I remember the first time I experienced the death of a hero in a comic book. It was Cypher. I was all of 8 years old or so. And my comic was The New Mutants.
It was a few months after I picked up my first issue, just in time for “The Fall of the Mutants” storyline. An arc which affected all the X-Men lines at the time. A frightening, gripping, and mature storyline. But the death of Cypher was different. He was still a teenager.
Heroes rarely die in comic books. And even fewer die permanently.
Why is that?
In part, it’s the medium that’s the problem.
Here was a hero I hardly knew and hardly even liked. He was a mutant, of course, like the others. His power was linguistic genius—he could speak any language upon hearing it the first time. An important and useful gift. Just not useful in battle.
In the abstract, I didn’t like him. He had a chip on his shoulder.
But it was because he felt useless to them. He didn’t know his place. He felt like a reject at a school for rejects.
It bothered me because he was a kid, vulnerable, depressed and searching. He wasn’t who I was but who I would become.
The cynic knows that he is expendable, the red shirt on the mission. But nobody wants to feel like the red shirt. And for people of faith, it is the vulnerable who get our most attention and support.
Deaths are consequential
For a medium which exists in the eternal present, a perpetual now, stories of life and death are too consequential.
If it were Wolverine, Cyclops, or even Cannonball, the death would have been too consequential. Too permanent. Too momentous in a permanently momentary medium.
And yet, the stories of consequence are the most lasting and powerful. The wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. When Superman died. Wolverine’s adamantium was stripped from his body by Magneto. Batman’s back was broken. Robin died.
The most significant moments shake the eternal present into motion.
And yet they feel like time has stopped. They come at us like a great unwinding, unbinding. These moments aren’t just opportunities to sell comics with a big storyline (though sometimes they are). We don’t interact with them that way. They don’t sell because we want to be sold to.
Our brains compel us to see them. They are momentous in a medium which tries to be momentous eternally. And consequential moments rip that paradigm to shreds.
We can’t handle these moves for long.
None of us can handle a dead Superman. We need him to keep on. So we have to bring him back.
And Batman’s back needs to heal. Peter Parker and Mary Jane need to get divorced and Wolverine needs his adamantium back.
And Robin gets replaced.
This is the intriguing difference among characters.
Some actually die.
Some consequences last in the eternal present. A Robin can die because he’s a sidekick. Writers can replace a Green Lantern who goes crazy because there’s a whole corps of Green Lanterns. For some, the mantle exists in the eternal present more than the individual.
Some consequences can remain. Not all get wiped aside. Because the eternal present is an illusion.
Because stories get complicated.
An eternal present is not your friend when Captain America was made to fight Nazis and Magneto was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
This isn’t only multiple dimensions, different versions of heroes, and the tweaking of storylines. Real time monkeys with our stories.
Origins need to be rewritten. New ones become vague and timeless so that they can persist in the eternal present.
Alternate worlds and stories become necessary to keep up the eternal present.
They also awaken our imaginations.
They become the release valve for the unchanging world of comics by giving opportunities for consequential stories free of that meddlesome consequence. Origins and deaths can be told and retold. Marriages and children and the deaths of parents can become great fodder for telling and retelling.
We tell stories today about yesterday. That we maintain the eternal present with the veneer of consequence without changing the “real” character. She will remain unchanged forever.
Of course, the stories will get too complicated so they’ll need to be cleaned up.
New origins and worlds need to shift and get reoriented.
Here is the ultimate alternate storyline. It makes consequence and eternal present exist at the same time in a self-preservation collusion.
Just tell an epic story and permanently kill off whole alternate worlds. Let characters, their stories and very existence die to the cult of the eternal present. Some must die for the good of the universe.
The archives, our dustbin of history, full of beings from the time before the great reset by the gods of DC and Marvel. We can simply declare today that yesterday wasn’t in the canon.
The present gets to determine eternity.
And the present once again exists as it always was.
This is the power revealed in Logan. A movie all about consequence.
A film about life and death. It preserves time and the origin stories. It is aware of consequence so it knows that in 2029, Professor X wouldn’t be able to live forever. He doesn’t get to go on without aging. Not with the ties to the post-war time and his only peer with his holocaust roots.
The question is: can Logan? One whose super-healing power prevents him from aging at the usual rate, even as the actor playing him in the movies does?
Can these stories of ours even survive the eternal present?
There is great beauty in staging Shakespeare in different settings, trying on these stories in their new lights. Being able to tell this old story to a new generation. Like gospel parables and Jewish midrash: consequence and humanity is eternal and present. But life isn’t.
Isn’t it more powerful to let our heroes die?
That we can rediscover and retell their stories? Not as official canon or in some parallel universe, but in the honesty of an update, a retelling?
Let the stories be full of consequence! Not only are they more compelling, but the whole endeavor is more rewarding!
This doesn’t mean we write every book like its The Walking Dead or fill our movies with over the top spectacle beyond the blowing up of New York City. Not every Marvel movie needs three marriages and seven deaths.
But let our heroes live! And let them die in the many deaths afforded humanity.
Cancer and staph infections. Bullets and accidents. Domestic violence. Old age.
Let them live!
Of course we shackle them to the present because we fear death.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Our fear of death. Of change. The eternal present of comic book universes is the very definition of a changeless existence.
This makes them antithetical to real life and give us the false impression that we can avoid death and all things will exist as they are now.
Like Disney’s copyrighted mouse. Always and forever the same. Generation to generation. The only constant and unchanging. Even God changes. But not our cartoons and comic books.
We age and change. And have moments rich with consequence. We buy our first cars and work jobs and raise children. We become regulars at coffee shops and finally give up on the toasters we received as wedding gifts.
Lives. Consequence.
We kiss our babies swaddled and blink as we’re kissing them again as they go to school for the first time. And then, when we get home from work, we’re packing with our college-bound progeny.
Life happens. Full of consequence. Full and vibrant. The very definition of eternal life.
Let our stories have that same opportunity to fully live.
And may we give that same dignity to our institutions.
Our churches and cities and schools. Let them grow and explore and thrive. Encourage them to experience and shake their booties like the chicken dance at a wedding.
Let them live with consequence. Or they will all one day die without dignity. The faint memory of something that may have mattered. The toy you used to play with. Friends you remember caring for in middle school. Before real life happened. A life full of decisions and consequences. Always present. But always having been. And always planning for tomorrow.
Tomorrow. When the next moment of consequence arrives to arrest the eternal present.