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The Return of Professor X: Death without Trivialization

If "The Revolving Door of Death" seems to wax cynical at times, much of this ill-feeling derives from the trivialization of death that saturates most episodes where comics choose to kill, then revive, a superhero. Recent episodes seem particularly brazen in sneering at the insurmountable barriers involved in returning the dead to life (ask a doctor or a theologian, depending on your proclivities, about these barriers.)

If comics had always possessed such a cavalier attitude, I might shrug this tendency off as a convention of the form. However, the history of the business casts this as a fairly recent development - perhaps in the years after 1980 we could view comics' editorial model as one that considered death no more incurable than a bad cold.

Once upon a time - within living memory for some of us - comics might seek the redemption of a dead character, but only while treading very carefully. We see this in an early example, the return from the death of Professor X of the X-Men, a resurrection tale far removed from the casual escapes from death that abound in modern comics.

Death and Its Undoing

The history of the X-Men franchise in the sixties can provide some troubling moments and seemingly-incomprehensible developments. Why, for instance, with Professor X so central to the concept of X-Men, would a writer choose to dispose of him?

Yet the books record that Marvel did. And, in context of the aimlessness of X-Men before the Wein/Claremont/Cockrum days, one can mostly dismiss the development as a shocking stunt intended to startle readers into some interest in the title.

The books that followed show the mistake inherent in killing off Professor X. After his passing, the X-Men concept lost its focus and drifted aimlessly towards cancellation, gaining a momentum that even the heroic efforts of Neal Adams and Roy Thomas could not stall. The optimistic tone of special youths overcoming the obstacles of a paranoid world became a gloomy tale of helpless, though superpowered, victims of circumstance.

Hoaxes, Dreams, and Imaginary Stories

One might note that writers in the sixties made a great deal of work out of the simple overruling of the earlier death of a character.

Imagine, therefore, this scenario. Charles Xavier, presumed dead for a year or two, reappears before the X-Men, claiming he faked his death in order to go underground to plan a defense against extraterrestrial invaders (of a type previously never seen before). Xavier faked his death through the mechanism of an evil mutant named "Changeling" who, when he discovered his own immanent death, sought to redeem himself somehow. Therefore he impersonated Xavier up to and through the point of his own death, and Xavier allowed all the X-Men but Marvel Girl to believe his death. He spent the months of his presumed extinction planning and organizing.

We recognize this entire scenario as contrived and unlikely. Why, then, should Roy Thomas and Neal Adams have gone to the trouble?

Back in an earlier day, comics respected death more. If a superhero died, one wouldn't see something like a nonsuper hero harrowing hell, beating up a few demons, and rescuing the soul of some lamented decedent. Instead, writers would craft some explanation why the character hadn't really died, even if in the original death scene adequate forensic evidence to establish death existed (such as a clearly identifiable corpse).

To the extent that earlier writers did respect death, they also had to bend logic and inherited history ("continuity") to explain it away in the unlikely case that they chose to revoke a previous episode where a superhero died. So, therefore, clever, contrived, or positively twisted reasons would have to surface explaining why a previously-dead man might return.

From the standpoint of continuity uber alles, we might question the attempt to return a character from the dead by means of revising continuity. Perhaps, though, this reflects a respect for a more important standard than the editorial model of a shared comics universe. For all the derision that the predictable escape hatches have earned, in the form of "the dream" (as in Alice in Wonderland), "the hoax" (Xavier's death) and "the imaginary story" (any death of Superman before the 1990s), we should consider the context before writing off this story as a simple cop-out.

Maturity 1970 versus Maturity 2000

Much talk suggests that comics, since the sixties have become more "mature." In the euphemistic sense, we can consider this true - some comics dare dabble in content and themes that would have caused the members of the Comics Code Authority to collapse in the throes of seizures. However, we might beg the question with this loaded term "mature."

When we define "mature" in terms of violating norms and taboos concerning what we consider appropriate to show young people, the term comes to mean lurid, erotic, crass, or a number of traits that, without redeeming context, do not do much to commend the work that serves as their delivery vehicle.

We have comics where superheroes frankly discuss things like adult sexual proclivities (though in somewhat limited detail, since not all barriers have fallen yet). We have scatalogical humor pertaining to most excreta and ejecta of the human body within Code-approved books. We have lethal and graphic violence that once would have made a movie earn a rating of unsuitable for minors. Certainly we can define these things as "mature" in the sense that we might see children as unready yet to ingest much entertainment material heavy in such concepts.

However, crassness, vulgarity, and luridity - all of which have a place in the arts (within reason), and therefore somewhere within some kinds of comics - do not necessarily mean a comic should earn the title "mature" in the more positive sense of that term. Consider "mature" as an antonym of "immature" and we begin to approach the other concept, one much absent from the increasingly-graphic pieces of the modern day.

"Mature," in such a sense, stands to mean things like "sane," "balanced," "civil," "tactful," "respectful," "thoughtful," "measured," "philosophical," or "wise." In this more important sense of the term, I would have to deem the Thomas-Adams X-Men, even the story with the resurrection of Professor X, as more mature than most of the material currently available in today's comics market, even the intellectually challenging work of writers like Alan Moore.

Adults, after all, take death as something seriously. As an example, if a child says something indicating a desire that someone die, we might interpret this as a poor understanding of death on the part of the child, rather than a murderous nature. If an adult expresses the same sentiment, we can reasonably suspect some kind of emotional imbalance or, alternately, real malicious intent. Why? Because we expect adults to view death as less of a trifling matter than we expect children to.

Even with media geared (in another day) towards children, we can recognize maturity in a greater respect for death. Compare the story of the return of Professor X to something more recent - like the absurd return of Hellcat from the dead - and we can see a greater maturity in the comics of an earlier generation.