Death and a Franchise

I'm always annoyed at the way death is belittled in superhero comics.

Death is such a powerful tool in fiction. One only needs to look at Disney classic Bambi for proof of that. Of course, you don't need to look much further beyond Bambi to see the inherent differences in a full feature movie and a decades old serial publication.

There are readers who's mantra is, "it doesn't matter what happens as long as it's a good story." That's a perfectly non partisan attitude to maintain as a reader, but when this careless attitude begins to infect the creators and the publishers, the franchise begins to deteriorate.

Recently, there was some hullabaloo over some comments made by David Gabriel, Senior Vice President of Sales at Marvel Comics. Namely, due to the success of the death of The Human Torch, Marvel would kill a character every quarter.

After the news broke, he made some follow up clarifications, stating that the storylines are not about killing characters, but instead about the landscape of the comics afterward. The new directions and developments that the living characters go through are what's really important. He then pointed to the new book Future Foundation, spinning out of Fantastic Four as a positive example.

This attitude completely ignores and deflects the complaints people have about death being used recklessly as a sales tactic. In fact, it does more to validate them.

With Marvel and DC, it's a constant back and forth with the creative possibilities versus the marketing sensibilities, and this stems from the simple fact that both Marvel and DC are trying to maintain profitable franchises. Marvel faces this problem more than DC because one of the underlying selling points of Marvel, established by Stan Lee, was that their characters aged, grew, and progressed as characters. This was great for the first couple of decades, and really helped them gain an edge over their competition. But as time passed, it grew to become more and more of a problem and the process was more or less neutered in the 80's and 90's. Now all their characters are stuck in this faux aged purgatory, where they have aged roughly a decade since their first appearance but are clearly not going to be getting older any time soon. In fact, some of them are getting younger.

[If one were so inclined, one could find a certain amount of ironic similarity in the state of arrested development between Marvel's franchised characters and their core fan base, but I'm not here to talk about obvious ironic metatextual occurrences.]

This schizoid approach to writing characters has been the biggest hurdle to Marvel's creative teams for a score of years. It's really hard to have your cake and eat it too.

Repeatedly killing characters is the only solution that pleases both the Creative and Marketing departments. Trading on a character's popularity for a few extra sales by killing him will always keep the money crunchers happy. As for the creators, well, it gives them something to write about.

But I still maintain that killing the characters is ultimately damaging to the franchise. We need look no further than the Fantastic Four, which is both the origin of a lot of the current controversy and a well regarded book as well. Here are the cynical facts as I see them. The Fantastic Four debuted in November of 1961. The Human Torch died in Fantastic Four #587. The series ends with #588 and relaunches with a new #1 as FF, which stands for Future Foundation. So, we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the Fantastic Four. I will be extremely shocked if we don't see FF run for a dozen issues before turning back into Fantastic Four #600, celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary with the return of the Human Torch.

So everything is taken care of nice and neatly. The fans get taken on a little ride that shatters the book, causing things to "never be the same again" and then ends by bringing everything back together to it's familiar settings. I've got to give credit where credit is due in that it is all very neat and tidy. Furthermore, it's all being written by one creative team as opposed to a committee. It's the type of story that fans have come to accept. It looks to be fairly short lived and unobtrusive.

So, why do I have a problem with it? I dislike it because it sets two very bad precedents throughout all other books. Firstly, that death is necessary to get anybody interested in the franchise. The Fantastic Four scenario may be neat and tidy, but it is being presented in a comics landscape that is glorifying death. Just in the last few years we've been dealing with the death and return of Batman, Captain America, Flash, and countless X-Men. Not only that, but while Marvel is publicizing their current death of Human Torch story, they are advertising for the future, "Death of Ultimate Spider-man" story. You can't swing a dead cat in the comics industry without hitting a dead superhero.

The second precedent being set is that death always results in a Resurrection. I find this to be especially damaging because it destroys the narrative power of death. Death is no longer taken seriously.

Comic fans will hear that and say, "So what? That's comics! Nobody stays dead!"

I find that to be especially ironic because Superhero Death has only been a carefree accepted way of doing things in comics for maybe the last twenty years, during which the fan base itself has been dying.

[okay, maybe one last ironic metatextual observation.]