Comically Serious

Feels like it has been a while since we talked about plain old comic books. No MCU, no adaptations, just the old panels and pages.

Marvel has recently teased the death of a prominent character, the announcement of which has met with some backlash namely from younger fans, but also comics stalwarts who are tired of seeing this trope play out.

The trope you ask? Death in comic books. Name a comic book character, any, they have likely died at least once in some book somewhere. After all, death is such an appealing story device in fiction as it raises the stakes and creates a lot of emotional resonance with audiences….or it would if the afterlife wasn’t a revolving door in comics.

We’ve covered at length the amount of retcons, reinterpretations, and revisions that a given comic series will go through simply due to the fact they change authors/teams so frequently. As such, it should be no surprise that when an author kills off one character, another author (or sometimes the editorial staff) will see fit to bring them back.

Most of the time, killing off a character is done to increase sales or generate buzz around the inevitable return of said character. The most high-profile case for this is likely to be The Death of Superman storyline from 1992 to 1993. Superman is such a beloved pop culture icon, that his death received coverage in mainstream media outlets as well (not too relevant, but Godzilla also got coverage for his death in 1995 as well).

This cynical approach to handling the deaths of characters is usually met with shrugs and wondering when said character is going to come back to life from comics fans. Indeed, some books have mentioned the phenomena in-universe quite often with the X-Men in particular even having a means to resurrect anybody they want.

There was an old saying amongst comic book fans: “no one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben”, a phrase that has become outdated since about 2005 when both Jason Todd and Bucky returned from the dead as Red Hood and the Winter Soldier respectively (sorry Peter, Uncle Ben is still dead).

And now is when we get to the particular death that sparked this whole topic for today.

If you don’t want spoilers for the comics, turn back now.

Alright? Here we go. So Marvel announced that Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, will die in The Amazing Spider-Man #26. This was met with a good share of backlash, as mentioned above, for being the lazy shock tactic that it likely is.

It is bad enough to kill off a popular character needlessly, it is doubly worse in a book that said character isn’t even a star in, and to once again do something to add more angst to Peter Parker’s life (a rant for another day).

Now, Kamala Khan isn’t going to stay dead, she has a new movie in November and just like clock work you can guarantee that she will be right back to action in time for the debut of The Marvels.

So why kill her off? Well outside of the shock factor, online theories seem to indicate that this is Marvel editorial’s way of officially making her a mutant. As mentioned above, the X-Men have a handy-dandy way of bringing back the dead called the “Resurrection Protocols” which utilizes the technology of Cerebro, along with a group of mutants called “The Five”, whose powers in conjunction basically allow them to create clone bodies that can have the original consciousness of a mutant “uploaded” to it.

The MCU has already introduced the idea for Kamala being a mutant in the Disney+ series, rather than the Inhuman she was in the comics, and another way to tease the X-Men coming to the MCU.

Of course, this leads us to a different, but not unrelated, tangent.

The X-Men/Inhuman issue. The concept of mutants in comics really needs no introduction, everyone knows they are people born with specials powers and amongst the most popular (and easiest origin stories to explain) characters in Marvel.

The Inhumans were introduced in the pages of the Fantastic Four as a race of isolated beings that gained powers through Kree experimentation.

Before Disney purchased Fox, the X-Men film rights were out of Marvel’s hands. Because of this, former Marvel CEO and Chairman Ike Perlmutter, had made a push for the Inhumans to fill the role of mutants in the MCU. This led to the Inhumans receiving a lot more attention in the comics, and the X-Men being diminished in a lot of roles.

Now things have changed, the X-Men are back under Marvel’s umbrella (and Ike is out too), so the replacement of mutants with Inhumans no longer appears to be the case.

Nevertheless, given Marvel editorials obsession with maintaining synergy with the movies, Kamala is very likely to become a mutant or be revealed as a mutant all long when she inevitably returns.

I think this is the reason I’ve enjoyed other adaptations of superhero media recently versus the comics. Other mediums usually have the freedom to change things without worrying about having to have a steady stream of new readers (not that physical comics have many readers nowadays). This isn’t to say you can’t make death in comics interesting, I think the excellent Immortal Hulk series had a really interesting (and horror inspired) way of handling frequent resurrections.

Of course, all of this relates back to the status quo being important in comics and some characters (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man) are hit harder than others that have more freedom to be weird and shake things up (the X-Men seem to change locale and leadership almost every few years).

We’ll see how this all pans out, but hopefully you came away knowing that the next time someone says “Hey, X publisher just killed off X character in this comic”, you say “So what? They’ll be back in a few months to a year anyway.”