Death in Comics Revisited

On the eve of Free Comic Book Day I am revisiting one of my previous blogs about death in comics. My last post was about a year ago and a lot has changed. DC did a storyline called Blackest Night where all the dead people in the DC universe were re-animated and they attacked friends and families to feed on their emotions. When the story was done {SPOILER WARNING} the above 12 super-heroes and super-villains were brought back to life. Why these 12 and not anymore is an on-going story that is occuring in the Brightest Day series which will last through the rest of the year. But I'm ok with this. The way writer brought them back was quite clever and the fact that it was only these 12 makes it an interesting story that is yet to be told why they lived. What I like also is that these 12 are all having trouble trying to get back to living after being dead for so long which is fairly realistic. According to DC this is also the beginning of Dead means dead, which means the heroes and villains that did not live probably will not be coming back soon, but who knows. However DC has decided to continue killing, case in point little Lian Harper. She is an 8 year old girl who is the daughter of the hero Speedy/Red Arrow/Arsenal/Roy Harper and the villain Cheshire. In a storyline that preceeded Blackest Night they destroyed Roy's home town of Star City and killed is daughter. Now he is going through hell because he also just got his arm tore off as well. So Death is still around and this time it is effecting non heroes. And I don't like this. Not only because it is an 8 year old girl, that is the main reason, but also Roy Harper is a second tier-third tier hero who is not that interesting. He was addicted to drugs in the 70s which lead to a great Green Lantern/Green Arrow story. Green Arrow is his former partner and mentor, and surrogate father. But when they made him have a kid with a known female assassin and villain that made the story interesting, also focusing on the travails of a single parent super hero which is very interesting to me. Now he is a non-entity, even without an arm. Comics tend to not like to have heroes have interesting things, single parent, or in the case of Spider man let's dissolve his marriage in a magic way so they never remember being married.(That I will save for another Blog)

On another note Captain America is now back in the land of the living and Batman will be starting his return in May. Oh and Jean Grey may be back for a third time. AWESOME!!! Sarcasm...