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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12440
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 4:39am | IP Logged | 1
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QUOTE:
| Can we really blame him [Chris Claremont] for not letting go of such a pivotal story? Furthermore, would it really make sense for the X-Men to just forget about Jean and never mention her? |
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Yes, and yes.
The sense is in not in how characters realistically would behave but in how comicbooks should be made.
The next generations of readers need to know about a character killed off five years before their time, ten years, twenty? Again, as a matter of origin, that could be indispensable. But if you take over a cast of comicbook characters and decide to kill off one of the major characters with the intent that forever after the remaining characters will never be the same, then -- to use one of JB's expressions -- you're not putting the toys back where you found them. The death of Jean Grey should not have been "pivotal." No death in a comicbook -- excepting an origin -- should be.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 5:09am | IP Logged | 2
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On the matter of kids understanding death...My paternal grandfather died of cancer when I was six. My parents and grandmother helped me understand that he was ill, but that the doctors were doing all they could to help him. Then, one day, I realized my parents hadn’t been to visit him in the hospital for a while. I asked why. Looking back, I suspect they’d been waiting for that moment. They sat me down and, gently but without sugar coating, told me he had died, and what that meant. I suspect the reason I have no fear of death comes from that moment. They didn’t weave a big story to “protect” me, and so I went forward from that moment accepting death as part of life. (Now, dying, as an activity, that’s something else. That scares the hell out of me.)
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Petter Myhr Ness
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 02 July 2009
Location: Norway
Posts: 3826
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 7:29am | IP Logged | 3
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(Now, dying, as an activity, that’s something else. That scares the hell out of me.)--
Me too. "I don't want to be there when it happens," as someone once said.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 7:40am | IP Logged | 4
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There are two words I have said I hope will never be applied to me.One is "killed", unless it is followed by the word "instantly". The other is "dying", as in "John is dying."
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Doug Centers
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 February 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 5468
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 7:58am | IP Logged | 5
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When I was younger, I used to say drowning and burning to death would be the worst ways to go. Now I ad cancer, after seeing people close to me succumb to this disease.
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Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 10:18am | IP Logged | 6
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Not to be too morbid, but my father was a police officer, and as a kid, I had a pretty good understanding that he might not come home some evening and what that would mean. Kids may not get all the nuances of a given topic, and they tend to fly to the next thought without much consideration given, but they do key into the world around them and think about things at length on their own time.
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Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 10:54am | IP Logged | 7
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How does the forum feel, I wonder, about the Legion of Super-Heroes approach to death? The members who were killed in action had their bodies flown in rockets to the heroes' graveyard on the asteroid Shanghalla and their images were forever after enshrined in the Legion HQ as memorial statues.
The reader, coming to the series cold, did not need to read the particular story in which Ferro Lad or the Invisible Kid had been killed. There was no weeping or wailing over their loss, nor a series of constant attempts to resurrect them. It was simply acknowledged by the members and the series itself that their sacrifice was meaningful and the job was dangerous.
There was even a sense of consequences yet to come in that the "Adult Legion" story showed members on display who were still young and active in the current stories. Those of us who read that story knew that Shadow Lass should stay away from the Science Asteroid in years to come, yet each month she was shown adventuring alongside the others, in peril or in triumph, the same as any other Legionnaire.
Had she been killed in some other fashion, no doubt the hue and cry from fandom assembled would have been deafening and something would have to have been written about how perishing from microwave beings on Mercury somehow did "save the Science Asteroid" as noted on her memorial. Levitz went on to mock the Adult Legion story at one point, having Shady dress in the costume and skin coloring shown on the statue and go with her boyfriend to the Science Asteroid where they faced a gigantic Khund robot... and survive.
He further established the Adult Legion as simply one of many possible futures the Legion might face in issue #300, so as not to feel "hemmed in" or "trapped" by the events shown there.
For me as a kid, the bronze statues of the Fallen Legionnaires carried a lot of impact and made me respect the team for remembering their teammates and honoring them in that way. It conveyed a genuine sense of sacrifice and risk. It meant something when the Legion unveiled a freshly-made statue of Ultra Boy when they thought he had been killed.
Constantly erasing stories as they occurred and never looking back would have robbed that series of emotional heft and storytelling impact. The sense that Legion history had weight and consequence associated with it gave you the sense that today's story could be as meaningful as those of yesteryear because, look, those are still remembered and respected today. Ferro Lad was a great guy. He saved the entire Solar System in general and Superboy's life specifically. There's nothing wrong with looking back now and again to remember that.
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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4525
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | 8
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The fallen Legionnaires statues were something visual that didn't necessarily even need any explanation and did add weight to an otherwise fairly light comic series. The new X-Men started off with a bang in the death of Thunderbird, wonder if maybe Cockrum was trying to duplicate that touch of gravity having just left working on the Legion?
In anything if you can sensitize, or inform (look at all we learned from Carl Barks adventures), as well as tell a solid story that's the best. If a writer is stoking their ego in making 'history' through death using someone else's creations... that I'm not so keen on. I suppose morally Chris Claremont had a right to do whatever he wanted with the Phoenix brand/power/costume he wanted to, especially with Dave Cockrum back, I just say as a reader at the time they took a high point and weakened it, made light of it in a couple instances, and with further artists Claremond stretched it further and further weaking the import of the original storyline until the structure fully collapsed with various alternate future Phoenixes and re-runs of the original story with Mastermind back and Madelyn look-alike mystery background Phoenix marrying Cyclops and another future alternate child and just became a bad joke. From which at least Jean Grey was extricated for awhile without affecting the original story but adding a dimension to it. Future Rachel Phoenix worked some of the time but that's about it for me from the Claremont side, and you had to pick through a lot of excess Wolverine co-starring the X-Men, others going 'dark' or getting mohawks, and long recap captions and word balloons to get to that. Once a favorite writer he got tangled up in his own past somehow.
"There's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can sing that can't be sung." But obviously it's not easy without love? I think if the writer loves the characters they are writing at some level it will come out well, but if they are using them for their story, to make their mark and impress.... meh. That comes and goes and gets undone anyway as we've seen. Is there any sweet without some bitter though?
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 4789
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | 9
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Brian H., you remind me that one of the earliest deaths in comics was Lightning Lad... and then resurrection, too. Mon-El died and was resurrected. Ferro Lad died, and was only resurrected once (and it failed.) Ditto for Invisible Kid. And of course, one of Mr. Mxyzptlk's descendants* killed the entire Legion. But they got better when he returned to Zrff.
*We do not know if this Mxyzptlk reformed and joined the Adult Legion. But A) that was kinda invalid, since Luthor's descendant had no super powers save those provided through machinery... but no more so than Brainiac 5's force field belt. And B) as noted, Paul Levitz made that a dream reality anyhow.
As for children and death... I shrug. We can all agree to disagree, but I know of a few kids (both then and now) who didn't get the idea of death. But everyone is different, so much more so when they're very young.
And as I think of it, here's a curious item. Jonathan and Martha Kent's deaths had nothing to do with Superboy's origin... but DID have to do with Superman's origin. I wonder what people think of how that fits.
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Peter Martin
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 15800
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | 10
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The death of Jean Grey should not have been "pivotal." No death in a comicbook -- excepting an origin -- should be.------------------------- But it was! Whether Claremont harked back to it or no, it happened, it was big. Bucky dying was not part of Cap's origin story. Should Stan have treated it as trivial rather than pivotal?
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | 11
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Peter M. - And yet, maybe Bucky's death was pivotal to Cap's revival in Marvel comics. It's an interesting idea, I think. And no... it was a key for Cap, and Stan handled it pretty right. Maybe looming a touch TOO large... but not a mistake, I think.
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12440
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| Posted: 23 June 2019 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | 12
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QUOTE:
| Whether Claremont harked back to it [the death of Jean Grey] or no, it happened, it was big. Bucky dying was not part of Cap's origin story. Should Stan have treated it as trivial rather than pivotal? |
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If the death of Jean Grey could not but have become the new pivot that re-defined the X-Men, then she should not have been killed. With hindsight, it seems Mr. Claremont gradually but deliberately presented an all new "all-new" X-Men after JB left and the entire Phoenix storyline was made to be the pivot for that.
Bucky dying was an essential part of Cap's comeback origin. Bucky's death was defined, ab initio, as the pivot for the returned Captain America. One might find fault with that, but I don't because Cap had been gone and now he was back in a Marvel world quite different from the comicbooks published when he was first created.
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