Life in ComicsThis column was written just before Good Friday, theday on which Christians commemorate the death of Jesus Christ, beforecelebrating his resurrection, three days later on Easter. Thedead-and-resurrected god is a recurring story in religions, originating in the "death"of the earth in winter and its "resurrection" in the spring. While Iam not a believer, I acknowledge the power of these stories that humans havebeen telling for millennia; they tap into some primal fear and need for comfortin all of us.

I spent that Easter holiday weekend at Wondercon, acomics convention held in San Francisco, where I was able to find many, manyexamples of death and resurrection. Some of the themes of mythology are presentin superhero comics, so much so that I've heard people claim superheroes as ourpresent-day mythology. But here's the thing: Myths use archetypes, butsuperhero stories tend to stretch those archetypes so far that they becomealmost parodies of myth-but parodies without any subversive meaning. Thearchetypes have become more like cliches.

Superheroes who die but don't stay dead are socommon that there is an expression for this phenomenon: "comic bookdead." The website TV Tropes has pages dedicated to it, called "Back from the Dead" and "Death Is Cheap," where I've discoveredthat the storyline is so common and predictable that comic books now treatsuperhero death on a meta-level. At Metamorpho's funeral, "priest givingthe service explains that nobody bothers with superhero funerals anymore, as theyalways end up coming back."

So what is the point of death in superhero comics?About a week ago, I asked somewhat rhetorically on Twitter and Facebook,"Jesus died for our sins. What did Superman die for?"—the Man of Steelwas "killed" in a famous 1992 series—I got a couple of replies that said what Iwas thinking: Superman died for DC's bottom line. A friend of mine stuck to theline that there could be a meaningful death-and-resurrection superherostory, if it were written well, but I countered that the way iconic charactersare now handled makes it nearly impossible because they are properties, notorganic creations.

I can't help but think that this is a loss of sorts.Superman has the potential, as an iconic figure, to have something of thetranscendent meaning present in dead-and-resurrected god stories. Superman, asI see him, is a more-than-human being who strives to understand and embracewhat it is to be human. (This is something that the First Comic Book CharacterI Ever Loved, Death in Sandman, goes through when she lives one day eachcentury as a mortal. Needless to say, I find Neil Gaiman's Death the HighCost of Living more affecting than superhero death. I think part of this isthe fact that the parameters are predefined when it comes to Death's death-it'spart of the established mythology of the Endless, so it happens naturallywithin the storyline.) This essential quality is present in some Supermanstories that I've read, but it gets lost as Superman has been imagined andre-imagined, killed and resurrected.

Yes, it's unfair to compare a superhero to a figuremany people accept as the embodiment of God on earth, not to mention their lordand savior. Some might say that Jesus's story is meaningful because it is ofdivine origin, while Superman is a mere fictional creation. However, I wouldsay to anyone writing a story that draws upon religious or mythic themes toconsider what makes those themes meaningful within their original stories.