Death in comics...

[fajrdrako]

Ron Marz wrote an interesting essay on death in comics: O Death, Where is Thy Sting?.

There's no other medium in which death is treated as such a trivial matter. And yet... it's handled that way because it isn't trivial, because comics deal with the melodramatic, the larger-than-life-and-death, and the miraculous. These are superheroes, even when they have no powers: most major myths have aspects of transcending mortality. It's part of the mystique. People live large, die large, and live again.

Or maybe it's in the nature of character-based serial fiction.

Marz mentions the death of Captain Marvel (to cancer) as being a successful, realistic story in which the death remained permanent. So it did. I remember it as a bit of a prosy bore.

What would mainstream comics be like if people didn't die and return? I can't really imagine. Would I prefer the matter not be treated as a cliché? For sure. Do I have any doubt that we will see the dead member of the Fantastic Four alive again? Or Jean Grey? Or Nightcrawler?

I do think the matter is being used with increasing creativity. Batman's recent death has led to interesting (and unprecedented) changes in the status quo; so did the parallel storyline at Marvel about Captain America's death and return. Interestingly, Iron Man didn't die - but he shut down his own mind for a while, and has been resurrected with changes. Death becomes a kind of transformation.

And Wolverine, now - not dead, but his soul severed from his body and sent to Hell. I'm not sure whether I really like this storyline, but it's a terrific concept - a cross between Dante and a horror show.

Perhaps it's good that we have a fictional medium where we can examine and re-examine concepts of death. I can't say I entirely approve of this aspect of comics, but I can't say I dislike it, either.