Death is something superhero comics have struggled to really deal with, pretty much since they first began. Writers constantly strive for the perfect balance between ensuring death feels consequential, and retaining the fantastical nature of superhero funny-books. This has had the unfortunate side-effect of making every 'death' in both the pages of Marvel and DC tending to feel just a little meaningless, with resurrections plentiful and near-instantaneous.
Point being, it doesn't take a lot for a 'death' to get botched completely, and when you factor in the medium's obsession with 'women in refrigerators', genuinely affecting deaths are hard to come by.
No single publisher emerges better than the other either. Both halves of the 'Big Two' have spotlighted some truly egregious comic book deaths, featuring heroes, villains, and more - even as recently as this year.
Although her fate is yet to be sealed, the cover for Heroes in Crisis #6 seemed to exemplify almost everything wrong about the superhero genre's approach to death.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
