A big Spread-4

I was writing here on Saturday about the outward signs of a literalness that prevails in comic books. I regard it as a bad thing, in case that isn't clear. Today I'm delving deeper.

I've just found out that there's a wikipedia entry for Death in Comics that looks as though it's as important as the scientific one for Life on Mars. Death in comics, as you probably know, is completely bogus. It is hardly ever 'permanent or meaningful.' You would expect any artist of integrity to say 'Well I certainly won't be contributing to this dishonesty' and sure enough, there's Geoff Johns up near the top saying, 'death doesn't exist in comics the same way it does in our world. I wish death existed in our world as it does in comics.'

Comics operate like soap opera, where every effect is caused and every price must be paid, and what comes next is all that matters. Everything is literal. A death is literally a death. We can't just say, 'oh well, it's only comic books' and resume business as if nothing has happened. The character must be returned for further commercial exploitation, and so the death must be explained away. Comic books being very limited in their range of invention, there are only four ways of getting out of the difficulty. A death must in due course be dealt with by means of a retcon, (the wiki entry gives these instructions believe it or not) a bad dream, mistaken identity or the character is simply replaced by a doppleganger who in every possible respect is the same as the person who is supposedly gone.

Why do characters have to be killed if they are going to be needed again? (you may innocently ask). Cheap fiction demands that the reader should, in the words of Oscar Wilde, 'experience a feeling without having to pay for it.' Thus the reader may wallow in the sentimental excess of suffering a loss without ever losing anything, even a character that didn't exist in any tangible sense in the first place.

Can a fictional death be non-literal? Yes, Kenny's death every week in South Park, not counting the famous thirteenth episode of the fifth season. And of course the author's death, or 'The death of the author' in Eddie Campbell's The Fate of The Artist, in which he is found double-bagged and filed in the permanent collection of the State Library under the number newly allotted to the graphic novel by the Dewey Decimal System. I mean, you knew I wasn't literally dead, didn't you?