I've been walkin' through the middle of nowhere, Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door:
We're cheating ourselves.
As readers we're cheating ourselves. In comics death is treated as a plot gimmick and not the milestone it should be treated as.
When was the last time you believed that anyone in comics that supposedly died was really dead? Give DC credit, at least when Batman died they didn't even pretend that he was really dead for good. Marvel tried to get everyone to buy into Captain America's death, trying to convince us that Bucky was the new Captain America. But we knew that eventually Steve Rogers would be back in the red, white and blue. (And please don't tell me that even with Steve back Bucky is still going to be Cap. We'll see for how long.)
We all know at the end of the storyline when the Big Bad is blown up that somehow the Evil will return to harangue our hero in the future. That's an expected cliché of the comic book story. When Dr. Doom is blown up we know he'll be back. I'm not talking that as real death. That's comic book death and it's really not supposed to trick us.
I'm talking about the death in comics that is supposed to be true and final. Death should move us. Death should make us feel. Death should make us cry. And good fiction can do that to us, it can move us, make us feel, make us cry.
Even the supporting character that dies will probably be back. No one that dies in comics is safe from coming back. It used to be said that the only two deaths in comics that would never change were Bucky and Uncle Ben. Well Bucky is back. I don't think Uncle Ben has come back, but I could be wrong, I haven't been keeping up with Spider-man.
I really feel that taking the element of true death out of a comic has hurt the writer's ability to make you feel that ultimate sense of loss. He can bring you to the brink, but you're not going to take that plunge over into the abyss, because you know it's not true.
It doesn't have to be like that. Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The TV show, not the comic. Now Buffy was a show that dealt with the supernatural, so you would think that here for sure you would never believe a character could really be dead. For goodness sake there were vampires and ghosts and all sorts of demon things on this show, so how could dead be dead? But imagine how you felt when Tara was killed. You believed it. You hoped that they might find some way to bring her back, that she couldn't really be dead. She was one of the good guys. She was Willow's girlfriend. But she was dead. And it made the fiction of the show a little more believable.
Once more going to Buffy we look at what is arguably considered one of its best shows, “The Body.” This was the show where the vampires and ghosts and other supernatural thingies took a backseat to the storyline. Buffy comes home and finds her Mother, Joyce on the floor of the living room. She was dead. And Buffy with all her powers could do nothing to save her. She didn't die from some monster or spell, she died from a normal everyday medical condition. Watch that show and I dare you not to be moved. I dare you not to feel a few tears. But how powerful would it be if you knew that death wasn't real in the Buffyverse and that in a few episodes Joyce would be back. You might feel something, but I can promise you that the emotions you would feel wouldn't be as strong.
So in comics when you see that person die you always have the thought in the back of your mind that it isn't going to last. Sooner or later that dead person will be back. So how much emotion do you want to invest in their death scene?
I was a late comer to the Television show NCIS. Whenever I'd go up to Tennessee my Mom would be watching it. It's becoming one of those shows like MASH or Law and Order that seems to be on some channel almost any hour of the day. USA Network runs marathons of it every week. But I really never paid attention to it while I was up there. I'd see part of a show, part of another show. I didn't know the characters, the situations or anything about the show and it always bothered me that for a show with Navy in its title none of the characters seemed to be in said Navy. Still I have to admit that I was intrigued by what I saw. The characters were interesting.
I started to watch it when I'd come home. I set the DVR to record it on USA. After watching half a dozen episodes I was hooked. I am not a fan of the other forensics cop shows, the CSI franchise. I've watched some of them and to be honest, really really do not like them. I find the characters tedious, the stories terrible and cannot watch them. But NCIS I was enjoying. I goggled NCIS and discovered that the agents were civilians, they weren't supposed to be in the Navy. They were investigating the Navy, not part of it.
And the characters. Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Such a great name for a character. The name just by itself tells you something of his past life. That he was from a small town. The rest of the team; Tony, Tim, Kate, Ducky and of course Abby. Abby became my favorite character.
I went out and bought the first two seasons on DVD. I still hadn't seen a lot of the shows and the ones I had seen were out of order. I knew somewhere in the run of six seasons Kate was replaced by Ziva, but why I didn't know.
So there I was watching the shows. The first season cemented my feelings for the show. I was really enjoying it. For a show that that doesn't focus on the characters' private lives you actually learned a good bit, a little at a time. I was becoming attached to these characters. The second season just continued my fascination with the show and its characters. Towards the end of the second season it was looking like there might be something more between Kate and Tony, like they might be heading into a romantic relationship. Than at the end of the second season, in the final episode, Kate was killed.
Let me repeat that. Kate was killed. I can't tell you the surprise I felt while watching that episode. I guess I was lucky that I hadn't stumbled across that fact before I watched the show, especially since it was already four or five years old. But I had no idea what was going to happen. I remember sitting there thinking this can't be right. They can't be killing her. She was going to get together with Tony. There were too many story possibilities for her.
But she was dead. And the next season explored the consequences of her death. It looked at the reactions the other characters had because of her death. It introduced a new character to replace her, but the acceptance of Ziva didn't come quickly to all the members of the team who were still grieving over the loss of Kate. In essence it dealt with death and its consequences.
If this was a comic, with the show being in the seventh season, Kate would have returned. The reasons could be many, she could be back as a good guy or more than likely she'd have returned as a villain, convinced that her death was the fault of Gibbs and his team and wanting revenge. And it would have cheapened her death. All the emotions I had as a viewer watching her die and the aftermath of her death would have felt cheap and hollow. The investment I had in the character and the mourning I experienced over her loss would have been for nothing. Even if I missed Kate and wished she was still with the show I knew her loss had made a difference in the show and by making me believe in the characters and the show for an hour whenever I watched it it had made a difference in me.
This is exactly what we as comic readers are being denied. We can see someone die, but do we ever truly believe that the death is real? As soon as the issue is read and the comic put to the side the message boards are going to be full of questioning the death or when will the character come back from the dead, things that aren't important and not accepting the death and whatever happens next.
Knowing that a character can actually die makes you read or watch whatever series you are involved in with a different light also. Knowing that any character (yes, I know that even with Kate's death the odds of Gibb's character being killed were very slim, but there was the possibility and with the other characters you really didn't know) might die makes you believe in the show a bit more. Any fiction wants you to invest in its world and for the amount of time you're visiting it wants you to believe in it. I'm not saying you have to believe in people that can fly and whatever, but for the time you're in that fictional world you have to believe. You have to be willing to put aside what you know might not be true but believe in what the creator of that piece of fiction has created. And to believe the world has to be consistent with what the creator has created. Everytime something happens in this make believe world that makes you pause and question it is a chance for you to cease believing and to pull you from the story.
Knowing a character can really die in this world you're reading or watching helps you to invest in the world, helps you to believe a little stronger. When you don't believe the character dies and there is a death and your first thought is how or when will the character return, you've just been pulled from that world a bit and you're not quite believing as much.
Watching NCIS I am always worried that another character might die. And they have. From semi regular supporting characters to other leads, some characters have died. It's made me believe in the characters that are alive even more. When I read the death of a comic book character, as much as I enjoyed the death of Captain America, part of me was questioning the death, wondering when he'd be back, how'd he be back, too many questions for me to fully believe in the death and to pull me from the storyline and the belief that I had invested into that comic that I had been willing to give it.
There's no real summing up here. We all know that nothing is really going to change, as far as death is concerned in comics. It's a shame, death could actually bring a certain life to comics, give the readers a chance to experience true feelings of the death of a character and what it means. But don't blame just the creators, we as readers are just as guilty. We're the ones that demand the return of a character before his four color remains are even buried. We're the ones that start trying to come up with explanations of how the character survived their death. We're the ones that don't want to accept death as part of life. And thus we're the ones that will always read the death of a character and be pulled from that fictional world and be reminded a bit at that point in the story that we're just reading a story and of course it's not true and the link between us as a reader and the creator of the story will be broken just a bit.
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