Super Heroes, R.I.P.

I’ve been disgruntled lately.

I know I generally blog about comics that are a bit off the beaten path, not so much because I don’t like mainstream comics (because I do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it), but because I like to shine the light on stuff out that you might not know about.

With, say, Batman…I mean, what’s to know?

Bruce Wayne is Batman, he wears a costume and fights evildoers by night, right?

Well…no.

Okay, let me back up. First of all, for the uninitiated, let me lay this out for you: Most mainstream comic books are essentially soap operas on paper.



They have characters that we come to love (or hate), and the writers are charged with creating interesting situations into which to insert those characters, so that we are compelled to keep buying issues to see what happens. This is exactly the same formula as a soap opera. And much like soap operas, over the years some of the story lines have been pretty silly, objectively speaking. A huge favorite in either industry is killing off characters, thought they inevitably come back, or it turns out that the person actually killed was the evil clone, or it was a dream sequence, or Mephisto uses magic to undo the death, etc.

It sounds silly because it IS silly, but what’s even sillier is the frequency with which this happens.

The best example in my mind is DC’s Superman, whom we saw killed in 1990 by the alien villain, Doomsday. I remember this being national news, and the (appropriately black-bagged) comic was wildly popular for about 1.789 seconds, before the sixteen trillion reprints glutted the market, leaving little tween capitalist speculator fanboys—myself among them—literally holding the bag when the bottom fell out. This was my very first real lesson in the capitalist pendulum, and I’ve hated the Big Blue Boy Scout ever since. But I digress.


At least ‘Ol Supes has only died once, so far. DC’s character Green Lantern is complicated by the fact that there are multiple characters bearing the name and the mystical green ring that controls their power. The main Green Lanterns are Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner.

I think Hal Jordan is the only one to have been iced (so far).

Not too long after Superman came back to life, Hal went nuts, destroyed the rest of the Green Lantern Corps, and started calling himself Parallax. Wielding the collective power of all the Green Lanterns (which, in case you don’t know, is actually an intergalactic police force which assigns one “Green Lantern” per populated planet), Hal went on to wreak havoc on the DC Universe for a couple of years before valiantly sacrificing his life to protect the Earth from the Sun-Eater. But then he was reincarnated as the new Spectre, the divine spirit of God’s Vengeance.

Hey, I don’t make this stuff up.

Green Arrow Oliver Queen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan have both died and come back

Another vicitim is DC’s Green Arrow, which has also had a couple of names attached to it, though my personal (and longest-lasting) favorite is Oliver Queen. In Green Arrow Vol. 2, #100-101, Ollie sacrificed his life to save Metropolis, and the Green Arrow mantle was taken on my Connor Hawke (I told you they were soap operas…have you ever seen a more soap-opera-esque name?)

But a few years later, Oliver Queen was—you guessed it—revived in the “Quiver” story arc of Green Arrow Vol. 3, penned by fan-favorite Kevin Smith. Just to shake things up, though, Oliver came back without any memory of his previous life, until his soul returned from heaven, reuniting his memories with his body to help Connor Hawke (I giggle every time I type that) fight off marauding demons.

Yes, I said demons. Try to keep up.

Hungry for more?


Fine: DC’s The Flash has been, at various times, Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West and Bart Allen. Barry Allen died heroically in Crisis on Infinite Earths #8 (1985), but he kept sort of coming back to life—repeatedly—due to his ability to travel through time.

Well, that is until this year, when DC Comics apparently decided to bring him back permanently. Following the subsequent Infinite Crisis cross-over sage, the Wally West Flash didn’t die, but he did leave Earth indefinitely for a parallel dimension. (Some might argue that a better definition of “death” has yet to be written, but whatever, you say “deceased,” I say “parallel dimension...”). Wally came back in time to help his wife Linda in rearing their twins, who went from infant to tween thanks to some time in the "Speed Force".

Apparently, Barry is coming back this year too, in the much-anticipated The Flash: Rebirth, which is on the shelves as I write this.



The Bart Allen Flash (Barry Allen’s grandson, if you must know) was also removed to a different dimension in Infinite Crisis, only he came back four years later, albeit without his speed powers.

Unfortunately, he was then killed by villains in the final issue of Flash, The Fastest Man Alive…except that he was resurrected in the 31st Century in Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #3. Apparently he too is coming back (presumably to the present time) this year in Rebirth. Are you keeping this all straight?

Look, I’m not the only one to go on about this. Comics writer Geoff Johns said,

“Death in superhero comics is cyclical in its nature, and that's for a lot of reasons, whether they are story reasons, copyright reasons, or fan reasons. But death doesn't exist the same way it does in our world, and thank god for that. I wish death existed in our world as it does in comics.”

I’m picking on DC Comics today, but don’t even get me started about Marvel.


Starting with the 1980 “death” of Jean Grey in the X-Men’s Dark Phoenix Saga, to quote Charles “Professor X” Xavier, "in mutant heaven there are no pearly gates, but instead revolving doors."

The list of Here Today, Gone Tomorrow…And Back Again Tuesday characters in the Marvel pantheon is ridiculous.

Most recently, the “death” of Captain America made national news back in 2007…but yes, Marvel has now revealed that Steve Rogers (i.e., Captain America) will be resurrected later this year. Apparently he wasn’t dead after all…he was just trapped in the time-continuum, you see.

Duh.

I checked this out on Wikipedia (to whom I owe a thanks for helping even me, “Mr. Comics,” keep all this crap straight), and there’s a great little tidbit: Apparently, there has been a long-held saying in the industry that, “No-one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben.” Well, as the Wiki glibly points out, as of now, Bucky (Captain America’s golden-age boy sidekick) has been reincarnated as first the Winter Soldier, and more recently as the temporarily-deceased Captain America’s stand-in, and Jason Todd (the 2nd Robin, of Batman fame, who was killed off by fan poll in 1988) was recently reincarnated as, well, Jason Todd—although now he’s apparently evil Jason Todd.

Former deceased sidekicks, Jason Todd and Bucky, now resurrected

The jury is still out on Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben (dead since 1962), but I’m not making any bets.

Somebody actually took the time to parse this out, which I think is hilarious enough to reprint here. Again, thank you Wikipedia, which points out that the “most common reincarnations” (heh, heh) include the following:

1. The death scene is not actually the death of the character, but instead a severe near-death injury or situation, from which the character gets saved (off-screen, detailed in the subsequent reincarnation) by his powers or skills (e.g., Green Goblin), by good luck, or by the help of someone else. The death scene may be a deliberate plot of a character that simulates his own death or that of someone else for a certain purpose.

2. A common variant is an explosion that doesn't kill the character, they are merely buried in rubble/flung to safety/transported to another dimension (Spider-man villain Hammerhead once survived a nuclear explosion in this way).

3. The person who dies is a clone, impostor, or shapeshifter (Dark Phoenix being the most well-known example).

4. The character really does die, but is resurrected, either intentionally (e.g., Green Arrow) or unintentionally (e.g., Jason Todd) by some cosmic or magical being.

5. The character does die, and stays dead, but an identical character takes his place and uses the same name. Examples are the death of Snowball II in The Simpsons or Marvel's Thunderbird and Mar-Vel.

6. Time travel, reality manipulation or other narrative tricks may be used to undo big changes in the fictional universe (such as the death of characters) by setting them out of continuity and restoring things to a previous point. A story may also be conceived as not being canon from the start, so that the writers have creative freedom to kill major characters or perform radical changes as they see fit for the narrative, with such changes taking place only in that work and not in the main fictional universe.

7. The character does die, and stays dead, but using similar narrative tricks the character may be used and interacted with anyway. For example, even if being dead, the character may be found via time travel at a past time prior to his death, or in the afterlife. Flashbacks may be used as well to tell stories involving the character that would have taken place before his death and were not published before.

8. The writer may simply not be aware of the death of the character, so the use of it would become a continuity error until a proper explanation to fix it is given. In other cases, rebooted timelines may erase a characters death.

9. A character who was initially thought to be dead may be revealed to only have been in a coma. This premise is often misused for injuries and illnesses that do not involve head trauma, the primary trigger for coma. Variations on this theme include the character being placed in suspended animation or cryogenic suspension both of which are also used with varying degrees of scientific implausibility.

Jesus wept.

Okay, well, this all brings me to my point. As per usual, I do have one: There has been one major exception to this whole crazy business…The Batman.

From the character’s inception in 1940, through the zany space alien and nutty T.V. show era of the 50’s and 60’s, through the major creative shifts and the “New Look” in 1964, Bruce Wayne has been The Batman. Those names have become synonymous with the catchphrase, “Billionaire playboy by day, crime-fighter by night.”

Bruce.

Wayne.

Is.

The.

Batman.

Oh, sure, Batman’s butler Alfred was killed off (though they quickly brought him back when the fans went absolutely ape-$#!t), and they’ve been through a raft of Robins, the Boys Wonder (though the previously mentioned Jason Todd is the only that has died and been resurrected). Also, in 1993, DC Comics introduced the juiced villain, “Bane,” who promptly broke Batman’s back. During Bruce Wayne’s convalescence, Jean-Paul Valley took over the wearing of the pointy ears, but it was a stop-gap measure, and Bruce’s return was inevitable.

Because, you see, Bruce Wayne is Batman.

Until now. They have done the unthinkable. The recently-wrapped DC-wide crossover, Final Crisis sees the apparent death of Batman/Bruce Wayne at the hand of Darkseid, and in 2009’s Batman: Battle for the Cowl, the first Robin, Dick Grayson (who has been fighting crime by night as Nightwing since his retirement from the pointy green shoes), has donned the Batsuit.

Former sidekick Dick Grayson as The Dark Knight and Bruce's bastard son, Damian Wayne as the Boy Wonder

Is Bruce’s return inevitable?

Yes, probably. I’ve even heard rumblings about him coming back as a Green Lantern, though I’m betting that he’ll eventually find his way back to being the Dark Knight Detective. As for me, however, I’m all the way through despondent and well into the territory of “pissed off.” They shouldn’t’na done it, and even if this all turns out to be a dream sequence or something (that was clever in the 2nd grade, but not so much now…), was it worth adding one more character—and in particular, this character—to the “they were once dead” list?

Whatever.