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To Kill an Icon. Or: The Impotency of Comics
Lucascraft
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
All this hubub about the rebirth of Captain America has gotten me thinking about death in comics. Specifically, the death of iconic characters that have a widespread cultural presence. The list of comic heroes that are well known to the general public is a very small one.
But at the same time, these characters who have so very thoroughly permeated our pop-culture have gained an immortality that even a media stunt like a death or resurrection in comics cannot touch.
Using Batman (Bruce Wayne) as an example, I would wager a small sum of money that there will NEVER be a mainstream movie, television series, video game, or cartoon in which Dick Grayson has assumed the mantle of the Bat. Even if Bruce Wayne is dead in comics (which he's not), he is still Batman. You cannot truly kill Bruce Wayne.
Between Batman RIP and the Marvel Civil War, it has made me realize how truly impotent comics are now. Sure, when it was announced on the news that Cap was dead, comic stores all over the country sold out of issue #25. But it didn't really matter. If they were to make a Captain America Movie (which they are), Bucky will not be the shield bearer. It will be Steve Rogers.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this post. But I guess I'm just a bit taken back at how a few select characters have transcended the medium that birthed them, to the point where that medium can no longer truly affect the status of those characters.
But at the same time, these characters who have so very thoroughly permeated our pop-culture have gained an immortality that even a media stunt like a death or resurrection in comics cannot touch.
Using Batman (Bruce Wayne) as an example, I would wager a small sum of money that there will NEVER be a mainstream movie, television series, video game, or cartoon in which Dick Grayson has assumed the mantle of the Bat. Even if Bruce Wayne is dead in comics (which he's not), he is still Batman. You cannot truly kill Bruce Wayne.
Between Batman RIP and the Marvel Civil War, it has made me realize how truly impotent comics are now. Sure, when it was announced on the news that Cap was dead, comic stores all over the country sold out of issue #25. But it didn't really matter. If they were to make a Captain America Movie (which they are), Bucky will not be the shield bearer. It will be Steve Rogers.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this post. But I guess I'm just a bit taken back at how a few select characters have transcended the medium that birthed them, to the point where that medium can no longer truly affect the status of those characters.
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Comic characters as modern myths is interesting, but how many myths constantly have new chapters added to them? At what point is there too much baggage and the slate has to be wiped clean?
Course, it can be argued that death isn't necessarily meaningless, but rather possessing of a different meaning. The problem, then, isn't that death isn't treated with the same importance that it carries in the real world, but rather that it gets treated with that same importance in certain ways that create the impression that it should be the same in all ways. Specifically, the characters and the readers are meant to believe that death is permanent even when that's clearly not the case. If death is presented as permanent, then can we really be blamed for saying that it should be permanent?
The solution, then, might be to just incorporate the clearly impermanent nature of death in comics into comics that feature death and stop treating death like it was the end of the line. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening, as writers (except for the rare few, like Grant Morrison) seem to prefer writing about death in comics as though there was no afterlife or cycle of resurrection, even when it's staring us in the face. I think this is because they just want their stories to have impact, and death is the easiest way to achieve that.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I think people should accept that the cycle of death and rebirth are common in comics. Now, MY issue is that I would rather these cycles be plot driven, not just used as a ploy to increase lagging sales.
This thinking only works for actual deaths, not retconned deaths. There's nothing mythic about Spoiler faking her death, for instance, or Xorn turning out to be some guy who made himself look like Magneto.
Ham-fisted retcons are the real problem, I think.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I mean... I guess. Odysseus disguised himself as a begger while letting his wife think him dead... so... there is precedent.
Yeah it's similar, but since it wasn't a retcon there's a world of difference in execution and impact on the story.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I get what you're saying, but that's more the fault of the medium then it is the story. One could argue that retcons are almost a necessity for moving the story forward.
I mean, if at the end of the story Hercules dies, the next person to tell a story with Herclues is essentially retconning that death.
But this is where the comparison starts to fray... telling stories on a linear time line is quite different from just spinning a tale about some guy in a loin cloth who once did this thing...
I agree. Oftentimes it'd be impossible for a new writer to leave a unique mark on a character without overriding some of the prior writer's work, and so we need a fair amount of retcons in order to prevent long-running books from stagnating.
Not necessarily. If Hercules is brought back to life and ascends to godhood, the death is not retconned because he still died. The only issue is, perhaps, that the author of the earlier story had wanted the story where Hercules dies to be the last Hercules story. That said, if it's been established that death is not by definition permanent in the universe in which Hercules resides, then there'd be no reason for the audience to think the story where Hercules dies would be the last Hercules story.
Conversely, if the story after the death says that Hercules' twin had died in his place, then that is a poorly done retcon because the events of the character's death are now completely different. This sort of practice is what I consider to be the problem.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
That's one way to look at the issue. Here's another: comics have created small-time fictional characters, raised them up to the same status as the mythical heroes of yesteryear, and integrated them so deeply into modern culture that they can no longer pull the plug on those same characters. The reason comics can't kill Superman or Batman is because they don't belong to comics anymore. They exist in the collective consciousness, just like Hercules and Br'er Rabbit and Little Johnny and so on. Like you said, they're icons; DC can kill Batman the character, but as far as the people are concerned, Batman the ideal is brooding in the Batcave or using bat-shark-repellant or dancing the batusi.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration. At the same time, I think we're really in a much better place than we could be. I'd rather have comic raise up legendary archetypes that can't be budged afterwards than being dismissed out of hand for being simplistic stories for kids.
By the way, if we're equating comics to myths (a comparison that I think is entirely appropriate), I do want to mention that myths went through plenty of changes. There were retcons, there were cases of different storytellers ascribing different traits to the same character, there were multiple versions of ostensibly the same events. It wasn't exactly a case of "Oh, Hector was faking being dead!", but continuity was fairly flexible in those stories.
as for me, I could give less than two shits about continuity or canon. I see these legendary comic characters as merely tools for storytelling, and I'm looking for good stories with them. I read the good ones and try to avoid the bad ones, and leave it at that.
This is true. I mean, you can't even find a solid reason for Achilles invulnerability. Some tales say he had armor forged by Hephaestus that covered everything but his heel, other tales say his mother held him by the heel and dipped him in the river Styx.
No, they don't.
They just need a good story for her cycle of deaths and rebirths.
Frankly, I loved her last death, until the Xorneto retcon. It was a tragic death brought on by a petty tyrant who threw a temper-tantrum and killed her. It was awesome in its pointlessness.
I'm kind of disappointed with so many of the DC heroes coming back in recent years. I love Hal and Barry and Ollie but it was also fun to see Kyle and Wally and Connor pick up where they left off.
The active marketing of comics as collector's items hasn't been prominent since the 90s, I don't think. and unless I'm mistaken, which I easily could be, very few comics since the mid 70s are worth anything.
I remember when people picked up the first issue of electric superman because they thought it was gonna be worth a fortune down the line.
Now I'm REALLY jaded.
I do want to point out what Ziggy said. I think there's a lot more story potential to a character that gives up the cape then there is with one that dies. I would love to see a relationship like Nite Owl had in the Watchmen.
When Guy Gardner died in JLA: Our Worlds at War (written by Loeb), it was such a bullshit move. They basically had one panel with Booster, Beetle, and Guy fighting the bad giant robot and Guy is impaled and killed. That's more a "fuck you this villain is so hardcore look what they did to this long time character" rather than having any real weight behind it. It was Superboy punching Panthra's head off, only 5 years earlier and having 1/10 the reasoning behind it.
Another thing that needs to stop and would help with the pointless deaths is writers trying to leave some sort of legacy to their work, instead of just doing the work and worrying about legacy later. We've reached the point where we are on roughly the third generation of comic creators, and they look back at what happened and instead of just telling their story, they have to try and make it stack up to things that are (thanks to rose colored glasses) almost untouchable.
A good example is Tomassi's Nightwing. He didn't really reinvent anything, he just told good stories and they stood out pretty much immediately as being good. The only stretch he did was having Dick work at a museum, which is pittance. Everything else was about telling a good story. And it worked.
Because the general publics perception of comic book fans is Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons waddling around paying obscene amounts of cash for the issue he must own.
I hope next time Superboy shows up he fights Risk again and rips a leg off this time.
EDIT: Uhh..
Yeah, a bunch of my friends dislike comics for this reason. They know that the good guys can never lose, even though they might still come out a bit behind, the hero's will always win. Or, at least only the heroes they care about will.
This is true in mainstream comics. It's also true in mainstream movies, mainstream television, mainstream books, mainstream video games...
So, what, they just sit around watching Empire Strikes Back all the time? That's the stupidest reason to not like comics I've ever heard.
there WAS scope to this. it was huge. why couldn't we have had a month or three where all of the books dealt with life under Darkseid's rule? there seemed to be plenty of story opportunity there but instead it was....... whatever issues 4 - 7 were.
there was a lot of shit going down but there was like a weird filter that made it seem like nothing really mattered at all
which is a problem I have with a lot of morrison's work, actually, there are really cool and interesting ideas, but the way he puts those ideas into comic form kind of leaves me wanting in a lot of cases
keep in mind I haven't read stuff like Animal Man or Seven Soldiers
You know, while I understand why people hate the idea of tie-ins, especially when they're telling stories that should be in the main event book (Infinite Crisis was really bad at this), there's a lot of shit flung at tie-ins that basically amounts to people bitching for the sake of bitching. These "events" tend to be based around huge events in the universe that should really affect every character, and you can't fit all the secondary stuff in the main book, because that'd be stupid.
So the main companies toss a tie-in label on a bunch of books and the fans get answers to "what the hell was X doing when Y happened" and the company makes a lot of money and maybe a low-selling book gets an extra six or twelve issues before it's canceled.
I mean, I can understand if they're crap, but in a lot of cases recently, they're better than the core book of the event. I can kind of understand why DC's moved away from the tie-in model that Marvel uses, but a lot of why it didn't work for DC is that they did it so badly in the first place that people threw a shit fit, and then they overcorrected to the situation they're in now. I'm pretty sure it's a huge reason that they're constantly trailing behind Marvel in sales anymore.
I mean, Birds of Prey was the only book to really mention the after effects of FC (excluding Batman dying), with the internet being down and noticeable signs of clean up.
the result of NOT reflecting events in major event books in regular series is that the major event suddenly feels.... less major
and then gets ignored in the regular books. Final Crisis has been referenced in, what, Justice League? and the Batman books.
the GL books have ignored it completely
Hopefully with Blackest Night, DC will be able to emulate a bit of the success of the Civil War.
Agreed. While I really liked Final Crisis, I do think it would've worked MUCH better if it had acted as a sort of spine of the DCU with the other books filling in the blanks. Kind of like what Countdown was meant to be but with the events actually happening in the main book and, you know, actually being good.
Of course, that would probably require communication, which DC Editorial seems to have a lot of problems with.
I agree with this, although Punisher was the best Civil War tie in. I also think Secret Invasion had stronger tie-in's then the main story, like Deadpool, the Initiative, and New Avengers. As much as people hate on Secret Invasion, there was some good stuff to come out of there.