10 Most Tragic Deaths In The History Of DC Comics

Stop all the clocks, cut off the bat-phone. Prevent Krypto from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the Green Lanterns and with muffled drum, bring out the super-coffin, let the mourners come.

They're bright and colourful and mostly meant for kids but man, do superhero comics involve a lot of death. As bad as Marvel are for killing off people willy nilly, their Distinguished Competition might actually have them beat for the sheer number of tragic deaths they've chronicled in the pages of their comics over the years.

They may have created some of our most treasured pop cultural characters but boy, they're sadists when they want to be. There's any number of geeky pursuits that are put under inquisition with the question: can they make you cry? Right now everybody seems to be more concerned with a video game's ability to make you all weepy but, for our money, nothing has the humble superhero comic beat.

Sure, Gone Home tugged at our heartstrings, and there are you celebrated literary "graphic novels" which tell you some depressing true life tales. But fans will certainly have shed a tear or two over the untimely passings of spandex-clad saviours and the people who love them. They're larger-than-life stories, and death is rarely permanent, but that doesn't stop us from getting emotionally involved to the point of genuinely mourning the demises of some of the characters on this list.

So let invisible aeroplanes circle overhead, scribbling in the sky that they are dead, as we open up some old wounds and raise a toast to ten of the most tragic deaths in the history of DC Comics.