Before Adam West's Batman Was, It Was

Recently, I watched the first (1943) Batman serial.

To say that it was somewhat... cracked is an understatement.



Not entirely in a bad way, though. (FYI, "Batman's ray gun" was actually a stolen piece of villain's equipment which he just happened to be using because it was convenient.)

According to Wikipedia, this serial introduced the "Batcave proper" (although they called it the "Bat's Cave") and also strongly influenced later depictions of Alfred, and additionally was an enormous influence on major parody fodder for the "Adam West Batman" series.

Although I don't recall ever seeing a desk in the Batcave.

Yes, really. A desk. I guess they wouldn't have come up with a computer for him to sit at just yet.

Incidentally, not only is this one of the smallest and least cavernous Batcaves I've ever seen, it also apparently has one really stupid bat that can't fly in a straight line-it keeps going backwards. (I know I shouldn't pick on the "special effects," but I can't help it.)

Batman and an incredibly curly-haired Robin are actually supposedly secret agents for the government in this, reason being that '40s to '50s era censorship didn't permit depiction of flouting authority without said flouters being punished in some way. (If you've ever read The Ox-Bow Incident and then watched the film adaptation from that time period [or vice versa], the significant plot changes are a direct result of similar censorship.)

Batman calling the police on a police callbox frankly made me smile, if only because it made me think of the TARDIS (even if it had no resemblance to the TARDIS at all).

His calling card, folks:

The plot of the main story opens when Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend (who, in one of the last episodes of the serial, inexplicably is suddenly his fiance and probably knows his identity even though before she was completely clueless about it) go to pick up her uncle from jail.

Her uncle was supposedly wrongly imprisoned, but nobody who matters (i.e. the judge and jury) believes him on this point, even though everybody else takes his statements of innocence at face value. He's a rather harmless-seeming old man, which makes this even more incongruous. (Incidentally, it was a corporate crime he was accused of.)

Before they get to the prison, a couple of suspicious looking guys pick him up and drive off with him. When Bruce and company notice and pursue, they manage to get out of sight for a minute, spin around on the road...

...and cause their car to change color via the magic of incredible special effects pulling a tarp blocking a bright light out of the way and swapping license plates (and disguising the driver with a hat while having the others hide beneath the view of the windows).

Having lost their pursuers, the villains return to their headquarters in "Little Tokyo," which has been abandoned because, as the narrator cheerily relates, all the "sneaky Japs" have been rounded up and carted off.

All of them except for the villain, Doctor Prince Tito Daka.

(He's the one wearing bad makeup that's supposed to make him look Japanese and smoking a cigarette.) When I call him "Doctor Prince Tito Daka," it's because he was generally referred to as "Dr. Daka," his name was also established as "Tito Daka" (yes, really), and he was often called "Prince Daka" as well. It's possible that "Prince" was supposed to replicate the impression of the honorific "-sama," but I'm not sure I want to give them that much credit.

Anyway, Dr. Daka's evil plot involves mind-controlling people as "zombies" with incredible strength and using a "radium gun" (the aforementioned ray gun) to commit acts of sabotage, recruiting disgraced former businessmen and the like as minions.

And pretty much all of this is established in the first chapter.

This serial is an amusing artifact of its time period, and I think that people interested in comic book characters might be interested to watch it purely for its historical amusement value.

That's not even going into the increasingly ludicrous cliffhangers, which in the serial's climax involves about three or four scenes being added that changed what happened when the final cliffhanger resolved. (I'll probably save talking about some aspects of this for later posts.) To give you an idea of it, the "Batman's ray gun" scene takes place around when the cliffhanger of the previous episode appears, and in the cliffhanger, they conveniently omit Batman falling out of the armored car just before it flies over the literal cliff.

I would talk more, but I think that's enough for one post.

-Signing off.

The Clone Saga's Logical Climax

Spider-Man's "Clone Saga" takes a lot of flak, and for good reason-there are tons of plot elements that weren't handled that well, and which just kept coming back.

Preceding the Clone Saga was a... different kind of clone.

It is my humble opinion that Spider Amoeba (oddly enough, absolutely no relation) is the least offensive clone of Peter Parker ever-it even cleans up after itself when it's done.

-Signing off.

Golden Age Triple Moment of the Day (60)

I've posted a few of these moments of the day lately that feature scenes from Samson, a feature from Fantastic Comics, which also featured Stardust the Super Wizard.

This brief sequence from Fantastic Comics #9 shows that Samson, while a "powered" hero instead of a "super wizard" hero, was otherwise cut from much the same absolutely merciless mold as Stardust.

Here we see that Stardust Samson [EDIT: Whoops!], who is on an island full of monsters, has a huge bird tucked under his arm. Why is he after that boulder?

Duh.

And of course, he had the bird under his arm so he could have it carry him away from the island.

So Samson, rather than be willing to let these monsters live, decided he was going to drive them into extinction.

He probably broke the bird's neck later and gave it to somebody as a substitute holiday turkey, too.

-Signing off.

Just Plain Crazy Comics: (Nightmare and Sleepy) And The Corpse That Steals Living Men's Faces!

Been a bit since I've done one of these. Keep a hand on your face, just in case this happens.

Anyway, this story is from Clue Comics #3, and is (obviously) part of the incredibly absurd Nightmare and Sleepy feature.

We start with some guys who just watched a hearse drive past. One of their number happens to be an undertaker, and makes a suggestion.

What a great idea! Let's all make a bet where we collect our winnings over each other's dead bodies! That will surely reinforce our friendship!

This panel brings up a question that I'm curious about:

Is it actually legal to work a bet into your will? That seems strange, at the least.

Anyway, the bet soon has a result. Just a few days later...

The undertaker died first.

OR DID HE DUN DUN DUN?!!

At the funeral, the others are wondering if they'll be able to collect from the dead man.

Funerals are guaranteed to bring out the best in people, apparently.

And now we randomly check on our heroes, Nightmare and Sleepy:

Wait, what? What? You guys are basically hobos who occasionally get paid for wrestling in local matches when you get places. How the heck do you know about this bet, exactly?

Never mind.

Anyway, they see someone climbing up the side of a house.

Naturally, this arouses their natural alertness and suspicions, so their clothes "fly to the winds" (the story's words, not mine) and go running.

They corner the mysterious individual against the wall. (Wait, did that sentence make sense? I'm not sure.)

It has no face? Why...

IT TOOK HIS FACE!

... Sorry.

Anyway, long story short, the mysterious figure hits them a few more times and runs away.

Meanwhile, the guy in that house finds a note from the undertaker at his window that the figure was trying to get in. (Yes, really. Although the story doesn't make that terribly clear, by which I mean I only figured it out while closely examining the panels in preparation for this blog post. I've read it probably half a dozen times before.)

The note tells him where to collect, so he goes there.

And then he dies.

The story gets very repetitive and weird at this point (and it was pretty bad already), so I'll cut to the chase.

Nightmare finally has another fight with the dude, punches him in the face, and his mask shatters... because it was a mirror. (Seriously, that's the explanation for the stolen faces schtick?)

And surprise, surprise, it turns out that it was the undertaker.

So, let me get this straight: The undertaker was of reasonably sound body (other than the obvious), and an older gentlemen, but he was also mere hours from death. And he gave Nightmare, who is, need I remind you, a guy who makes money wrestling for a living (and is darned good at it, for that matter) a really hard fight?

Was this one of those crazy diseases that gives you superhuman powers while you're dying, or what?

I'm having trouble figuring out if this was really a weirder story than the Upside-Down Town one or not.

(Previous posts that mention Nightmare and Sleepy: Golden Age Moment of the Day #22, "Checking the Checker," "The Upside-Down Town."

-Signing off.

Character Distillation: Wolverine

Been a while since I've done one of these, and I might as well throw this one out, though it's incredibly obvious.

1. Wolverine has "animal-like" powers and temperament, and metal claws and bones.
2. Wolverine has a long, dirty history because he's old, and his memory is terrible (though terrible memory is an animal characteristic, so whatever).
   
3. Wolverine is the bestest ever. Or so Marvel's marketing department has been led to believe, and so the writers like to present him as a result.

Yes, that's the core of the character. I'm sure plenty of people would disagree with this assessment, but the first two are deeper and more central to him than any other characteristics, and the last is the most important in terms of how he gets treated.

Of course, the last part is what drives a lot of comic book fans (and Wolverine fans) nuts these days. Wolverine has to do all these really insane things and kick everyone's butts all the time, and if he ever gets his butt kicked it's not good. And thus he gets to do things that totally ruin logic as a result.

Although there was that one time when Magneto ripped the adamantium out of him, which amusingly arose (according to Peter David) from a random comment Peter David made that he didn't think it made much sense to have a big fight between the two characters, because Magneto could just pull his skeleton out. (He didn't think they should do it because Wolverine would die after that, but obviously they disagreed. And Wolverine disagreed with the dying part, of course. Because he's frikkin' Wolverine and can ignore death.)

As for the animal powers, metal bones/claws, and old man thing? I think one of my favorite things about Wolverine actually is that for all intents and purposes, he's a grouchy old man.

-Signing off.

The Very Short And Ugly Career of Missileman

Who, you may be asking, is Missileman?

A very short-lived supervillain. His career lasted for all of two pages.

In all seriousness, this guy makes the Human Flame's career look downright glamorous. And that's before Final Crisis.

Let's take a look at the dude and see his costume.

Pretty ugly fella. (Also, "uff?" Seriously, Supes, are you tripping or something?)

So what are Missileman's accomplishments? Well, he destroyed a bridge "before the very eyes of Superman." He also blew up a car and damaged some buildings. (I considered doing one of the little random filler posts I've been doing with a panel from that page, where Superman proclaims "Today I won't leave you Missileman!" but that's a little too out of context bad even for me.)

So Supes flies over and grabs at him, but Missileman boldly proclaims that "nothing can stop me today, Superman!"

Then Superman throws him into an erupting volcano.

The end.

No, seriously-the end. That's all she wrote-guy's dead.

See, whoever the heck wrote this weird little story wanted to have a villain for Superman to fight. And since, in Nagraj comics, they apparently don't take prisoners unless the dude's immortal, the guy had to make someone up, because he was certainly not allowed to kill off even the least important of Superman villains.

So, yeah. Really, this is a very elegant demonstration of why Superman needs to be such a nice guy, isn't it? His comics would just fall apart if he wasn't.

-Signing off.

Character Distillation: Martian Manhunter

Martian Manhunter is another of those characters with a long and very sad history.

Very, very sad history.

Let's get to the meat of this: The bullet points. (I love bullet points.)

1. Martian Manhunter is an alien being who just happens to look vaguely human.
2. Martian Manhunter is insanely powerful.
3. Martian Manhunter is relatively poorly known except to fairly hardcore comics fans. (Yes, this really is part of the character.)
4. Few if any writers know or care much about Martian Manhunter, so he tends to get written as a wimp and smacked around a lot.

For a good amount of documentation on Martian Manhunter of all kinds, there are two good blogs, Every Day is Like Wednesday (already linked, although you'll have to dig into the archives, as it's been a while) and The Idol-Head of Diabolu (a very Manhunter-centric blog). This is ultimately where I've learned most of what I know about him.

With regards to J'onn J'onnz's alien-ness (by the way, if you don't know, that's pronounced "John Jones"-chalk one up to comic book silliness), J'onn J'onnz, in one story, became addicted to pseudo-Oreo cookies, and then, in order to cure himself of this addiction (it was an actual drug addiction with physiological symptoms, not a psychological one), he purged himself of his addicted cells and fried them with his heat vision. You don't really get much more alien and weird than that.

With regards to his insane power levels, well, he has super strength, super resistance to injury (I hesitate to call it invulnerability), super speed, telepathy (powerful enough to launch a psychic attack on a small army while dying), telekinesis (he can use the powers of the universe to create an ice cream cone), intangibility, invisibility, heat vision, shape shifting, extreme regeneration (he can grow a new everything, and once grew a new person out of himself-it was a human named John Jones), and in his early Silver Age comic appearances, the ability to snap his fingers to do almost anything. (I am so not making this up.) On one occasion, he totally mauls (note: scroll down a bit for what I'm linking to-it's the third picture down) a guy with pretty much all the powers of Superman and then some. On one occasion, Superman listed Martian Manhunter at the top of the list of beings on Earth he'd be afraid to face in battle. His only weakness is to fire (what), and that pretty much only works when the writer feels like it.

With regards to his obscurity-well, he's shown up in two or maybe three cartoons, once as a brief cameo and another time as a major character for most of the run, albeit a toned down, less interesting version of himself. He has not had his own title in decades, and his runs in comics are generally either short or purely as a supporting cast member. And so hardly anyone knows who he is, other than pretty hardcore comic book fans and trivia fiends (of which I am the latter).

With regards to the last point-well, it's pretty much the Henry Pym effect. While good ol' Pym has, apparently, managed to crawl out from under this particular rock for the moment, at least for the purposes of one author, Martian Manhunter has recently been killed over it. (Don't worry-he'll probably get better.) Of course, this is a corollary of point #3, as well, as Martian Manhunter dying doesn't keep comic books from being sold.

And really, we come to the crux of what I'm driving at-choosing to kill Martian Manhunter was a lazy answer to the question "How do we make the latest crossover look like Serious Business?"

Sigh.

-Signing off.

This Comic Shocked Me-No, Really

Every now again in my journeys through this vast wasteland called the Internet, I find something that shocks, even disturbs me. Case in point:



Argh.

Anyway, I was going through my rounds the other day, and was directed to a very bizarre comic by Major Spoilers. Very bizarre.

Behold the madness.

I don't know the exact context of this comic, but I do know that it was published in India. That much is pretty clear. Beyond that is anyone's guess, as the person who posted this stuff doesn't have any commentary or even a link to it on his front page. Anyway, I would do some really in-depth commentary, but don't have time at the moment. (College is back in.) So, instead, I'll point out a few of the hilarious things about this. (And yes, this is just a few.)

1. Batman talks kinda like a lolcat.
2. Superman is so dumb, he tells the immortal alien magician who just fell from the sky in a diamond everything he knows about Earth's great heroes.
3. Spiderman (WHAT IS HE DOING IN THE SAME COMIC AS SUPERMAN AND BATMAN) is in Paris, France, disarming a bomb on the Eiffel tower. (Also, he is the MIGHTIEST.)
4. Spiderman was stung by a spider.
5. Shakoora, the evil immortal alien magician, defeats these guys with ease, and then goes to fight some guy that American comic readers have never heard of. (Though Superman knew about him, of course.)
6. Nagraj, India's home-grown hero, is a sexist pig. ("I don't like this dress, Nagraj." "Shuddup, you'll get used to it." That is nearly an exact quote.)
7. When Shakoora proves to be too much for Nagraj, he prays to his god to come help him.
8. Nagraj's god comes and helps him.
9. Nagraj's god looks like he's supposed to be the Judeo-Christian God, but clearly isn't.
10. When Nagraj's god totally owns the heck out of Shakoora, Shakoora, in a desperate, last-ditch measure, turns Nagraj's buddy into a mustachio'd evil giant.
11. Superman is helpless against the giant, who "made him flew."
12. Batman and Spiderman use "spider webs and rope webs" (I am not making this up) to no better success than Superman.
13. Superman grabs a giant knife and cuts the giant's cheek.
14. Spiderman takes the bomb he was "disarming" earlier and sets it off in the giant's face.
15. Nagraj, Mr. Much-Tougher-Than-Your-Heroes, leaps up on the giant and BITES HIM.
16. Since his teeth aren't tough enough to defeat the giant through his invulnerable giant skin, he magically summons snakes from his fingers, which go down the giant's throat and kill him.
17. That giant totally used to be Nagraj's buddy, who saved his life like five minutes ago.
18. The snakes come back out and go back into Nagraj's fingers.
19. The heroes all laugh, and totally aren't broken up by the fact that Nagraj just killed his buddy.
20. Nagraj's god is RIGHT THERE and he does nothing to help Nagraj's dead buddy.

Seriously, what a heck?!

Also, yay me-I set a personal bullet point record.

This makes me wonder about other Indian comics. What other cases of licensing gone horribly wrong are out there?

Character Distillation: Henry Pym

(Grr, missed a day of blogging again. This time, it's completely my fault, as I had time but completely forgot about it.)

So there are some cases where a character's basic nature is harder to figure out than others. Henry Pym is one of those cases. Why? Because the character is inconsistently depicted. Keeping that in mind, it's still possible to figure out the character's core, and here's my conclusion as to what it is:

1. Henry Pym is a genius, and has made many scientific advancements, most particularly Pym particles and Ultron. (Way to go, Dr. Pym!)
2. Nobody really cares about the character, so each writer does something completely different with him-and it's usually not nice.

Sure, you can say all kinds of stuff about his mental instabilities and whatnot, but the authors do whatever the heck they want with him, and it's just about never nice. Case in point: When the character actually gets to do some good stuff in recent comics, it's because he's been replaced by a Skrull. (Er, scroll down a bit further. The first post, with a Skrull Pym, has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's the second comic on that page with a Skrull Pym that concerns this post. Also note that with the fact that the Skrull replacing Pym may be a female Skrull, and the fact that a Skrull delicacy that unveiled Skrull Pym was strawberries mixed with pickles, my sister concluded that Tigra had somehow impregnated Skrull Pym. Admittedly, my sister is crazy, but that's pretty funny.)

Anyway, they'll always get away with doing this kind of crud to Henry Pym, because he's never been more than a supporting character that no one really knows what to do with. (Heck, even Lee and Kirby didn't know what to do with him, and they created him.) He goes from shrinking powers to growing powers within a single issue of his first appearance, he has periods of mental instability, he's a wife-beater, his marriage is fixed, his marriage is ruined, he's replaced by a Skrull, and oh yeah, he built an insane robot that wants to slaughter humanity like so many cockroaches.

Just kill the poor guy already, and move on to something more interesting. It's not like it'll make things worse for him.

Transformers: Starscream's Life (and death) Stinks

Starscream doesn't get to have much fun. Somebody's always killin' him.





Note: Music video. This scene is one of the most popular Transformers scenes to put into a music video, but nobody wants to touch putting the actual clip up. Dunno why.





(If you want to see the above sequence with the original audio, look here.)

It's nice to know that some things never change.

And now for something completely different!

Comic Book Death: Editorial Hammer of Deaths

Considering that my last post had a parody animation of GaoGaiGar where the robot was wielding a ban hammer, the timing of this post is ironic.

Editorial death control, in my mind, is the most current and controversial topic in comic book deaths. Why? The big one right now is probably Barry Allen.

It has more or less been openly stated that the reason Grant Morrison, author of Final Crisis, has decided to bring back Barry Allen is because he's the Silver Age Flash, and he likes the Silver Age version of any given character best. Barry Allen has been gone for twenty three years, and bringing him back almost certainly required the complicity of DC's major editors.

But that's less the point. I don't care that much about Barry Allen, although as previously noted some are rather bothered. A case I do care about is Spider-Man and Aunt May.

Aunt May "died" back in the early/mid '90s. After her "death," the editors and writers repeatedly said that they would never bring her back. At that time, Peter and Mary Jane were about to have a baby. When the baby should have been born, apparently at the editor's behest, the baby disappeared. (It was strongly implied the disappearance was a kidnapping, but the presentation was apparently ambiguous enough that it could easily have been a death instead.) Writer Tom DeFalco, creator of Spider-Girl, wanted to bring her back, and apparently stated that he would "bring back May [Spider-Girl]," but instead Aunt May came back.

That's hardly the worst of it, though. The most recent event involving poor Spidey and his poor aunt has attracted a lot of flack. Aunt May is fatally wounded by a sniper gunning for Peter Parker, and as a result, Pete makes a deal with Mephisto, in which he essentially sells his marriage to the devil so that Aunt May can live. This causes him and almost everyone else to forget that he was ever married, Aunt May and almost everyone else to forget they ever knew that he is Spider-Man, Harry Osborn to come back from the dead, and Mary Jane to possibly become a superhero. (Okay, at least one good thing may have come of this.)

What's my point? This seriously messes up more than ten years of continuity, and no one can figure out just what's what anymore, essentially because someone doesn't like Mary Jane Watson being married to Peter and thinks that Aunt May is more important to Spider-Man. (This isn't the first time that this particular someone tried to screw up Spider-Man.) This is also the point in which they tried to bring back Gwen Stacy. This whole idea upset the writer so much that he apparently struggled with this individual, who I will persist in not naming directly, and was browbeat into writing the controversial storyline. (Not that this entirely lets the writer off the hook-he contributed to this monster, although he at least has the good grace to apologize for it.) The big editor has claimed that "there will be a payoff" for One More Day, but the current highly successful storyline, Brand New Day, in the words of multiple bloggers, completely and totally does not require Peter Parker to be single, despite what this editor claims.

The sad thing is, this guy will think that the sales vindicated his actions, yet the biggest criticisms of the new story come from elements actually introduced by One More Day. Sigh.

Blogging About Bloggers (and comic books too)

One of my favorite blogs is Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep!!, a snarky blog about comic books. I read a lot of snarky blogs about comic books, and this is one I only started the other day, but it's still one of my favorites.

Why? Well, this is a good reason.

The primary reason I read this one is because it presents something of a dissenting opinion. Most comic book readers speak warmly of Grant Morrison, but this guy rags on him almost incessantly. (Well, he does at the moment, anyway.)

He also has blogged about one of my own pet peeves, comic book death. His title (and opening sentence) for it is brilliant.

Aaaaand I often find I don't know how to end a given blog post.

Comic Book Death: Defining Death

If a likeable character dies a "meaningful" death, such as a heroic sacrifice or something that forever shapes the behavior of another character (some examples here would be Skurge the Executioner, who died a very heroic death, and Ben Parker, Gwen Stacy, or Bucky, whose deaths are major parts of the mythos of the character they support), then bringing the character back to life on a whim is degrading the meaning of the original angst.

If Skurge the Executioner came back, it would take away any meaning his death as a sacrifice to help others and as his shining moment in the sun, his blaze of glory, that would be degraded too. I think Skurge would probably want to snap the neck of some bum who brought him back to life.

Or take Ben Parker. If Ben Parker hadn't died, Spider-Man would probably, after J. Jonah Jameson ran the editorial that put him out of his first job, have instead gone straight after J.J.J. and threatened him, possibly becoming a true criminal instead of a hero. At one point in the original story, Peter Parker thinks to himself "I'll see to it that *they're* [Aunt May and Uncle Ben] always happy, but the rest of the world can go hang for all I care!" Now, maybe I'm reading it differently than Stan Lee intended it, but didn't Peter just basically say "I love my own people, but as far as I'm concerned, everyone else can go die!"? That is a rather teenaged thought, true, but it is also not a charitable thought. Not charitable at all. This is hardly the same person who would stop a random mugger on the street, and realizing what kind of consequences not acting responsibly could have on someone's life is what drives Spider-Man. Bring Uncle Ben back to life, and you've just undone that single consequence that set Spidey down the path of being the worst-off person in Western mainstream comics.

Gwen Stacy's death, ironically, means a lot less, almost nothing by comparison. Its effect on Spider-Man comes less from its "meaning" and more from the fact that it broke the status quo that had been going on for some time in Spider-Man: Spider-Man is dating Gwen, and thinking about maybe marrying her, but he's too poor. Chances are, if the old status quo hadn't been broken this way, Spider-Man would be immensely less popular today, because it'd be all about "Oh no! I *still* don't have enough money for a wedding! Oh, no!" Or possibly, he would have gotten married a lot earlier, and had less of a chance of the status quo being messed up, which would also have stagnated his stories somewhat. No, what Gwen Stacy's death means is change. Gwen Stacy cannot be allowed to come back, because it undermines the sense of Peter Parker having a "real" life, one that resembles that of a real person's, with ups and downs (mostly downs) and struggles and changes over time as the character gets older. (Gasp! People age! Shocking!) This, for me, is the strongest and most important part of Spider-Man's character, and while they haven't undone Gwen's death yet, they've still undermined it repeatedly.

(As an aside, undoing previous deaths can have an undermining ripple effect across a shared universe like Marvel's. Gwen Stacy's death being undone would have a greater detrimental effect, in my opinion, on the Marvels miniseries than on Spider-Man's mythos itself.)

As one last example, take Bucky's death. This death is, by pretty much any standard, "meaningful," but it did a lot less for Captain America than Ben Parker's did for Spidey. Cap is the way he is because that's *always* been the way he is-shooting off cornball lines as he takes down the badguys with improbable skills and weaponry. Bucky's death or undeath makes no difference there. So the return of Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier and later as Captain America XVIII (okay, I'm making that number up) is not so bad.

These are all, as I have said, "meaningful" deaths of supporting cast members.

What happens, out of curiousity, when a main character dies?

Practically nothing. About fifteen minutes later, he gets back up, washes off the blood, and is fine. Even if he was vaporized or died of cancer twenty some years ago, he's fine. This is part of the reason I like team books; if a team member dies, unless that person is Jean Grey or Wolverine, that person is probably dead.* Even Barry Allen has come back or will be coming back (might as well be the same thing, he's the Flash), just so you don't think I'm only honking my backseat driver horn only at Marvel.**

(In fact, I'd say that historically, Marvel was a little better about this. There was apparently a pre-Crisis comic where some villain actually brough Pa and Ma Kent back to life in order to hold them hostage against Superman. Seriously, what a heck?)

Sometimes, this is okay, if not especially believable, but it's kinda overused. When I say, "sometimes," heroes are by nature "larger than life." They're more impressive than the normal Joe on the street. Remember I mentioned that Sherlock Holmes came back to life? He did it by elaborately faking his death in front of his best friend, who being of normal instead of exceptional intelligence completely fell for it. Slightly contrived, but Holmes' death was, quite honestly, the less satisfying part of the equation here (hence the vicious campaign to return him to life).

And how about villains? Well, it matters how much appeal the villain has. If the villain is some thug who was fried by the Eradicator-turned-Superman or reduced to an ugly smoldering corpse by a Toastmaster in Reign of the Supermen, then, yeah, he's pretty dead. If he's, say, Doctor Doom, or Thanos, or freakin' Apocalypse***, then death usually means little to them, and they rise from the grave at least as easily as a main character hero type, and sometimes more easily. (Dr. Doom once apparently convinced the Beyonder to restore him to life and his own body by coming up with some convoluted bit of weird logic that, if the Beyonder did not, the Beyonder would not exist because of timestream warping. Stupid Beyonder fell for it, too. Not that, being in the process of bargaining with the Beyonder, Doom was in any sense actually dead; he had hijacked someone else's body.) And in the case of Mephisto, the bugger doesn't even blink if someone eats his heart. (That was in a Black Panther comic, although I can't tell you which one.) Obviously, in the case of some of these guys, death means something different than simple physical dismemberment, but there's a fundamental difference between these guys and heroes.

They're villains. They're monsters. They're horrific and brutal by nature, and willing to do anything to get ahead. (Granted, increasingly we see heroes with at least some of these characteristics, an extreme case being Spawn.) They're willing to do just about anything to stay alive and keep on doing what they do. (There are exceptions to this, I'm sure. Thanos won't come back after the latest stuff with him for two or three years at least-he's "at peace with Death now," which is kinda nutty because he's always wanted to die.) And like heroes (but to a greater extent) villains are often larger than life. And yes, it really can be to a greater extent. Solo villains from team books are a great example of this kind of thing. Characters like Ultron, Thanos, and the Silver Surfer (in his earliest appearances) present huge threats that counter the entire team's skills and strengths, so it's a little hard to trust such a character's death.****

Wow. As opposed to last time, when I was just releasing targeted snarkiness at specific and numerous examples, that was actual verboseness. Next time in Comic Book Death: EDITORIAL HAMMER OF DEATHS!

*Decision subject to editorial approval and acts of God, which in the comics biz are the same thing as far as the editors (and probably the writers) are concerned. At Marvel Comics, they actually deliberately extend this metaphor!
**This irritates me at least partly because I have no attachment whatsoever to Allen (as he died when I was two; that and I like the name "Wally West" better).
***Admittedly, the old clownface seems thoroughly "dead" at this point, captured by the Celestials for some wicked purpose that will have him screaming in hopes for oblivion for all eternity, but I give it another five years at the most before someone decides it'd be a great idea to bring him back.
****By this point, it would probably require the complete destruction of the Marvel Universe to destroy Ultron, with all those backup copies apparently running around and doing stuff in two or three places almost at once.

Comic Book Death: Impermanence

Pushy fandoms and crazy writers actually have a long history of reviving characters who kicked the bucket. The earliest example that I know of is the revival of Sherlock Holmes.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing some of the later Holmes stories, he was getting tired of them. He didn't much like them-he thought that they were silly things. (I would look up just exactly what he said, but don't feel like it.) But when he killed Holmes off, thinking he'd laid the character to eternal rest, there was an uproar. He started receiving rather unpleasant letters. One of these letters was from his mother.

That had to be a harsh moment in Doyle's life.

Doyle: Mother's always liked *you* better.
Holmes: Indubitably, Watson.
Doyle: ...A heck?

Anyway, pretty much ever since then, writers have known that you can stage a death for emotional effect. And some people have decided that staging death for emotional effect is a great idea for sales.

Which leads me to just what has me going buggy right this second-the cheapening of death in mainstream comic books. I'll open my snarkiness by quoting something written by Mark Gruenwald in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition (Book of the Dead)

"But for the most part, irrevocable deaths in the Marvel Universe are exactly what they seem to be."

Hmm. I'll list off some of the names which sit on the very same page as the essay (titled "Dead Reckoning") from which the above quote was taken.

Ancient One: Technically dead, although even as of the book's publishing he was still going Obi-Wan Kenobi every five minutes, from the sound of it. Apparently he's been more active in the afterlife than he was while he was alive.

Baron Strucker: Alive. As a long-lived Nazi big wig, he's pretty much unkillable. Not to mention that in some alternate reality he (or a guy with exactly the same name) transformed into a sorcerer named Charnel by merging with Death's Head's corpse. But then Death's Head killed him. (Consider the essay and figure out how that makes sense. If you can't, go here, and be glad that other people put this kind of info on the internets.)

Baron Zemo (I): Okay, he's still pretty dead. But Baron Zemo (II) is still around, avenging his father's legacy or something.

Basilisk (I): Dead. You can't usually get deader than a guy shot by the Scourge of the Underworld.

Beyonder: Dead. Er, maybe. Is Kosmos still around? (That'll be another snarky post on here, I'm sure.)

Big Man: Dead, and so is Big Man's crossdressing daughter, Big Man. Although Big Man's name lives on as the name that obscures viewers of The Spectacular Spider-Man from learning that the big villain is actually-well, you can look that up somewhere else if you want spoilers (not that that spoiler would be much of one by now). (Note: This one's rather hard to find information on.)

Black Knight (I): Dead. He lived hundreds of years ago, he'd better be dead. Although he pulls some Obi-Wannage too, as I recall.

Black Knight (II): Dead. (Note that he's technically connected to the other one-the link above will take you to an article that discusses both of them.) He died a stupid man's death. Black Knight: I was riding on my flying horse, carrying Iron Man, whose armor I had disabled, when the little ------ knocked me off my horse! And I fell a few thousand feet, and for some reason all my armor didn't do anything to protect me! Iron Man: Maybe you should have had thrusters, or at least a parachute.

Blackout: My poor kitty! (cough) If you're wondering what brought that on, I actually used to own a cat by that name. He's dead for sure because Hasbro grabbed the name for a Transformer.

Blizzard (I): Still dead. This is mostly because minor irrelevant guys like him are easily replaced by other minor irrelevant guys.

Bucky: He's so dead, he's been dead forever, and they're never bringing him-wait, they killed Captain America and brought this guy back to replace him? What a heck?

Captain Mar-Vell: Because you must spell it that way to be clear. He's dead, cancer took him out. But it appears that a Skrull has been brainwashed to be indistinguishable from him and think that he is in fact him, so it doesn't matter. He's not really dead anymore no matter the convoluted ridiculous origin story, now is he?

Carrion: A zombie clone of a dead guy who came to take revenge for the dead guy... who is a relatively minor character that practically no one cares about. Okay, that sucker had better be dead. (looks him up) GACK! They made him into an immortal virus entity! What a heck?!

Sharon Carter: She's not dead, and in fact she's apparently pregnant.

Changeling: Dead (maybe), but he sort of lives on sometimes as Morph.

Then, there are a half dozen or so more characters who as far as I know are still dead. The sad thing is, since I'm taking stuff specifically from the table of contents of the one issue, I can't get to some really good ones, like:

Drax the Destroyer (not dead)
Dracula (dead forever but not really haha!)
Ghaur (dead but not dead again by two years after this book is published and his ghost is in two places on the covers!)
MODOK (not dead)
Ben Parker (still dead, THANK GOODNESS)
Professor Power (seemingly dead, but it isn't for lack of thumbing his nose at death-he apparently resurrected himself by possessing someone once already)
Red Skull (not dead, despite being killed again at least once after this, and for that matter evading actual physical death more than once before this)
Ringer (killed dead by the Scourge of the Underworld which should have meant his eternal end but it didn't although he still died later)
General "My Nickname Is Too Long For the Table of Contents" Ross (not dead)
Satana (she was dead but they brought her back as a teenager so old guys could perv at her)
Snowbird (she was dead but rose from the dead out of her empty grave because she's a Goddess of the North and she can do that)
Gwen Stacy (dead, but they almost brought her back, and there's a clone of her running around somewhere)
Franklin Storm (still dead)
Swordsman-who-is-not-the-one-from-Thunderbolts (dead, but his corpse was animated by an alien tree so the tree could get it on with Mantis)
Terrax (not dead)
Thanos (he was turned to stone but brought back to life and *then* killed)
Vampires (as a category, see Dracula's status; note this includes Varnae, previous lord of vampires, who had committed suicide to let Dracula become the lord of vampires but came back anyway with the rest of the vampires)
Adam Warlock (he apparently can stop being dead because he feels like it)
Zombie (who is clearly dead, because he was already dead, but apparently he's even deader-er, no, he came back, apparently)

So here's my point that I'm driving at. How come these deaths mean anything? I'll grant you: Lots of the characters documented in my crumbling old Handbooks are still thoroughly dead. I mean, Turner D. Century? Cheetah? Who even cares about these guys? I suppose that's the point here: Nobody cares about these guys. So they're allowed to rest in the afterlife.

This is the first aspect of comic book death-it has no permanence, and thus, it fails to parallel death in reality. Granted, comic books often flout the laws of physics and life, but death is the one thing in life that is permanent.

I read a lot of comic blogs (far more than actual comics), and it seems more than a little disturbing when folks remark "I hated it when they offed [insert name here], and I hope they bring him/her back." While I can understand that the attitude is a product of liking a character, the attitude also comes from a feeling that the characters can come back whenever they please-which they (sort of) do. And this feeling is created by the extreme impermanence of comic book death.

(Don't think, from the lack of extensive examples from the DC Universe, that I'm not looking at them, too-they're bringing Barry Allen back after over twenty years, aren't they?)