There is a term often used in fiction – “Comic book death”. The killing off of characters which carries no emotional impact to it because you know their demise will be temporary and soon they will be back thanks to some radioactive talisman powered cloning machine built by Jesus or something. We’ve grown to accept that because comic books are a business and characters are what most of us look for when we return to them. You kill the character, you kill part of your profit, simple as that. So it is quite surprising when you find a comic book character that died and had the integrity to stay dead. Here are some of them:

- Shredder and Splinter

For all of us raised on 80s cartoons, TMNT are the definition of childhood. While G.I.Joe and the Transformers had what it took to entertain us for 20plus minutes each week (mainly ‘sploding action and robots), TMNT had virtually everything which gave our preteen minds mental boners: anthropomorphic ass kicking animals, ninjas, ninja weapons, robots, lasers, explosions and April O’Neil, who supplied the real boners. So how do all of you feel, when I tell you both Shredder and Splinter had taken that great dirt nap and never woken up?

This of course all happened in the comics. To those who’ve read them, this is no surprise, but to the majority of us, man, we only know the cartoon and the live action movies. Speaking of the movies, it turns out the very first one was an incredibly faithful adaptation of the early TMNT comics. The first printed stories of the turtles were quite grim, gritty and ended with Shredder’s death after his first encounter with the reptiles. Awesome. More awesome is the fact that in them funny books, after Shredder got his ass kicked, he was given the choice to commit seppuku. You know, the traditional Japanese samurai way of death by slicing open your stomach. Why would a ninja succumb to a samurai ritual is a question dismissed on the grounds that this whole idea is fucking necro-grim-awesome.

This didn’t happen because Shredder simply fell of a building, but that was not the end of it. Over the years he came back thanks to magical worms and cloning, once actually as a shark, but currently, though it is possible he will come back any minute, Shredder is out of the picture. And honestly, has been for a very long time. The person most of us call the turtles’ Archenemy, has been nothing more than a blip on their villain radar for a very long time. It’s a faith worse than death.

And as for Splinter… he died of old age in TMNT #10. Just like that. Thanks writers, that’s classy. What next, you will kill Scrooge McDuck for being too old?

- Scrooge McDuck

Son of a… wait, how can a Disney character bite it? Aren’t all Disney characters living in some suspended time bubble pocket dimension where they never age and will never know the sweet liberating embrace of Mistress Death? Apparently they do, but Scrooge is an exception.

Now to all who like me are fans of the Ducktales cartoons, let me help you relax: that Scrooge is very much alive. Actually, Scrooge still appears in animated shows, movies and certain comic books. Is he a zombie? A clone? A Scrooge from a parallel dimension? Follow me.

There is a reason why you don’t write most comic books in real time. It basically gives you a finish line for how long you can continue your laugh rag, and with Disney you do expect some form of immortal wholesomeness. Here is where Don Rosa comes in. Rosa was a big fan of Carl Barks, the man credited with creating Scrooge. When Scrooge first debuted, he was more or less a villain, but under Carl he soon became a more positive character. And he wrote the stories in real time. So when Barks left in 1967, it was generally accepted that this is where Scrooge dies. Rosa ran with it.

When Rosa wrote the critically acclaimed comic book “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” he set up a timeline for it which followed Barks’s stories. Therefore, Scrooge’s birthday had been set at somewhere in the 1870s, and the book covers his life (including every story we learned from Barks) all until 1947, ending 20 years before Scrooge’s mysterious death. So you see, unless you subscribe to the notion that Scrooge lived to be around 140, you have to accept that in 2009, he is deader than the hooker in my trunk.

This of course does not stop anyone from writing stories set before the 60s, and really, if you are a pinko communist Nazi fascist, no one is stopping you from ignoring Barks’s legacy. I am sure no one will try to set your house on fire and sodomize your children when you leave on that business trip next month.

- Batman

This is a hard one because the mantle of Batman lives on and Bruce Wayne isn’t technically dead, but look at it this way: Bruce Wayne is not Batman currently. This was a controversial idea way back during Knightfall (which you should all be reading btw) when Bane broke Batman’s back and he got a bona fide Knight Templar to take his place (why aren’t you reading that story right now? It’s way better than anything I could ever come up with). But that one actually got plenty of buzz. This thing right now? Not so much.

This is all tied to the whole Crisis thing. Now, let me be the first to say it: Crisis on Infinite Earths, the mega-super-crossover historical event where DC got rid of their multi-verse and upgraded everyone’s place and stories in the DC pantheon, is one of the best comic series ever made. The 2 other Crisis(es?) that followed were more or less bullshit, culminating in Final Crisis, one of the worst comic series ever shat out. I would rather pour bleach into my eyes than to go through Final Crisis again, but what you need to know about it is this: Batman “dies” in it.

To make it short: through a series of convoluted, bizarre and nonsensical events, Batman decides to chuck all of his morals and believes out the window and into a furnace and actually uses a gun to kill. OK, he was trying to kill Darkseid, the most thinly veiled analogy to the Devil ever, but still, this is Batman. For Batman to actually pick up a gun and shoot it is like Superman joining the Aryan Brotherhood or Captain America turning Communist, it makes no freaking sense in no conceivable way.

So after Batman complete betrays everything he has ever believed in, he is shot by Darkseid’s McGuffin Rays. I call them that because they are rays or beams which apparently are capable of anything the writer needs at the moment. During Final Crisis, they needed them to seemingly kill Batman, but not really kill him because that would piss off the fans, so kill him only a little so he would be out of the picture. Why Darkseid would do that is a question which would require a whole miniseries for the writers to pull shit out of their ass in a desperate attempt to explain their idiotic decision, so let us leave it at that.

So where is Batman now? In the past, living in a cave. Or it might be another dimension. Or it might not even be Batman, just his… consciousness inhabiting a host body. Or fuck, maybe not even that? Who the fuck knows? Not the writers I am telling you. It’s all a great big load. Currently Dick Grayson took his mantle.

Batman’s corpse probably will come back as a Black Lantern in Blackest Night though. As a zombie of sorts. So logically he will be the most powerful character in the history of comic books. Because how can you kill a Batman that is already dead? Hey, maybe his death was worth it then?

Tagged with: Batman • TMNT

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