Cheshire mourns her daughter. Titans, vol. 2 #26 (Oct. 2010).
Open a mainstream comic these days, and chances are you'll find one main theme: death, death, death, death, death! After that, you can choose from gore, hyper-violence and the occasional resurrection. This is what the
Modern Age of comics has boiled down to, driven by company-wide crossover events. Since the 1980s, events at
DC and
Marvel have pushed fans to buy more comics by tying their titles into events, thus ensuring annual best-selling series. These events are characterized by their
'Where's Waldo?' group shots of heroes battling cosmic menaces. But despite the fact that some planet-sized villain is coming to eat the planet, drama has declined. Perhaps because the end of the world is happening so often, it's hard to take any of it seriously anymore. This has prompted creative teams to use character deaths to add drama to big events as well as regular series.
But there's something more going on here. The grim and gritty Modern Age, now winding down, became characterized by what's described in comics circles as
the revolving door of death, where characters were and are regularly killed off, then brought back on a cyclical basis. Marvel is ushering in the seemingly less dark
Heroic Age - yet in its
Second Coming storyline just killed off
Nightcrawler, one of the most beloved members of the classic
X-men. Their old DC rivals, the
Titans, have suffered a parade of death and violence over the past twenty years that is notable even by Modern Age standards - but in the past decade the Titans' deaths have been unremitting.
Despite the recent resurrections of Donna Troy and Young Justice favourites, Superboy and Kid Flash, the revolving door of death has not revolved that much for this beleagured team.
Death of Duela Dent. Teen Titans, vol. 3 #47 (Jul. 2007).
After DC's huge crossover event
Blackest Night, where the drama revolved around the return of zombified dead characters (of which there is no shortage), as well as a few more deaths, and a few resurrections, the current event,
Brightest Day, follows the resurrected and the reason for their troubling trip back from the dead. Just like Marvel's Heroic Age, the
Brightest Day title belies its purpose. This series is not about things getting better in the DC Universe, but death is supposed to regain its meaning: the revolving door is closing. DC's leading lights have declared that "
dead means dead," in other words, if your favourite character is dead, forget it - no more resurrections. But
that doesn't mean the deaths are stopping, as
another hero,
the Atom, was just
killed off in
Titans Villains for Hire.
Deathstroke takes over the Titans title: Death of the Atom. Titans VFH Special #1 (Jul. 2010).
Over at
Legion World, a board devoted to discussion of DC's futuristic team, the
Legion of Superheroes, fans are compiling a list of characters killed in the DC Universe in the past seven years,
here.
These fans calculate that in the past seven years, DC has killed off over 600 characters in the name of 'rough and gritty drama.' Of these, about 50 characters long or recently dead have been resurrected within the same time period. Maybe DC is clearing out a backlog of unused characters, but there's something odd about the sheer volume of numbers in this macabre death march.
