Mainstream superhero comics appear to be stuck at an immature stage of death denial. The reversibility of death is not a new topic for comics studies; José Alaniz devotes three chapters of his excellent 2014 study, Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond to this very topic, providing sensitive and thought-provoking readings of key superhero death texts (including, as we have seen earlier, Strikeforce: Morituri). Building on the work of Freud, Ernest Becker, Elisabeth Bronfen, and Katherine Verdery (among many others), Alaniz puts the question of death within the framework of disability studies: so many superheroes as "supercrips," with comics centered around their disabled body in order to show them "overcoming" the disabilities that otherwise mark them (Daredevil, Oracle). Disability reminds us that the human body is variable, vulnerable, and porous; it is also a status that could be either innate or acquired. The logical endpoint of the vulnerable human body is its finitude, with death as the one "handicap" that cannot be overcome.
Except that, in comics, it can. As his book's title suggest, Alaniz charts the development of superhero death from the Silver Age to the early twenty-first century, as death moves from the realm of the "imaginary story" (which indulges in the pain of loss that nevertheless has no real consequences) to in-continuity demises that are supposed to matter, at least theoretically. Among the varieties of comic book death identified by Alaniz is "sticky death" (death with no possibility of return, usually reserved for superhero origin stories, such as Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, Bruce Wayne's mother and father and Clark Kent's Kryptonian parents. The tongue-in-cheek term for this status used to be "Bucky dead," referring to Captain America's World War II sidekick. Bucky had to stay dead because he was part of Captain America's second origin--when Steve Rogers is revived by the Avengers, he is haunted by the loss of his young friend, even going so far as slotting lookalike sidekick Rick Jones into Bucky's role. Bucky's death was a narrative constant, at least until Rick Brubaker came up with the idea to bring him back as the Winter Soldier. But by that time (November 2004), Captain America had been a fixture in the modern Marvel universe for over forty years, far long than his original adventures had lasted. Arguably, Captain American no longer needed the trauma of Bucky's death to define him as a character; if anything Bucky's return was initially a source of new trauma rather than healing.
Bucky, then, is the exception that proves the rule, in that his death outlasted the narrative need for him to actually be dead. Before that point, he, like Uncle Ben, was essential to the hero's development precisely because he was no longer alive. And even the other such characters already namechecked have since actually come back at one time or another, though their return is not as "sticky" as their death. Typically, the are brought back as multiversal counterparts (the Flashpoint Batman) or, in Jor-El's case, plucked from the moment before his death to meddle in his son's life before eventually being sent back to suffer his inevitable fate. This new wrinkle on "sticky death" does not not invalidate Alaniz's thesis, but reminds us that logic of the imaginary story or the alternate dimensional counterpart works both ways, killing off immortal heroes but also reviving the otherwise permanently dead.
Alaniz's other important category is what he calls "existential death," the loss of a (usually) secondary character whose demise is meaningful because it is permanent, and because it leaves its mark on the hero:
Readers could more easily relate to their heroes, not because they could die, but because, like the rest of us, they could experience a tragic loss. Whether “heroic” or “existential,” then, what we might call “superhero mortality by proxy” (a compromise of sorts between the genre and lived reality) came to represent the most consistently conscientious means of depicting death in mainstream superhero comics.
You gotta love 70s Marvel for including the phrase “Monster Madness! It’s a gas—for lad or lass!” as an ad under this page
Though technically more realistic than the reversible deaths of superheroes and supervillains, the existential deaths of secondary characters are not without problems of their own. Just a few months after putting on the Green Lantern ring for the first time, Kyle Rayner discovered his girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, murdered and stuffed into his refrigerator by his new archenemy, Major Force. The scene was so overwrought that it read like a parody of the superhero's dead girlfriend trope, and inspired Gail Simone, a comics fan who would eventually turn pro, to create the website "Women in Refrigerators," devoted to the numerous cases of female comics characters being raped, murdered, disabled, or depowered, usually to advance the character arc of a surviving male. This trope, now called "fridging," is now widely recognized (and castigated) in multiple fan communities, comics included. In has long since crossed the barrier from criticism to in-joke. In 2017, Catherynne Valente published The Refrigerator Monologues, about six thinly-veiled version of famous dead female comics characters who belong to the Hell Hath Club that meets weekly in limbo. The protagonist of the She-Hulk streaming series worries in one episode that she is going to be "fridged," while Barbara Gordon, whose paralysis resulting from being shot by the Joker is one of the most famous examples of fridging, finds herself trapped in refrigerated van that she could easily escape, but at a risk to her secret identity. She tells Dick Grayson, "Nightwing, they're after you. They'vefridged me to get to you" ("Get Grayson, Act Three," Nightwing volume 4 90, by Tom Taylor and Geraldo Borges). Only in superhero comics does permanent death or disability seem like an unrealistic trope.
Next:
The Revolving Door of Death