MarvelBatman No. 428 (1988). Photo by Cam Smith.
It’s a well-known grim truth that death can be very a profitable business venture. For many artists, shuffling off the mortal coil is the ultimate career move and can reap major financial rewards. Likewise, coroners, morticians, casket makers and funeral directors will never be out of work, as they'll never run out of customers.
The comic book industry has long recognized the value in embracing the Grim Reaper. While fans of any given series may grow bored of a title, it often takes only one major character demise to send them sprinting back to the comic shop. For a business that’s posting weaker numbers by the year, death offers an easy opportunity to draw free publicity, mainstream attention and escalated sales.
How could any bottom-line conscious company ever resist?
Since the early 1990s, they haven’t tried very hard.
In the last 20 years, Marvel has killed off Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Punisher, Captain America, Professor X, Jean Grey, Sentry, Colossus and Ghost Rider (to name a few), while DC has offed almost half of its stable of characters in various event storylines such as Grant Morrison's Final Crisis miniseries.
Few stayed dead for long.
Just this past month, Marvel published both the untimely end of the Human Torch in Fantastic Four No. 587 and began an arc called The Death of Spider-Man in Ultimate Spider-Man No. 153. In both cases, the media blitz announcing the heroes sad fates began weeks before.
There was a moment in time when the death of a major character was taken fairly seriously in the comic biz. Captain America was haunted for almost four decades by the loss of teenage sidekick Bucky Barnes, who died heroically in flashback in 1968’s Avengers No. 56. The Death of Gwen Stacy, in 1973’s Amazing Spider-Man No. 121, became a powerful turning point for the series and is regularly regarded as one of the finest Spider-Man tales ever told.
The Death of Gwen Stacy trade paperback (1999). Photo by Cam Smith.
The beginning of the death for dollars craze
The shift towards using death as a means of producing cheap publicity stunts can be neatly traced to two watershed DC Comics titles.
In the 1988 Batman story arc Death in the Family, Robin was savagely beaten to a pulp by the Joker and left to die in a fiery explosion at the close of issue No. 427. Instead of predetermining an ending to the story, DC Comics created a telephone poll which placed the Boy Wonder's fate in readers’ hands.
The fans chose death.
The ensuing controversy was, according to former DC editor Dennis O’Neil, covered in “hundreds of newspapers, and on as many radio and television broadcasts,” and generated gargantuan sales.
At the time, O’Neil said “It would be a really sleazy stunt to bring him back.”
This past decade, DC did just that.
The second landmark was the much-hyped Death of Superman in 1992’s Superman No. 75. The issue flew off store shelves and became a must-have collector’s item. Although the issue has since almost completely bottomed out in value - you can now purchase a copy for as low as $8, according to Comics Price Guide - the event sent a crystal clear message to the industry.
Superman Vol. 2 No. 75 (1992). Photo by Cam Smith.
Vancouver vendors voice their thoughts on the issue
Comic book retailers highlight Superman No. 75 as being most responsible for the paradigm shift.
Winson Tan, owner of Comic Land, said Superman’s death was the true precursor to such highly publicized and lucrative events as Captain America’s famous end in Captain America Vol. 5 No. 25 in 2007.
“When they killed off Superman it was the first big, big name that they killed off... He was basically the Holy Grail of the superhero world,” he said.
“[Nowadays], some marketing guy needs a promotion and he’s like ‘What’s the best way to promote? Hey it worked for Superman, let’s go kill somebody!’”
Aaron Birkenhead, owner of RX Comics, shared a similar opinion as Tan, and said the Superman issue was such a huge phenomenon it was impossible to ignore. He said, since then, the trend has led to noticeable reader apathy.
“It seems like not a year can go by that they don’t kill off a character. And then everybody knows they’re going to bring the character back, so it doesn’t have the impact that it did 50 years ago,” he said. “[Back then] there wasn’t an assurance that the character would be coming back, whereas now you can pretty much bet that in a year you’ll be seeing them return in some form.”
Birkenhead said the events do still generate sales, though, as the death of the Human Torch “sold more than double” the average Fantastic Four issue. However, the sales boost doesn’t usually last long.
“[It] tends to be specifically for the one issue where the event takes place,” he said.
For Tan, the most frustrating aspect of the trend is that these deaths rarely ever lead to good writing.
“It’s a gimmick when you kill somebody. It’s not something you need to do. Over the years they’ve killed characters just for the sake of killing them... It didn’t add anything to the story whether the character was there or not,” he said.
Captain America Vol. 5 No. 25 (2007). Photo by Cam Smith.
Although fatality fatigue may be wearing on readers and vendors, the time may eventually come when even comic book creators themselves begin to show discontent towards the trend.
Marvel Entertainment chief creative officer Joe Quesada, one of the industry's most prominent forces, recently called comic book character deaths a "very cliche" method of storytelling in a piece on the Human Torch in The News Chronicle. If even Quesada, who defended the decision to kill Captain America, can speak ill of the craze, is there hope it could end?
Sadly, logic dictates that for now, as long as books featuring superhero deaths keep flying of shelves, the chances are mighty slim
1992 CNN Headline News report on the Death of Superman.
