Come with me, if you will, to a better time, when a young boy eagerly awaited each week for the weekly comics at his local “News and Novelty” store. It was the 1970’s, and there were no comic shops, and the young boy loved X-Men and Captain Marvel(the Marvel version). His parents knew this, and they oftentimes would go to the store for their son, and buy his comics, so when he came home from school, they would be waiting. In return, the boy got good grades.
Fast forward just a little. For some reason, Captain Marvel stopped coming out in the store. This young boy was purplexed, because the comic really didn’t have a final story, it just stopped coming out. Come Christmas time, the parents of this wonderful little boy decided to go to the mall and look for some books for him at the book store, and they happened upon a large, thick comic book called “The Death of Captain Marvel”. These parents were raised in a era where you didn’t kill of the hero, so OBVIOUSLY this was a play on words, they wouldn’t kill off the main character. They further decided this would be a great Christmas present for the child. So they bought it.
The child comes down early Chrismas morning, and immedately goes after the book-sized presents … well, he goes after the presents that look like an Atari 2600 first, then the book presents, but he gets to the wrapped thick comic, sees it’s a Captain Marvel book, and immediately begins to read.
And he reads it in one sitting. He stares, wide-eyed, as his childhood hero dies of cancer, not a scarce 2 months after he loses his real-life grandfather to the same disease. This has a fairly drastic effect on his child, as he tosses the book into the fire and runs up to his room crying. He is only 8 years old, after all, and seeing Cap Marvel die brings back a whole lot of memories he really didn’t enjoy reliving.
Cut to several years later. The boy is older, and is still reading comics. He’s “gotten over” the Captain Marvel affair, although he’s still pretty upset that Marvel is seemingly the only character they haven’t bothered bring back to life(maybe next year). His current favorite character is a Canadian hero called “Guardian”, from his favorite title, John Byrne’s Alpha Flight. One day, he stops by the News and Novelty after football practice and picked up Alpha Flight #12. “One Person Dies” is listed on the cover. Surely, SURELY it couldn’t be the team leader.
Sure, they could. They may have eventually bring them back, but I never have been able to understand why they seemingly kill the very characters I get most attached to: Cap Marvel, Guardian, Colossus, Nate Summers. Surely writers can come up with great stories without the cheapness of character death.