Let them stay dead

I’m open to pretty much all cultural forms and try to at least dabble in a wide variety of media and genres, even as I continue to have a few preferred categories. The one category I can’t seem to care about, at least not since I was in high school, is the super hero serial comic book (this despite I’ve recently started reading at least some graphic novels, in particular The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and a few Alan Moore books). Here’s why: Clicking around the internet (read: procrastinating), I just saw that DC Comics has resurrected Jason Todd, Robin #2, killed in a rather famous storyline, “A Death in the Family,” that involved readers voting as to whether Robin should die or not. Robin lost and a pretty memorable Batman story successfully concluded, enabling Batman’s guilt over Jason’s death to serve as a motor for later stories. Yet, where lies the moral force of such guilt in the world of the comic, where any death, major decision or change not only has the potential to, but is likely to be, simply reversed later?

We roll our eyes when Marvel decides to kill Captain America. DC killed Superman and broke Batman’s back in the same year a while ago, yet they both shockingly recovered in time for another major storyline that would change the DC Universe yet again. This is annoying. The narratives of mainstream super-hero comics are bankrupt even if they sometimes manage to provide individual arcs that may rise above the rest (I was drawn to the Batman stories because I saw that Neil Gaiman was currently penning a story arc). And therein lies the problem: the two companies clearly see little to gain from consistency, instead working under the — apparently correct — assumption that they need a major event every year of so in order to garner consumer interest. It’s the strategy of shock value that bumps up sales momentarily, rather than quality consistency that would enable a more steady revenue stream.

Maybe I just don’t get it. But it seems like you either need a short memory to truly enjoy the super hero serial or you need to enter and exit a particular series within a certain amount of time (as I did with X-Men comics). Neither case does much to support the incredible longevity of certain super hero comics. Even the better ones, such as Batman, where the best work seems to be happening in other mediums, without the baggage of past history.