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Thanks to Lady Obie for recognizing that an exploration of the rules of death in superhero comics made for just the kind of topic upon which a claustered redactor can expend the stray syllable.

Superhero Comics and the Rules of Death

How many times does one steeped in the lore of comics consumers encounter the sarcastic, though rhetorical, barb "How many times has he died?" The loose way superhero comics have with death - using it in the serious role it has in real-world understanding, then undoing it at convenience - suggests that this four-color literature uniformly sneers at death. Mortality, it seems, never sticks.

But can we support such a claim? While a superficial look at mainstream superhero material finds it infested with characters and titles representing properties at various times killed off, then brought back for whatever storytelling purpose, can we truly argue that all supposedly-dead heroes return? Or do some return with great reliability, others under more special circumstances, and yet others not at all?

A differential impact of death does seem to apply. Some characters spend less than a year in the four-color grave, others might remain among the dead for ten years, and some others, a generation later, have yet to return. Something seems to glean the death-resistant from the mortal. Rules seem to apply, but as the comics form changes, so, too, these rules seem to change.

The Old Rules

In the beginning - meaning in the early days of superhero comics, and, indeed, in the adventure and pulp-themed comics that immediately preceded them - heroes did not die, though occasionally a throwaway supporting character might, as might the occasional villain-redeemed who still has a place in the continuity-based material of the modern form. Villains could die, but with certain protocols to follow.

For instance, "Never show the body" stood as a rule for resolving the action of a story with the seeming death of the antagonist without committing to it - kind of like a one-night-stand with mortality rather than the full-blown marriage. However, the villain who apparently fell to his death in the water appeared a few too many times to convince any more, and comics writers developed other stratagems for simulating a death in ways other writers could amend.

Weird rescues, greatly exaggerated reports of death, and the use of proxies became increasingly commonplace. In a day before clones came to infest comics like cockroaches, villains made do with robots (fairly often), occasional look-alike stand-ins, and, perhaps, the one-shot twin. Thus, one could show the body - the fundamental element that "proved" the death - and later argue that it belonged to someone or something else later.

When superheroes began to die, a process that readers might notice in the 1960s onward, many of the rules of villain deaths began to serve for them. Ultimately, however, readers knew the rules well enough that stories called for more convincing mortality. Thus for a considerable stretch of time, Marvel left Adam Warlock dead, though the process of killing him seemed to have taken considerable time; the death, with body visible, had to occur no less than twice (the mechanics required this), followed by one episode where the spirit of this unfortunate hero appeared as a revenant to dispose of the tiresome Thanos.

Starting in 1975, however, supposedly-dead superheroes started populating mainstream books. Once a zombified Wonder Man regained his senses (or what passes for them), the genie had emerged from the bottle; and, predictably, the other "serious" deaths of Marvel by the dawn of the 1980s, those of Warlock and of Jean Grey, would prove more like temporary retirements from adventuring punctuated by dramatic but false visits beyond mortality.

Even though superhero comics treat death as remediable by an entire catalog of improbable mechanisms these days, though, certain rules do apply to it, channeling the flow of who can die and who can come back from the dead. Considering all deaths as subject to inevitable appeal misses the nuances of the Rules of Death. The following, suggested by an admittedly incomplete resume of reading, seem a likely revision of the current rules.

1. Good Sales or Standing Inoculate Against Death.

A quick analysis of market share will frequently provide the prognosis for a character who seems to have died. Such studies will invariably bring up the most-hyped and best-known such event, the temporary demise of DC Comics' Superman.

The death of Superman stands in a defining position of the way superhero comics handle mortality. From the beginning, no one expected Superman to remain dead, which creates a problem of definition with the notion that he "really" died. However, readers (and non-readers observing the goings-on) predicted a few basic things.

First, the cultural penetration of the Superman concept meant that any permanent retirement from popular culture, or particular corners thereof, did not seem especially likely. Heroes of legend frequently died in a more-or-less permanent way, even if a few sometimes managed an apotheosis escape clause (as, indeed, Wonder Woman would do in 1990s). But the real clincher - the point that preemptively convinced observers that DC would not commit to this death - centered around DC's product line.

Superman appeared in Superman, Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, and, possibly, Man of Steel. Multiply four titles by sales figures and you have, in this franchise, a significant piece of DC's market share. Assuming the cynical premise that DC Comics "killed" Superman as a ploy to spike sales (and such has become a historical tenet rather than the disgruntled grumbling of critics with the passage of time), one can note that it makes little sense to use some event to spike sales and then cancel the products one hoped to sell. We could label such behavior, had it followed, the Marketing of the Absurd.

This has the postulate "The longer a character has appeared in print, the less likely that his death will take." This, however, amounts to circular reasoning; staying in print requires commercial success, and doing so for a long time means a lot of it.

2. Poorly-Handled Deaths Tend to Stick.

If fans let their resentment show too strongly, or if editors realize an error in their handling of some property as they move it into the beyond, observers may find these deaths defended behind the editorial equivalent of walls of concrete and steel. Some logic may underlay the rock-ribbed resistance publishers present in the face of obvious error or conspicuous cheesiness. "If we yield to pressure here," we might imagine them arguing, "we will never have the freedom to make a lasting decision." Indeed, if publishers yielded to every demand to revoke a development in a story, superhero comics would feature little more than retcon events and surprise revelation stories that undo previous ones. So, even though particular decisions seem somewhat noxious - hardly palatable, perhaps, even with all the windows open and electric fans blowing the funk of bad writing out of the room - we can understand the inevitability of this kind of dogmatism.

This dynamic, unfortunately, tends to mean that whenever a death goes beyond the criminally-overused "In this issue a hero DIES!" type of cheesiness into the territory where fan lobbies organize to criticize it - or where some grave, sour editorial malpractice comes to light and educated consensus points it out - deaths tend to stick.

Thus we have the infamous demise of Justice Society in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. DC had a rich catalog of plausible and viable means of disposing of the Justice Society, perhaps a head at a time. Heroes from 1940 or so, after all, would generally have retired or died by the 1990s. This would require little explanation. Instead, though, DC continued its on-again off-again business with this team, giving them an eight-issue mini followed by an ongoing (that lasted ten issues) until suddenly offing most of the team with the wave of the hand of a ludicrous and disposable villain cobbled together from the debris of previous crossover events. If DC had disposed of this team cheaply in 1985 ("I know! Let's send them to limbo to fight with a giant forever!"), they didn't even try that hard in Zero Hour ("Oh, just have some villain wave his hand and make them drop dead. Sheesh. Let's get this over with.") In brief, DC managed to badly bungle the deaths of superheroes whom logic required to have mostly departed from life due to the predations of time and misadventure anyway. DC has found this mass dying useful in its pursuit of generational themes, so we might expect it justifiably to persist so long as such themes work for their product line; however, the return of the friendless Red Bee seems more likely to occur before that of the dead members of the Justice Society. The process of admitting the mistake seems too risky.

Hal Jordan, once also known as Green Lantern, stands as a kind of patron saint of editorial malpractice. While a small but assertive readership defends the three-issue story that detailed his undoing, a larger consensus contends that DC gave the character an altogether dubious send-off. The death of Barry Allen, as far as hindsight can suggest, evoked nothing like the anti-Kyle Rayner invective, nor the pro-Hal Jordan lobbying, that followed "Emerald Twilight," Zero Hour, and "Final Night," the pieces that intended to show the character the door once and for all. Highly vocal and adrenal fan resistance to these developments essentially led DC to dig in their heels on the hero's destruction; I postulate that, had DC not felt and resented the swell of fan opinion moving against their treatment of the character, he might have returned to some version of his original form already. However, a series of events chronicle subsequent DC efforts to entangle the character such that a return to something like his previous status would become increasingly impossible. The initial corruption in "Emerald Twilight" not having made the point clear enough, they moved Hal-as-Parallax from serial killer to universe-destroying cosmurge in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. In the latter work, they suggested his death without showing a body, which they remedied in "Final Night" by making his death more clear; and, later, in the bizarre Day of Judgment, they attempted to reinvent the character as a late nineties kinder, gentler version of the Spectre.

DC certainly has the right to do with their intellectual properties what they please, but it seems like they could have saved a lot of grief by saying 1) "Yes, we blew it." and 2) "No, we're not going back on it." and leaving it at that. The attempts to battleship-plate the mistakes have just made a bigger mess. But we can understand the principle here: Where readers challenge the publisher's turf in offing its superheroes, expect said publishers to stand by these decisions.

3. Previous Recovery from Death Predicts Future Recovery.

The more often a character dies and gets away with it, the more likely he will do so again. We can almost look at this as a problem in behaviorist psychology. However, outside of Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," these recurring deaths and resurrections tend to lose more of their appeal with subsequent iterations.

The Human Torch (the 1939 version) has a short, though representative, history of defying the grave, only to return and escape again. That he should appear in an early Fantastic Four annual, although only a) to remind younger readers that he had ever existed as a prototype for the Johnny Storm version and b) to provide a tragic, one-shot goon in the Mighty Marvel Manner, did represent a resurrection, owing to the details of the story.

Wonder Man, among death-recidivist superheroes, has played the Revolving Door of Death game frequently enough that his dubious connection to either world, that of the living or the dead, has become a defining concept of the character. Some of his history might, here, enlighten.

Wonder Man began as a one-shot character whose failings became his undoing, though he redeemed himself by dying. A failed entrepreneur, Simon Williams turned to crime as an ill-considered method of getting back on his feet. Connected with costumed goons who could give him powers by a process similar to that used to create the original Power Man (today called "Atlas" in Thunderbolts), he also discovered that his powers had begun to kill him. In such a vulnerable state, he followed orders to infiltrate (and, perhaps, destroy) the Avengers to guarantee medical treatment to prolong his life. In the end, however, he refused to go through with it, and, himself, died. A few years later, after the title Avengers had passed from Stan Lee's pen to that of Roy Thomas, the refurbished Vision would appear as an Avengers regular; and, to anchor him to humanity in spite of a synthetic form, Thomas postulated that the Vision's personality derived from a recording of the departed Wonder Man's brainwave patterns. As the Vision became increasingly central to the Avengers, by implication the departed Wonder Man did also.

In the early seventies, Wonder Man would reappear as a zombie in an early incarnation of the perennial "Legion of the Unliving," a gang of remote-controlled dead superheroes. A few years later, he would reappear in an army of zombies controlled by the black talon, at which time he would recover both sentience and some semblance of life. From there, Wonder Man would proceed to decades of histrionic angst and frequent repeat offenses against the understood laws of death of the real world; and the number of times he has died, or seemed to die, and somehow made it back.

Having made it back (in attenuated form) by the late sixties, we can note that the returns became more frequent, including one circa 1971 (the Legion of the Unliving), 1975 (in his original form), perhaps around 1979 (in the "Korvac Saga"), and, though we can't discount the possibility of other deaths in between, the staged and gimmicky death in Force Works #1 and the return in early Avengers v. III reached the point at which a slovenly attitude towards death became central to the character.

4. Deaths Meaningful to Writers Tend to Stick.

For many comics consumers, myself included, the tragic death of an obscure hero called the Red Bee did not shake the earth. In my own case, I had begun my second year of a thirteen-year vacation from comics when it happened, but more dedicated readers often thought little of the event. The character hadn't mattered much to comics so Roy Thomas and the minds behind All-Star Squadron figured a way to make him mean something by having a nazi-themed villain dispose of him with alarming cruelty. This, in the long term, seems to have made the Red Bee a kind of martyr of DC's Revised Golden Age. Since the Red Bee in his original death tended to represent the little guy who lost his life because he couldn't quite keep up with the big guns - but had the gumption to try - his death became a kind of event, and, though revised after Crisis, it recurred in similar particulars in Robinson's Golden Age, leaving the precise details of his death variable but its meaning essentially unchanged. Thus, the Red Bee could sit at a table of dead Golden Age heroes in issues of Starman where Jack Knight communes with his dead brother and selected other revenants connected to his father's role. That his death has come to mean something more or less assures that we should not expect to see him return any time soon.

The Flash serves as an important example of the principle. Though after the sixties, the character fell on somewhat hard times - no reader I knew during the period cared much at all, and the book seemed, for a time lost in weird misdirections including the cascade of revelations that placed his wife Iris as a refugee from the future - once Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared, the character grew in symbolic meaning, and would continue to grow with the subsequent passage of years.

More than one character who, ultimately, did return from the dead demonstrated the soft case of this principle. Taking the examples of Phoenix and Warlock, both of whose deaths appeared in stories that suggested writer and publisher intended these to pass for meaningful events. Though later books would wrench each of these characters from the superheroic equivalent of the Happy Hunting Grounds, in both cases years would pass before it happened. Warlock, particularly, enjoyed a long state of death; assuming a date in the 1990s for the Infinity Gauntlet stories that returned him to the living, over a decade passed before Marvel brought him back.

5. Deaths Meaningful to Character Definitions Intermittently Remit.

Here we have one of the softer rules, one which suggests death does not "stick" based on the nature of the relationship between a decedent and some protagonist character. The line tends to divide between blood relatives and spouses.

Dead parents - and, in general, genetic relations - don't return from the dead if their death helped define the character concept. One can see this principle in the field by following the live-again dead-again antics of Superman's adoptive parents, John and Martha Kent; since the character's definition does not impose a burden of death on these characters, they have some degree of freedom to die and return as writers see fit. Spider-Man, on the other hand, had in the person of his guardian Ben Parker a reason for his turning to crimefighting; thus, one would expect Ben to remain soundly entombed for the foreseeable future.

Dead spouses, more frequently, do, perhaps because of the complications a writer can create by taking a widowed character and returning the supposedly-deceased partner just as the bereaved starts to open up to the prospect of another lover or marriage partner. Suchlike, after all, can considerably entangle and confound characters on the cusp of redefinition, such as Marvel Comics' Black Widow early in her transition from villainess to heroine. In the case of Frank Castle/The Punisher, we have a case that seems to violate this rule of spouses; however, inasmuch as the death of his wife accompanied the death of his child, undoing one would create a pretext for the other. Furthermore, as in the case of Ben Parker, the deaths of Punisher's kin plays the role of defining event for the character.

6. Projects Trump Death.

The concepts of writers, once properly pitched to editors, frequently cause death to behave as a less-than-permanent thing. Where someone has a project in mind, death recedes on demand.

When Marvel decided to do in the character Jean Gray, known variously as Marvel Girl and Phoenix, it did so in the context obvious intent to stand by the decision. The story certainly read like Claremont, Byrne, and Marvel Comics had intended finality with this situation, even if, as reports of the creative process involved contend, the final decision how to resolve the whole business of Dark Phoenix occurred late in the formulation of the story. However, when the original notion for X-Factor took hold, a reforming of the X-Men in their original lineup and forms, this concept prerequired the existence of the original members; and, therefore, Marvel had to yield Jean Grey from the dead. This involved some bait-and-switch as Jean Grey "reappeared", after ten years, with the Dark Phoenix character suddenly and retroactively becoming another entity altogether - a "phoenix force" that took Jean Grey's form and went on to become Phoenix and Dark Phoenix, and then, seemingly, expire. In this process, Marvel managed to undermine one of its punchier arcs and involve Jean Grey in a morass of story entanglements generally intended to explain multiple copies of herself and frequently serving to confuse (and sometimes alienate) the reader of X-books.

The return of Hawkman may similarly involve the projects-trump-death rule; fortunately, he escaped the mass euthanizing of his peers (a decision DC will likely stick by), although he did so by a bad reinvention as some kind of syncretic Hawkman avatar in Zero Hour that required some degree of ingenuity to clean up adequately to return him to JSA. Fortunate in that character's original concept - one involving a reincarnated Egyptian prince - DC had mainly to contend that a Thanagarian sect that revered Hawkman's soul as eternal and, for them, messianic contrived his reincarnation in the form of Carter Hall. With this accomplished, and Hawkman's rescue of the remaining Thanagarians from a doomsday cult complete, the question of what to do once one defies death occurred; and he resumed his role in the Justice Society. This partially reflected a desire to reinforce the Golden Age aspect of the book JSA with another founder (most of these having yielded to the superior force of bad writing in Zero Hour).

Back cross the aisle at Marvel Comics, furthermore, more recent projects also tend to strip mine the underworld for players. With Erik Larsen's Defenders project, Larsen inherited the benefit of recent pilot miniseries that brought back the defunct Nighthawk and Hellcat in the late 1990s. Depending on the particular details of more than one Valkyrie character, the membership seems slanted towards revenants, even if the higher-powered characters, such as the Hulk, Dr. Strange, and the Sub-Mariner, have less frequent burial miles to cash in. Or the chronic recurrence of Mantis in Marvel books might serve as an example of project-related immunity to death.

Order or Disorder?

If the need appeared to measure whether death proceeded (and receded) in an orderly fashion, one could fashion an empirical test to determine if, indeed, regular laws do apply to comic-book death and its revocation. Perhaps one could discern order in the ability of a predictive theory to make guesses more accurate than random chance allows.

For instance, if some brave soul during human prehistory had sought to prove a theorem stating that tides followed some logical pattern (or some other, more random-seeming event, like eclipses), predicting such a thing with a fair degree of accuracy would attest to the virtues of the theory that sought to pinpoint such occurrences. Comic-book resurrections, while not on a timetable, do seem roughly to follow patterns such as those detailed above.

The speculation of fans holds the evidence here. Fans predicted that Superman would not remain dead (something of a no-brainer prognosis, but accurate nonetheless). Fans demanded the return of Hal Jordan, an acknowledgment of their recognition that DC did not intend to revoke his death (on a technicality, they haven't). Fans predicted the return of Elektra (she returned). The occasional error does occur in the process; fannish consensus argued against both Phoenix and Warlock returning when they died, based on the significance-of-death principle. However, the project principle caught Phoenix and special rules may apply to Marvel's indelible "cosmic" heroes.

Such prediction can't measure the accuracy of the proposed principle listed above about projects, since the notions of creators don't follow the same sort of predictable rules. In general, though, it looks like the predictions do hold some degree of reliability, and, thereby, show the order behind a non-random phenomenon.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 277. Completed 04-OCT-2001.