Seven Deadly Sins of Comics, Part V: The Body Count

Old, old readers of old, old comics may remember a day when the polyannaish virtues of platitude-spouting superheroes never failed to bore. Once Superman, for example, began discussing his oath never to take a life, it became time to flip through to something more interesting, like an explosion or a slugfest.

Eventually, in the decline of the Comics Code Authority during those days in which urban fear reached its maturity, a crop of superheroes appeared who did not scruple over dispatching their adversaries into the next world. At first, the shock value of this hobby struck long-term readers; when Wolverine or the Punisher did something particularly violent to someone who particularly deserved it, it inspired a long-deferred thrill that attested to the power of forbidden pleasures.

If superheroes became more violent and less scrupulous, the villains of the day could do no less, and readers could soon enjoy stories where villains casually dispensed with whole cities, countries, planets, or whatever quantity became the minimum threshhold for attracting a reader's attention. However, in spite of the recent population of the "big epaulets 'n' big guns" type of hero in the expiring new comics, readers did not long stay with the titles that fed a diet of extravagant violence.

Yesteryear's shock value became today's boring cliche, and, even though comics do not dispense with mortal violence, the piles of bodies do little to make tales more interesting. One could conclude that the mortal violence experiment failed even as it permanently infected the medium.

A Trail of Blood

Since 1974, a date conspicuously past the high point of the Silver Age and, by some reckonings, into the "bronze age" of comics, a certain type of character began to appear and exert an influence on the portrayals of superheroes.

The Punisher represents one major prototype of this character; Wolverine, another. Such characters made their reputations either by lining the streets with the corpses of their victims or utilizing exceptionally violent methods for apprehending and subduing their enemies, not scrupling to exclude the occasional or frequent killing.

The age of urban terror provided an excellent time for such characters. Movies such as Death Wish offered some catharsis to people terrorized by the increasing brazenness and density of violent hoodlums in a day when fewer citizens felt any wisdom in travelling within the city after dark, or even during midday. These developments did not add to the credibility of the DC-model of hero, a man of high ideals coupled with some great source of power he would use in the pursuit of those ideals.

However, to cater to this new urban fearfulness meant to pander to sadism with stories that followed a simple formula: Find them; kill them. Sometimes some background text would appear in word balloons or captions explaining why the protagonist needed to do away with his latest round of cattle in a superheroic abbatoir. However, where unadorned homicide provides entertainment, the character of the meat need never become an issue.

At least within the pages of comics, mortal violence will dull the senses of readers to the expenditure of life, until another death becomes . . . another death, no more important than the passing of, say, a cockroach or a field mouse. As far as the superhero story goes, villains do less to desensitize when they kill (depending upon the skills of the writer) than do heroes, but comics routinely portray great mass killings, sometimes by antiheroes, without it breaking stride in the story.

This sad condition reflects a great dulling of sensitivities. Our violent culture does much to bring this about, but it also represents a failure of storytelling, since a good treatment of a story can make a simple blow to self-esteem bear more weight than the bloodiest bulletfest handled wrongly.

Warping the Hero

The notion of superheroes assumes some logical pretext. This pretext includes the notion that "good" superbeings do work that complements the efforts of legitimized agencies that promote the public welfare. Such agencies, by one definition, include police, the courts, and the military. While a superhero need not remain on good terms with any such agency, his credibility rests on the benignness of his work.

No government would put up with someone who acted as an assassin for criminals. Even when a government intended the deaths, it would recognize the dangers of a freelance hit-man whom nothing compelled to serve their ends.

However, comics do not always deal in true-to-life matters; if they did, we would call them nonfiction. The pernicious effect of the killer vigilante rests not in his his skillful evasion of realism even as he pretends to such realism; his ability to demean the medium derives from stirring up desires that some might consider better left untitillated.

By the eighties, the editors of comics realized that a market existed for killer vigilantes and antiheroes, and they stimulated creators to respond with product. Market demand soon brought about a glut of derivative, interchangeable, and thoroughly disposable characters who eagerly sought the opportunity to summarily execute hoodlums. Thus, we have DC's Vigilante of the 1980s, who tracked down crooks and killed them, although he suffered from occasional bouts of unwanted self-awareness, presumably to camoflauge the inherent shallowness of antiheroes spawned from the same archetype. Marvel, after realizing the success of its derivative character the Punisher (who bore an improbable resemblance to a Mack Bolan creation), created Cloak and Dagger, a superheroic duo who specialized in killing drug dealers to avenge the designer-drug experimentation that created them.

Fortunately, the novelty of the killer vigilante wore off back when comics still sold in respectable, if contracting, numbers. Even the crowd that lovingly tallied body counts within a story lost interest, not because of a shift of values but because a story one may summarize as "Hero kills villain" does not enjoy much of what creates a story.

Gimmickry and Abuse

Comics, like any form of entertainment, can become less interesting after enough consumption. As a hamburger eaten only once a year probably tastes better than a hamburger that follows 364 consecutive days of hamburgers, so, too, can comics lose their ability to grab and hold the attention of readers. The medium, driven by market forces, has experimented with a number of things to increase attention: improved print technologies to make colors bold and vivid; lurid and loving depictions of the female form in an excess that would once have inspired accusations of pornographic content; and stories that do things stories once avoided.

Like a metallic cover, a #1 of a title in continuous production for decades, multiple covers, or the redesign of a costume that hasn't changed in a generation, death can grab the attention of would-be readers. All of these effects may impress for a while.

In the manner of all gimmicks, death loses its impact with repitition. At this point, writers must consider either upping the ante of the story (see Part I of this series) or telling a better story to get the reader's attention. Writers do not always choose to tell better stories; killing someone off sometimes represents the path of least resistance.

Misplaced Realism

A war story or a police story may require some things to create an air of realism, including the deaths of protagonists and antagonists. The conventions of such forms require, if one deal with the basic premises, that someone die, because war creates casualties and police chase killers. Some might argue that bringing a more realistic mortality into superhero comics also invests them with a greater quality through realism.

However, the superhero comic does not inherently owe to realism. Men and women who fly, change shape, emit rays, and do hundreds of other absurd things, all while clad in improbable outfits that cling to muscle more tightly than human skin, do not imply much of a realistic worldview. Granted, realism typically does contribute to better stories than, say, the puerile silliness of DC in the 1960s in works such as Superbaby stories or Lois Lane tales of absurd schemes to drag Superman to the altar.

Briefly put, superhero comics do not owe much to realism, and can, without damaging the superheroic concept, dispense with too severe a dosage of it. Such comics did, in their first thirty-five years of history, manage to tell stories without needing to begin or end each tale with a funeral. Death constitutes an optional element, available at the discretion of the writer; used frequently, death just becomes another attention-getting gimmick.