Lorendiac
06-19-2006, 06:53 PM
Two years ago, in June of 2004, I posted an earlier version of this: "10 Motives for Killing a Comic Book Character." I invited feedback on any other basic motives the writers and editors might have that I had overlooked on the first pass. Several people were kind enough to offer such feedback - and now I'm finally getting around to reacting to it with a new version! :)
12 Possible Motives
01. Cannon Fodder
02. False Alarm to Raise Sales
03. Let's Make Room for Someone Younger and Cuter in a Similar Role!
04. The "End of the Romance" Fatality
05. It's Time to Shake Things Up in This Book - Which Regular Cast Member Shall We Kill?
06. Let's Spice Up An Epic By Killing Someone Incredibly Obscure!
07. Housecleaning to Get Rid of an Embarrassment
08. The Professional Corpse
09. The Series Was Getting Cancelled Anyway - Let's Go Out With a Bang!
10. Punishment for Sins
11. The Mystery's Gone Out of Our Relationship
12. "I'm Back and I'm Badder than Ever! (Watch me prove it!)"
01. Cannon Fodder
These are the characters who were "created to die" for dramatic reasons. The writer who invented them never intended for them to become permanent participants in the continuity of the series he is writing; he will finish them off himself when the time is right. They may last a panel, a page, an issue, or even a year or two, but they were always doomed in the end.
Obvious examples are the characters who only exist long enough for a villain to kill them, just to show how ruthless and deadly he can be. You know, we meet the security guard at the local bank on Page 5, and the supervillain slaughters him in a colorful fashion on Page 6? The poor guard may have gotten three whole lines of dialogue before he dies. Nothing more was ever expected or required of him by the writer.
On a larger scale, Jeph Loeb introduced several new characters, mostly criminals, in his "Long Halloween" and "Dark Victory" epics, and many of them died before he was through with them.
Other examples: Terra and Kole, two Titans characters of the early-to-mid 80s. Marv Wolfman has freely admitted both of them were created to die.
In addition: At least one reader of the first draft pointed out the important role, in several team books, of the Expendable Founding Member who becomes acquainted with his new teammates and then dramatically dies - maybe within the first story arc, maybe at some later point within the first year or so after the team starts working together - as an object lesson to the others in just how dangerous the superhero line of work can be. One obvious example, possibly the earliest one, is Thunderbird I who debuted in "Giant-Size X-Men #4" as part of the "New X-Men" and promptly died at the end of the new membership roster's next adventure together, in "Uncanny X-Men #95." Two decades later (our time), Serpentina was the equivalent member of the newly formed "X-Men 2099" team who lived a century in the future. We barely got to know her before she perished.
An unusually frank and widescale case of "Cannon Fodder" would be the cast of Marvel's title of the late 80s, "Strikeforce:Morituri," in which the central characters were all volunteers who had been warned that if they didn't get killed in the line of duty, the process that gave them their superpowers would still kill them anyway, probably sometime within the first year of their superpowered careers as elite soldiers fighting alien invaders. Successive waves of characters were recruited, empowered, trained, and frequently killed off fairly quickly, exactly as they had been warned to expect.
02. False Alarm to Raise Sales
Used to be this "false death" of a lead superhero, or someone close to him in his personal life, would seem to happen on the cover of a book, and within the pages of that single book the character would die or seem to, but would recover fully from his slight case of death by the end. As multi-issue stories became more common, the False Alarms got longer and longer.
Remember the "Death of Superman" in 1992? Several months went by in four linked titles before the Real Thing returned to Metropolis. And a few years later, I think the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards was Missing in Action, Presumed Dead (except by his wife) for a couple of years! (Our time. Less than that in comic-book-time.) In both cases, however, I never believed for a minute that these deaths were meant to be "permanent." And they weren't.
03. Let's Make Room for Someone Younger and Cuter in a Similar Role!
Hal Jordan is dead; Long Live Kyle Rayner! (Who DOESN'T embarrass DC by having white hair at his temples, suggesting he might actually be getting downright ancient - like, in his forties, even!)
NOTE: Yes, I know that first Hal was only turned into a lunatic in order to "make room" for Kyle. Later on in the 1990s he was apparently killed off once or twice, to "nail it down" that he wasn't going to be a respectable Green Lantern anymore.
Ollie Queen is dead; Long Live Connor Hawke! (Who has a nifty Politically Correct multiracial background too!)
And more recently: Ra's al Ghul is dead; Long Live Ra's al Ghul (Version 2.0), who used to be Nyssa!
On a similar note: Sometimes one villain is killed off so that a different and possibly much nastier version can take over. (Not necessarily "younger" and "cuter" in this context, but still "significantly different.") Judd Winick did this with Sabbac, for instance.
04. The "End of the Romance" Fatality
"Good grief, I think the hero is becoming emotionally involved with this lady! What can we do to get rid of her? I know! We'll kill her! That'll fix the problem! Then the fans will stop nagging at us to let him marry her and settle down, which would *gasp of horror* change him from the swinging bachelor he is now! This will teach them not to nag us about such nonsense!"
How many times did Erik Larsen take this daring approach to "resolving" the Savage Dragon's romantic relationships?
Superboy lost Tana Moon that way; Daredevil lost Karen Page that way; Captain America probably lost Sharon Carter that way in the 1970s (for a couple of decades, anyway . . .)
Even spouses are not immune to being tossed in the trashcan for this reason. Scuttlebutt says that several years ago some editorial types at Marvel decided that letting Spidey get married in the first place was a huge mistake, so it was time to "fix" the problem. In other words, use a plane explosion to kill off his wife, and try to move him back toward the "poor guy trying really hard to get a date with one neat girl or another" roots of the character as quickly as possible. Didn't quite work out. Faithful readers were not amused, to put it mildly. Eventually Marvel conceded that Mary Jane was still alive, after all.
05. It's Time to Shake Things Up in This Book - Which Regular Cast Member Shall We Kill?
Gerry Conway wrote that this was the basic reason Spider-Man lost his first really serious girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, back in the early 70s, at the hands of the original Green Goblin. Presumably it was also the reason Spidey lost his Aunt May in the mid-90s. (That one was later Reverse-Changed of course. As with the Dark Phoenix thing, it hadn't been the "real" Aunt May who died, but an impostor.)
Likewise, Batman lost the Post-Crisis version of Jason Todd (admittedly, readers got to vote on that one), and eleven years later, Commissioner Gordon lost his second wife, Sarah.
06. Let's Spice Up An Epic By Killing Someone Obscure!
I see this one as being a different category from the previous version, because here you choose someone so obscure that people who have only been reading the book for the last few months, or sometimes the last few years, may never have heard of her until the story arc in which she dies.
The "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" storyline started off this way by killing a woman Bruce had apparently dated a few times during Doug Moench's 1990s run on Batman. Her name was Vesper Fairchild, and during and after "No Man's Land" she basically disappeared until an obscure murder victim was needed in a hurry.
Vesper was continuing a proud tradition; much the same thing had previously happened to Kathy Kane, the Batwoman of the late 50s and early 60s, in a story in the late 70s. Information at dcuguide.com suggests that when she died in Detective Comics #485, it was her first appearance in that title in the past 160 issues, although she had been shown in some issues of "Batman Family" earlier in the 1970s.
And after Vesper, we had Harold Allnut. In the first 10 issues of the 12-part Hush, he was not visible at all. Anyone who had only started reading Batman with the first issue of Hush could be pardoned for not knowing anyone named "Harold" was even supposed to exist in Bat-continuity. In the 11th issue, Batman #618, he showed up in one scene at the end of that issue, just long enough to say a few words and then die. One online commentator has claimed Harold hadn't been seen interacting with Batman and his friends in the Batcave since before NML, which (if accurate) would mean that basically regular Bat-readers went without him all the way from 1998 to 2003, a five year gap. After all that time, even many of the old-timer readers could be forgiven for having forgotten him already, and/or having assumed he was long gone from the Batcave and unlikely to return in circumstances that suggested he'd actually been working in the cave for Batman, behind the scenes, all along!
12 Possible Motives
01. Cannon Fodder
02. False Alarm to Raise Sales
03. Let's Make Room for Someone Younger and Cuter in a Similar Role!
04. The "End of the Romance" Fatality
05. It's Time to Shake Things Up in This Book - Which Regular Cast Member Shall We Kill?
06. Let's Spice Up An Epic By Killing Someone Incredibly Obscure!
07. Housecleaning to Get Rid of an Embarrassment
08. The Professional Corpse
09. The Series Was Getting Cancelled Anyway - Let's Go Out With a Bang!
10. Punishment for Sins
11. The Mystery's Gone Out of Our Relationship
12. "I'm Back and I'm Badder than Ever! (Watch me prove it!)"
01. Cannon Fodder
These are the characters who were "created to die" for dramatic reasons. The writer who invented them never intended for them to become permanent participants in the continuity of the series he is writing; he will finish them off himself when the time is right. They may last a panel, a page, an issue, or even a year or two, but they were always doomed in the end.
Obvious examples are the characters who only exist long enough for a villain to kill them, just to show how ruthless and deadly he can be. You know, we meet the security guard at the local bank on Page 5, and the supervillain slaughters him in a colorful fashion on Page 6? The poor guard may have gotten three whole lines of dialogue before he dies. Nothing more was ever expected or required of him by the writer.
On a larger scale, Jeph Loeb introduced several new characters, mostly criminals, in his "Long Halloween" and "Dark Victory" epics, and many of them died before he was through with them.
Other examples: Terra and Kole, two Titans characters of the early-to-mid 80s. Marv Wolfman has freely admitted both of them were created to die.
In addition: At least one reader of the first draft pointed out the important role, in several team books, of the Expendable Founding Member who becomes acquainted with his new teammates and then dramatically dies - maybe within the first story arc, maybe at some later point within the first year or so after the team starts working together - as an object lesson to the others in just how dangerous the superhero line of work can be. One obvious example, possibly the earliest one, is Thunderbird I who debuted in "Giant-Size X-Men #4" as part of the "New X-Men" and promptly died at the end of the new membership roster's next adventure together, in "Uncanny X-Men #95." Two decades later (our time), Serpentina was the equivalent member of the newly formed "X-Men 2099" team who lived a century in the future. We barely got to know her before she perished.
An unusually frank and widescale case of "Cannon Fodder" would be the cast of Marvel's title of the late 80s, "Strikeforce:Morituri," in which the central characters were all volunteers who had been warned that if they didn't get killed in the line of duty, the process that gave them their superpowers would still kill them anyway, probably sometime within the first year of their superpowered careers as elite soldiers fighting alien invaders. Successive waves of characters were recruited, empowered, trained, and frequently killed off fairly quickly, exactly as they had been warned to expect.
02. False Alarm to Raise Sales
Used to be this "false death" of a lead superhero, or someone close to him in his personal life, would seem to happen on the cover of a book, and within the pages of that single book the character would die or seem to, but would recover fully from his slight case of death by the end. As multi-issue stories became more common, the False Alarms got longer and longer.
Remember the "Death of Superman" in 1992? Several months went by in four linked titles before the Real Thing returned to Metropolis. And a few years later, I think the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards was Missing in Action, Presumed Dead (except by his wife) for a couple of years! (Our time. Less than that in comic-book-time.) In both cases, however, I never believed for a minute that these deaths were meant to be "permanent." And they weren't.
03. Let's Make Room for Someone Younger and Cuter in a Similar Role!
Hal Jordan is dead; Long Live Kyle Rayner! (Who DOESN'T embarrass DC by having white hair at his temples, suggesting he might actually be getting downright ancient - like, in his forties, even!)
NOTE: Yes, I know that first Hal was only turned into a lunatic in order to "make room" for Kyle. Later on in the 1990s he was apparently killed off once or twice, to "nail it down" that he wasn't going to be a respectable Green Lantern anymore.
Ollie Queen is dead; Long Live Connor Hawke! (Who has a nifty Politically Correct multiracial background too!)
And more recently: Ra's al Ghul is dead; Long Live Ra's al Ghul (Version 2.0), who used to be Nyssa!
On a similar note: Sometimes one villain is killed off so that a different and possibly much nastier version can take over. (Not necessarily "younger" and "cuter" in this context, but still "significantly different.") Judd Winick did this with Sabbac, for instance.
04. The "End of the Romance" Fatality
"Good grief, I think the hero is becoming emotionally involved with this lady! What can we do to get rid of her? I know! We'll kill her! That'll fix the problem! Then the fans will stop nagging at us to let him marry her and settle down, which would *gasp of horror* change him from the swinging bachelor he is now! This will teach them not to nag us about such nonsense!"
How many times did Erik Larsen take this daring approach to "resolving" the Savage Dragon's romantic relationships?
Superboy lost Tana Moon that way; Daredevil lost Karen Page that way; Captain America probably lost Sharon Carter that way in the 1970s (for a couple of decades, anyway . . .)
Even spouses are not immune to being tossed in the trashcan for this reason. Scuttlebutt says that several years ago some editorial types at Marvel decided that letting Spidey get married in the first place was a huge mistake, so it was time to "fix" the problem. In other words, use a plane explosion to kill off his wife, and try to move him back toward the "poor guy trying really hard to get a date with one neat girl or another" roots of the character as quickly as possible. Didn't quite work out. Faithful readers were not amused, to put it mildly. Eventually Marvel conceded that Mary Jane was still alive, after all.
05. It's Time to Shake Things Up in This Book - Which Regular Cast Member Shall We Kill?
Gerry Conway wrote that this was the basic reason Spider-Man lost his first really serious girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, back in the early 70s, at the hands of the original Green Goblin. Presumably it was also the reason Spidey lost his Aunt May in the mid-90s. (That one was later Reverse-Changed of course. As with the Dark Phoenix thing, it hadn't been the "real" Aunt May who died, but an impostor.)
Likewise, Batman lost the Post-Crisis version of Jason Todd (admittedly, readers got to vote on that one), and eleven years later, Commissioner Gordon lost his second wife, Sarah.
06. Let's Spice Up An Epic By Killing Someone Obscure!
I see this one as being a different category from the previous version, because here you choose someone so obscure that people who have only been reading the book for the last few months, or sometimes the last few years, may never have heard of her until the story arc in which she dies.
The "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" storyline started off this way by killing a woman Bruce had apparently dated a few times during Doug Moench's 1990s run on Batman. Her name was Vesper Fairchild, and during and after "No Man's Land" she basically disappeared until an obscure murder victim was needed in a hurry.
Vesper was continuing a proud tradition; much the same thing had previously happened to Kathy Kane, the Batwoman of the late 50s and early 60s, in a story in the late 70s. Information at dcuguide.com suggests that when she died in Detective Comics #485, it was her first appearance in that title in the past 160 issues, although she had been shown in some issues of "Batman Family" earlier in the 1970s.
And after Vesper, we had Harold Allnut. In the first 10 issues of the 12-part Hush, he was not visible at all. Anyone who had only started reading Batman with the first issue of Hush could be pardoned for not knowing anyone named "Harold" was even supposed to exist in Bat-continuity. In the 11th issue, Batman #618, he showed up in one scene at the end of that issue, just long enough to say a few words and then die. One online commentator has claimed Harold hadn't been seen interacting with Batman and his friends in the Batcave since before NML, which (if accurate) would mean that basically regular Bat-readers went without him all the way from 1998 to 2003, a five year gap. After all that time, even many of the old-timer readers could be forgiven for having forgotten him already, and/or having assumed he was long gone from the Batcave and unlikely to return in circumstances that suggested he'd actually been working in the cave for Batman, behind the scenes, all along!