July 25, 2002

BID #2 - DEAD AND RECOVERING NICELY... (Aug. 3,1990)

digress (26k image)

Who killed death in comics?

This calls for a baseball metaphor (as do most things in life). Asking who killed death in comics is like asking who a runner steals a base on: the pitcher or the catcher? The former says the latter; the latter aceuses the former. So it is with comics death. The fans will blame the writers, and the writers will pin it on the fans.

Follow:

Comic books are second only to soap operas in terms of being a fan-responsive medium. When Stan Lee would smilingly proclaim that readers are "the real editors," he wasn't kidding. Fan letters (and fans' ultimate vote, their dollars) can determine a great deal about how things proceed.

Not that any writer worth his salt does everything readers say. It's gutless, and, besides, fans can be remarkably shortsighted. Remember the "kill that obnoxious Wolverine" pleas from X-Men letters pages, circa issues 97-107? Still, fan reaction was, is, and will be a powerful influence.

And fans hate to see characters die.

Except characters they hate or characters that are felt to have "no potential." (And after what's been done with Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and others, can anyone comfortably say that about any character?)

But if the fans have any sort of emotional attachment to a character, they don't want to see that character go. Worse than that -- they don't believe the character is really dead. Why should they? They've seen resurrections far too many times to take any of it seriously.

And that's where we, the writers, have shot ourselves in the foot. By trying to placate the fans by reliving popular characters (I stress popular. You don't see anyone plotting to bring back The Ringer) we bave robbed ourselves of the ability to tell stories with any meaning (myself not excluded, in case you think I'm getting holier-than-thou).

In any action film you see, tension is generated because somebody you like might die. In Die Hard, might be Bruce Willis or his wife. In a Bond film, might be his latest lady love. And so forth.

But comics have a built in fail-safe mechanism-- someone dies, we can bring 'em back-- and so we are unable to get anyone to take death as a serious threat.

Case in point from personal experience: The Death of Jean DeWolff.

Here was a relatively minor supporting Spider-Man character who was blown away to kick off a four-parter. (Short digression: An editor at a comic-book company [no longer in the field] took me aside and informed me quite seriously that this story violated the "rules" of comics. That when a character died, it had to be at the climax of the story, preferably with the character giving his or her life heroically to save the hero. That was a rule. Killing Jean on page 4 of an 88-page story was "ridiculous." Old, dopey me.)

So Jean dies in Spec Spidey #107, and we get deluged with letters. The majority of them contained recurring themes: First, that Jean was the letter writer's "favorite character." This was odd considering Jean had hardly appeared at all for many issues previous, and letters demanding more of her were nil. The second theme was the more disturbing-- people didn't believe she was dead.

I was unnerved by this. If readers didn't accept her death, they wouldn't accept everything that flowed from it. Spidey Editor Jim Owsley was even told by confident fans at an Atlanta Con, "Nah, she's not really dead."

I couldn't understand it. I had called the damned thing "The Death of Jean DeWolff." I'd had her entire upper torso blown away at close range by a shotgun. I had her funeral and planted her in the next issue. What did I have to do? Decapitate her on panel? She was dead, cold, wormfood.

And people refused to believe. They were willing to accept the most outrageous contrivance (clones, replicants, LMDs, secret S.H.I.E.L.D. plots-- all these and more were suggested) rather than handle the simple truth that Jean had joined the bleeding choir invisible.

The fans have made it too easy on us writers. They'll swallow it all rather than live with death. Perfect example: Elektra. Elektra's death was devastating. Frank Miller pulled it off perfectly. No one was deader than Elektra.

And Frank brought her back, and everyone was happy. Everyone. And it was accepted without question. And Elektra is walking around somewhere in the Marvel universe, waiting for her graphic novel. No one thinks this odd.

The following is not meant as criticism-- I think Frank is a freaking comics genius. But consider: Elektra was stabbed to death. Not turned to stone like Thanos or fried in mystical energies like the Lord Papal. Not molecularly disassembled, not scattered on the four winds of the cosmos, or any of the countless pseudo-scientifical/fantastical means by which you can at least justify, to some degree, that someone might come back.

She wasn't immortal, alien, interdimensional, or extragalactic-- she was just a human.

After she expired in the most mortal of ways, she was then autopsied. Now, when they perform an autopsy, they cut you open to discover what made you die. They remove and examine your organs. They then put the organs back but, since your future need for them would seem limited, they don't put them back in place. They just dump them all in your chest cavity-- liver, spleen, kidneys, everything-- stitch it up and ship you off.

For most people, this is where it ends. But Elektra, as they say, "got better."

When I was sales manager at Marvel, after Elektra returned, fans would ask me at conventions, "What's Elektra going to do now that she's returned?" And my reply was always, "Slosh." But people just stared at me.

Elektra's return was always accepted as "ninja magic." Why not? It's no sillier than, say, shrinking to microscopic size to avoid a gamma bomb blast.

They die, and the fans protest, and they return. Robin, Marvel Girl, Gwen, Ma and Pa Kent (well, OK, no one protested, but the Kents came back, anyway), the list goes on and on. Writers try to please the fans by giving them what they want.

So-and-So is dead? No! Shock follows shock, as So-and-So returns (usually accompanied by a cover illo of the hero saying, "It can't be! You're -- dead!", thereby proving that super-heroes never read comic books or they wouldn't be surprised by this sort of thing).

And what happens? The fans complain. What, someone has died, say the fans? Ah, the jaundiced, jaded fans, who cock a knowing glance and nod their heads and say, "Suuuuuuure, they're dead. You expect us to believe that? Come on. No one ever dies in comics. Because writers are too gutless to really kill someone and have them stay dead."

Which brings us back to the original question: Whose fault is that? What do I think?

I think the runner definitely steals on the pitcher.

(Peter David is the writer of The Hulk, among other things, and wishes to address something that seems to confuse people but is completely off topic-- namely, if the gray Hulk gets mad, does he turn into the green Hulk? The answer is: of course not. The two Hulks are aspects of Bruce Banner. An angry Bruce Banner gets you an enraged green Hulk. An angry gray Hulk gets you a quick trip to the nearest Emergency Room. The gray Hulk has never had any trouble dealing with anger and so would have no need to vent his rage in another persona. It's that simple. I think.)

Posted by Peter David at July 25, 2002 12:27 AM | TrackBack | Other blogs commenting
Comments
Posted by: David S. at April 28, 2006 11:18 PM

This was one of the few columns that you wrote that embarrassed me because I was just as guilty as most comic fans for making the following demands: create realistic characters and put them in realistic situations, but don't you dare kill them off! How can you possibly have one without the other and keep the story genuine? The adolescent me didn't care when Stan Lee first killed off Captain Stacey, then his daughter Gwen in Amazing Spiderman(now reprinted courtesy of the popularity of the first New Spiderman Film)! Like every Spidey fan, I was angry and upset when I first read it, but as I matured, I realized that Stan was only trying to do what the writers and editors at DC Comics didn't have the courage to do: tell stories where the hero sometimes "drops the ball" or at least doesn't "save the day everyday."

In high school, I had a physics teacher explain why it was scientifically impossible for Superman to catch people who fall from skyscrapers and moving airplanes and how falling bricks can be as lethal as "speeding bullets" IN REAL LIFE, but it took Stan the Man to actually show True Believers that it can even occur in a comic book...and it took years for many of his fans to forgive him, myself included.

I thank you for displaying the same courage in your second BID article and keep up the good work!