The Lazarus Bit

Anyone with the patience to pore through the diatribes I print under the rubrick of "The Revolving Door of Death" will note that I tend to view disdainfully the ocean of bad stories in which comics characters return from the dead.

While some might see in this tendency to treat the expressions "dead" and "on vacation" with identical consequences some kind of act of sacrilege, my own objections derive from annoyance at revocable death as a storytelling gimmick common to second-rate (or worse) writing. It serves as a tool for cheap shock; then, once the "death" has sold a book, a later writer can use a "resurrection" for a similar one-issue sales spike while ignoring the murmurs of "bait and switch" coming from the gallery.

My objection rests soundly on the consistent awfulness of comics stories in which dead superheroes come back. These involve more invented-on-the-spot miraculous circumstances, more amnesias, more clones and secret twins, more divine and semidivine interventions, and more bad plotting than almost any other kind of comics tale.

The Death of Villains

After I complete enough "Revolving Door of Death" columns, it will become obvious that none of my barbs relate to bad stories explaining the improbable survival of a villain whose last Evil Scheme rendered his mortal remains food for worms. One expects these deaths as part of the idiom of the villain, a trait accompanying petulance, arrogance, and sadism, impossible ambition, and a laundry list of other melodramatic traits. Further, the immortality of supervillains serves a storytelling purpose: If a superhero loses all of his archenemies, he rapidly becomes obsolete, a solution without a problem. At that point, the hero might well retire and become a couch potato.

Therefore, we could cautiously grant an amnesty for the improbable revival of deceased supervillains, who have collectively defied death since the earliest days of the Silver Age.

The Death of Superheroes

In the case of the deaths of superheroes, however, a different dynamic applies. Superheroes die as an attention-getting editorial stunt and return because of a loss of editorial nerve or as a similar attention-getting stunt. The resurrection of superheroes cheapens tales in which they die when anything of value existed to tarnish. This principle enjoys few exceptions, and those generally involve a planned tale where the resurrection of the hero logically culminates the story wherein he died, as in "The Death of Superman."

One type of exception may occur when none of the cheapening motivations exist prior to a resurrection. For instance, Marvel's Wonder Man had appeared in two issues of the Avengers, then died. He had no following of slavering fans to demand that Marvel bring him back. No one had invested more in the character than reading two stories in which one recognized a possibility that he would die, and he did. Furthermore, his return did little to undermine the story in which he had died. Also, since his death, he had grown in importance: He provided a matrix for the mind of perennial Avenger the Vision; he provided the Avengers with an enemy, his brother the Grim Reaper, who recurrently appeared to avenge his "death."

Other exceptions include characters whose essential concept includes their death. Consider Kid Eternity, the Spectre, Spawn, Deadman, and the first Jean Grey Phoenix, all of whom acquired their powers through dying. Their deaths, rather than serving as a gimmick to spike an otherwise very humdrum tale with a sickly infusion of syrupy melodrama, provided essential elements of the story; their deaths resembled the cake more than the frosting. To this category we may append undead characters (Dracula, the Grim Reaper) and bizarre beings who somehow utilize their own death for power (Marvel has a character in the Great Lakes Avengers who becomes more powerful every time someone kills him).

These examples establish the premise that superheroes can die, and, under some circumstances, return from the experience, assuming a rather loose definition of death. The stories do not even have to reek. Nonetheless, the state of the medium makes last-minute decisions to kill characters off and equally impromptu decisions to revive them more typical. When a reader sees the return of a dead character, he knows he will probably have considerable grounds to complain about the story that describes this revival.

This Issue...a Hero Dies!

More often than not, the death of a superhero represents no sane or logical event, serving instead to spruce up a tiresome story in need of flash or pizzazz or je ne sais quois. The phoniness of such usage becomes more obvious in stories where particularly obscure characters die, such as the brutal murder of the "Red Bee" in the pages of All-Star Squadron. Such usage reeks of double-entry bookkeeping: A superhero who meant little in life means little in a story containing his death.

Marvel's slaying of Mockingbird and other equally obscure second-tier players serve as similar examples. Neither character enjoyed a central place in the Marvel Mythos; neither character sold books. If these characters had simply retired or vanished or abandoned adventuring for a career in telemarketing, these things would have a similar impact on their storytelling environment as their hoaky and pointless deaths.

Writers do sometimes realize the cheapness of dredging up some uninteresting and forgotten character in order to kill him off in order to shock the reader, and sometimes use characters further up the pecking order for this. In such cases, readers have less grounds for complaint about trying to pass lead coins as gold ones. Another temptation exists in these cases, however. When more significant characters die, one may reliably predict their return as likely in proportion to their importance and popularity.

Does Death Matter or Not?

Raising the dead really seems like a cheat within the pages of comics because it represents a kind of bait-and-switch used within the stories. When the death happens, the story attempts to claim that it "matters," in that we may expect real and irrevocable consequences of this death; we expect it to "take." Sometimes the seriousness of a comic book death represents the element which sold the magazine in the first place.

When writers and editors return with "...but not really" storylines that improbably return characters from death, it cheats the reader whom writers manipulated through the histrionic passage of superheroes. Furthermore, a reader thus cheated by two stories, the first saying "buy this because it matters that this hero dies" and the second saying "buy this because we bring this hero back", learns rapidly to disregard mortality as an element used to create interest or invest realism.

The better the death story, the cheaper its reversal becomes. A well-received story with considerable impact, like Chris Claremont's telling of the death of Phoenix/Jean Gray, represents something of a commitment not to turn suddenly and say, "but it didn't really happen because we want to use that character again."

Writers have created the cynicism that causes readers to scoff reflexively at martyred superheroes, because anyone who observes the medium knows that superheroes very seldom stay dead. Superheroes remain in the graveyard in direcly inverse proportion to the amount of time they enjoyed a history in print; if a character came back, years after his title died, years since the last story containing his exploits appeared in print, and then dies, we may expect him to remain dead; Manhunter and the Crimson Avenger present examples of this sort. If, however, a character has appeared in print non-stop since 1938 and dies 55 years into this long and successful run, and his title continues a year in his absence, we can count on his return, perhaps within the next month. Pecuniary concerns, after all, prohibit dispensing with viable characters.

If death does not matter within superhero comics - if we may settle the problem more easily than dealing with a traffic ticket - then this premise should remain consistent; "death" and "disappearance" would become identical concepts, and characters would, in both cases, wonder if or when they might expect to see the departed again. If death does matter, it should have some enduring consequences.

Comics, especially Marvel comics, should decide the issue one way or another. Does death matter, or doesn't it?