Death is but a doorway… (DC SPOILERS)

Death is but a doorway… (DC SPOILERS)

Apr 30

Newsarama has HEAP BIG SPOILERS about today’s DC Universe Zero issue, courtesy of the New York Daily News.

(Please don’t read on if you don’t wanna be spoiled. Please! I beg of you!)

So Barry Allen’s back. Again. Duh. This is a move that was telegraphed months ago, and it happened LAST Crisis, so it’s not like there isn’t precedent.

What’s intriguing to me is Grant Morrison’s quote about the return:

“We can do anything with them, and we can make them come back and make them defy death. And that’s why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death.”

Death has always been a tricky beast to pin down in comics. Fans seem to want deaths to “count,” and they complain about too many deaths or “meaningless” deaths in some cases (Infinite Crisis, that old crappy issue of Starman I’ve bitched about before). What Morrison’s saying is that we may THINK we want worlds livin’, worlds dyin’, and nothin’ ever bein’ the same, but what we REALLY want is escape. Or maybe escape is just what we NEED, and despite what we may WANT, that’s what we ought to get. I’m not sure.

But when death comes a’knockin’, there is a sales boost. People STILL pay attention. Some portion of that has to be speculation, as if any of these highly disposable bits of pulp and ink will ever appreciate anyplace AT ALL, but most of it has to be a need to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

Maybe it’s time for us to embrace the idea that WHAT HAPPENS NEXT is usually that…death NEVER sticks.

I don’t mean that in the typical whiny fanboy sense of, “OHEMGEE Barry Allen’s death was the ONE death that MATTERED, and if it doesn’t STICK, then it’s MEANINGLESS!”

I mean it in the context of Morrison’s quote above–the cosmology of the DC Universe (and maybe shared comic book universes in general?) is that death truly IS but a doorway. Where it may lead–eternal life, another of the 52 multiverses, eventual return to the Earth one once knew–is ever-changing.

Death still counts; sacrifices are still made, and the ultimate price is still paid. But that price can be fully refunded, because that’s the nature of the superhero universe.

It’s that classic conflict at the heart of all modern superhero storytelling: The Fantastic versus The “Real.” Trends and sales seem to indicate that what fans really want are fantastic things happening in a world that feels REAL. The flying and stuff is okay, in other words, as long as there’s a stack of bodies to remind everyone that WE ALL DIE TOO.

Is that what we REALLY want? Is that what we really NEED?

More importantly, what are the implications of a universe where death has no real meaning? If we accept that death itself is not reliable in the DC Universe, what does that do for the stories we read, the characters we know, the themes explored?

I hope someone dives into those questions, now or soon.

Image courtesy Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery.