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May. 31st, 2013 12:25 amThis post is mostly me just showing off my shiny new icon, via Ultimate Spider-man. Kitty Pryde is the best, seriously.
But I just did some google searching, and I clearly don't have the right search terms to find the discussions I'm looking for. But I have a question.
All the writing about the concept of 'comic book death' approaches it Doylistically. It analyzes it in terms of the commercial feasibility of killing off popular characters. It considers the way comic book stories are open-ended and time-dilated. It considers the target audience of children.
But comic book writing these days is thoroughly suffused with post-modernism, self-awareness, and irony. Comic book writers are aware they're writing comic books, aware that their readers are aware that they are writing comic books, and aware that the characters they're writing about have had every story possible told about them over the past fifty years. It is the rare contemporary comic book that isn't, in some fashion, a deconstruction of the medium. So when comic book writers write comic book death these days, they do so knowing that their audience is incapable of really taking the death seriously. I remember when Captain America was shot and it was front page news even beyond the comic book world, and yet at the same time nobody who knew comics really took it seriously because we knew he'd be back soon. I actually had a conversation with my father where I had to explain to him that Captain America wasn't really dead, that his childhood hero would be back.
And what I would like to find is serious, critical theory conceptualizing comic book death. What are the storytelling costs of a world where no death is permanent? What stakes are meaningful, in a story with such rules? How do you subvert the comic book death paradigm? How can you tell stories about mortality when actual death is off the table?
There's a marvelously bleak moment in X-Factor Investigations that I read recently, where Siryn is told that her father, Banshee, has been killed. And she goes into full-on denial mode, and it is a stark and vivid portrait of a woman dealing with her grief, and yet her denial takes the form of an insistence that her father isn't really dead, only comic book dead. In a world where superheroes regularly return from the dead, this is an incredibly cruel irony. [And in fact, Banshee has made a few brief supernatural returns from the dead in the past few years, Wikipedia tells me.] Is Siryn's faith in her father's return a simple refusal to come to terms with the reality of her father's death, that in time she should work past, or is it something far more twisted and fraught, a trap of false hope baited with a sliver of the genuine article?
Where do I find people thinking about comics from these directions?
But I just did some google searching, and I clearly don't have the right search terms to find the discussions I'm looking for. But I have a question.
All the writing about the concept of 'comic book death' approaches it Doylistically. It analyzes it in terms of the commercial feasibility of killing off popular characters. It considers the way comic book stories are open-ended and time-dilated. It considers the target audience of children.
But comic book writing these days is thoroughly suffused with post-modernism, self-awareness, and irony. Comic book writers are aware they're writing comic books, aware that their readers are aware that they are writing comic books, and aware that the characters they're writing about have had every story possible told about them over the past fifty years. It is the rare contemporary comic book that isn't, in some fashion, a deconstruction of the medium. So when comic book writers write comic book death these days, they do so knowing that their audience is incapable of really taking the death seriously. I remember when Captain America was shot and it was front page news even beyond the comic book world, and yet at the same time nobody who knew comics really took it seriously because we knew he'd be back soon. I actually had a conversation with my father where I had to explain to him that Captain America wasn't really dead, that his childhood hero would be back.
And what I would like to find is serious, critical theory conceptualizing comic book death. What are the storytelling costs of a world where no death is permanent? What stakes are meaningful, in a story with such rules? How do you subvert the comic book death paradigm? How can you tell stories about mortality when actual death is off the table?
There's a marvelously bleak moment in X-Factor Investigations that I read recently, where Siryn is told that her father, Banshee, has been killed. And she goes into full-on denial mode, and it is a stark and vivid portrait of a woman dealing with her grief, and yet her denial takes the form of an insistence that her father isn't really dead, only comic book dead. In a world where superheroes regularly return from the dead, this is an incredibly cruel irony. [And in fact, Banshee has made a few brief supernatural returns from the dead in the past few years, Wikipedia tells me.] Is Siryn's faith in her father's return a simple refusal to come to terms with the reality of her father's death, that in time she should work past, or is it something far more twisted and fraught, a trap of false hope baited with a sliver of the genuine article?
Where do I find people thinking about comics from these directions?