Retro Review

I don’t like meaningless deaths in mainstream super-hero comic books. When characters die as cannon fodder or for shock value, or because the writer never liked them, it pulls me out of the story, weakening rather than strengthening the impact. I’m not suggesting that super-hero books should avoid death: there have been some superb stories over the years that involve heroes valliantly sacrificing themselves or villains receiving bitter punishment for their monstrous crimes, and there have been moments of great pathos in the deaths of supporting characters. I believe the death of a character should be integral to the storyline, an emotional moment that gives the reader pause, not a cheap shot to show that the writer is serious. 

It particularly irritates me when the character is a minor one that was had received a lot of development at the hands of one writer, only to be unceremoniously bumped off by another. If the writer really felt the need to kill off a character, why not create their own one-off character to die? Why take someone else’s work and end it?

I realize of course that there is always the chance of resurrection if the character is popular enough, but that’s beside the point: the moment of death should still be something significant for the story to ring true. Perhaps one of the reasons why so many otherwise good writers resort to cheap deaths is because death in comics has been cheapened by the frequent resurrections.

I’ve been feeling like character death has become more frequent over the past few years, so I thought I’d take the time to go back and see if that’s true or not. Were shock killings and cheap death scenes always part of comic books, or is it a more recent phenomenon? Are the current writers and editors really more bloodthirsty, and the current readers more blasé about characters being unceremoniously killed off? Am I over-reacting? Over the next few Thursdays, I aim to find out. Also, I’ll be looking at characters that were created to die in the next few Friday posts. I’d like to hear from you about your opinions on character death, resurrection and shock tactics too.