The only good corpse is a dead corpse

Death tends to be a transitory thing in the world of comic books. There's even a sort-of genre rule that says, "If you don't see the body, don't assume he or she will be dead for too long." Recently I've started wondering if that's actually a bad message to build into a medium that, no matter how many strides it may make, will always in some ways be considered for kids. I'm not saying comics should be dumbed down or neutered just because kids may be reading them (that's what content labelling is for) but rather that we should consider what kind of message it sends to whomever is reading them to treat death so unrealistically.

For years after my mother died, I had a recurring dream the essence of which was that, unbeknownst to my brother and I, our mother had actually been cryogenically frozen after seemingly dying that day in the hospital. The dreams always involved her showing up unexpectedly and explaining how she'd been saved but couldn't tell us for awhile because the process was top secret or something similar, and then I'd be telling her everything that had happened in my life, blah blah blah.

I used to always think the genesis of this dream was the Six Million Dollar Man TV show. On it, Colonel Steve Austin lost the love of his life (seemingly) only to find out a year or two later that she'd been whisked away by the same crack technical staff that outfitted him with his bionic eye, arm and legs, and they'd saved her life by similarly replacing those pesky human parts with vastly superior mechanical bits. Being a huge 6M$M fan at the time (as well as a teenager), I considered this high art at that tender age and echoed the emotions Col Austin surely must've felt upon being reunited with someone so dear to him. So years later, after losing my mother and then having dreams along similar lines, I blamed the Steve Austin and Jamie Summers.

But now I think comics may really be the root cause. One episode of a TV show, no matter how beloved, doesn't really compare with thirty-five years of resurrection after resurrection, to the point where nobody really believes a comic death unless the body's bhown to bits (even sometimes not even then). Personally, I wish comics would value the dramatic power of a significant death so highly that undoing it would be considered a sign of desperation, hackery or just plain stupidity. Because really, how can a fictional character's death, already hamstrung by the fact that it's a fictional character's death, have any impact if you know it's only temporary? Not to mention how it screws with young, impressionable minds! :-)