead. By comparison, the fake death was (by design) an almost completely inconsequential moment in the story, looking back on it.
February 1st, 2013 at 8:56 am
Of course if Marvel or DC had done that, Graeme and AC would be talking about how shallow and tacky it was…..
February 1st, 2013 at 10:53 pm
That’s the exact same argument Morrison used during his New X-Men run. He killed Magneto, then brought him back to life a few months later, then killed him again. Then, he claimed in an interview that he only did it to mock all those other lame, unimaginative writers who have to keep killing the villain and bringing him back over and over again as a crutch. Of course, this hasn’t stopped Morrison from rehashing this same trick several times in his subsequent Marvel/DC runs, most notably when he had Batman die, only to reveal that it was a clone a few months later.
Not only is Kirkman rehashing a tired storytelling trope that has been used dozens of times by other writers, he’s using a rehashed sketchy rationalization for said trope.
February 2nd, 2013 at 8:20 am
Marvel basically did do this. Not in a single issue, but in one event. It’s called Fear Itself, Fraction said himself in interviews that he was making a bit of a meta-comment on death and resurrection in comics. And, yes, Mechagamera, everyone basically *#?! all over Fear Itself.