Playing at Dying
15-May-05
Some time ago I wrote a little about death in video games, and recently I’ve been thinking about similar strangenesses of death in comics.
Death functions in fairly skewed ways in superhero comic books (and similarly so in soap operas). Superheroes, supervillains die all the time. However, they rarely (sometimes, it seems, never) stay dead, for a simple reason: in a commercial and ongoing fiction system, they are as much marketable properties and agents of profitable novelty as they are participants in a narrative. As moneymakers, they must remain safe behind what Stan Lee is said to have called “the illusion of change.” The limits of death in superhero comics amuse even superheroes themselves, who comment often on their revolving-door mortality.
And yet, the cycle never wanes. If anything, it accelerates: the recent storylines in Wolverine have shown characters, including Wolverine himself, return from the dead in the course of an issue or two, and the brevity of death is treated with a good helping of gallows ennui.
Death in comics is, or at least used to be, more often disembodied than embodied: you’re just as likely to see a superhero get atomized, or get eaten by an energy cloud. This of course allows plausible deniability: the disappearing body is the death that isn’t, an absence that allows the reader some anticipation of things to come. When the body turns up alive, the logic of the resurrection is at least tenuously preserved. It’s a familiar formula.
Except — and this is where it gets interesting — like any formula in comics, it tends to escalate, and I’ve noticed it escalate quite a bit recently. The atomized, absent body is a cliche, so creators, whether striving for novelty (“I dare you, reader, to dismiss this death”) or finality (“I dare you, follow-up creator, to plausibly explain the inevitable resurrection”), have replaced it with graphic dismemberment and fundamental bodily compromises. Magneto gets his head chopped off. Kitty Pryde and Colossus take a pylon to their torsos.
These deaths will be explained away: the bodies will be reconstituted. But the old cliche, “this absence may or may not be death,” becomes “this visceral depiction of death may or may not be death.” Becomes “this visceral depiction of death is not death.”
I guess you could say that it’s a performance of amplified physicality, of a piece with hypertrophied bodies in tights and muscle-flexing fights: a continuum of desire where idealized bodies and dying bodies both push the same emotional buttons. But death in comics is also a highly ritualized performance (one which implicates not only the producers but the readership, who will vehemently protest death as a closing of potential, even as they surely know on some level that it is a game).
That this ritual must become increasingly “real” seems like a sea change to me. Video games have always had a space for resurrection: death has always been what Bob Rehak relates to a fort-da game. But comics — through plausible deniability, through the absent body — have held on to the illusion that death in the system might have resonances with death as we understand it. Even though the disappearing body almost never had any finality, “real” death could. Now it seems like we’re losing even the illusion of change, and that the bodies we see eviscerated before us are no more than gory kabuki.