X-Cresence: I'm the best course, eat me last

[TheDeadSpace]

Hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween!

I can at least post this for once as well.

[Snoop Dogg]

my sandals are across the room and i refuse to go get them

[NewMutant]

Forgive me if this is the wrong forum to most/ask. But I was wanting to know if someone might be able to nicely photoshop Emma from the GSXM #1 Cover on to the newly released RD X-Men Legends cover; as well an RD Beast (I found his 90s print and his X-Force variant). If this is not the right place please point me in the right direction. Thanks!!!

[H-E-D]

Excalibur #14

[jwatson]

Excalibur #14

MAybe Bel is just obsessed with that cream?

[salarta]

Character death is one of those things that I don't think is actually needed to tell good stories. Most of the time, you can be a lot more impactful by doing things that don't involve killing characters off. However, if it happens, I can understand it more if the death emphasizes that character's identity and importance in the process.

I've thought about this many times, but most recently with the Demon Slayer anime. A certain character died, and their death continues to matter across the show (and I assume the manga it came from). A whole episode is devoted specifically to who they were, how their family felt about them, how their death affected everyone in their life. It still has an impact a couple seasons later, as other characters remember them and want to honor their sacrifice. Even when it looks like a character might die but doesn't, they still play it up by emphasizing what the character has to offer. The focus isn't just on the overall narrative by suggesting that death raises the stakes, nor is it spun in a way where their death becomes all about promoting the remaining characters. This is also one of the positive things I generally had to say about the Walking Dead show before I stopped watching. When characters died, it had some level of depth. You got to see their final moments from their POV, or you got perspective on who they were, or an action they took served as a very powerful embodiment of their identity as it happened.

This is why I just don't understand why comic books so often have very cheap, very empty character deaths. I don't say Marvel or X-Men comics solely because I recognize it's an industry-wide issue, not a single company or office within that company. It seems like every time a character dies in comics, it's more insulting than powerful. It seems to come out horribly disrespectful to the character that dies, treating them like cannon fodder for buzz instead of a fictional entity that's built up interest and feelings in the readers. It also seems like there's no good way to handle it when comics do it. Either you keep a character dead and waste immense potential (and tick fans off in the process), or you bring them back and make death into a cheap gimmick. The recent Kamala Khan stuff is a really good example of the problem. Even knowing she wasn't going to stay dead, the death itself still ticked fans off immensely by (from what I saw online) making her death more about promoting certain characters with their reactions instead of actually seeing her importance as a character. And then her coming back later just ends up making her death look like a tacky and insulting way of handling her death as part of a process to make her part-mutant.

So this comes down to the thread question. You know my take on character death. But since I can't wrap my head around why Marvel (and the comics industry in general) treats character death the way it does, I thought I'd ask here in case someone else can share a view that would make it understandable to me. What are your thoughts?

[Zelena]

It seems to me that in comics (and in anime) there are two kinds of characters: the ones whose death matters and the others…

Comics are almost all action-oriented: without a strong reason, authors don’t delve too much into an event.

For most of my life, I haven’t seen very often main characters dying: they are too important for the story. But recently there are more and more fictions where there are a lot of characters of equal importance. So authors can sacrifice them, not necessarily for shock value, but because they don’t need them anymore. So I suppose it’s a way to make them “leave in style”…

But viewers, readers can get attached to them… Still a fiction but the pain is real. I admit I want to watch/read less and less fiction because of that.

[Nicoclaws]

I think it's partly due to marketing a never-ending story, which means for marketers and consumers very little evolution, and use of the same marketable characters. It's safer to keep the mostly same roster on a team.
As for the use of death... it might be the last shocking thing that can happen to a character that's "acceptable" to show. It's also the "fault" of the marketing aspect of big comic industry, who wants to make numbers. The Ressurection protocols in the X-men Krakoa Era were meant to avoid that aspect, but it's been a bit muddled, tbh.

An intersting point you adress is that part : "you keep a character dead and waste immense potential ". In a finite story, there's no "potential". The story is the story. It's possible to change in the course of writing, of course, if the creator realizes that some characters are more interesting than they initially thought, but it's rare. There's a story to be told, and if the death of character is important to it, it trumps the "potential" of the character. The frustration is part of the game. Readers are SUPPOSED to be frustrated. You take example from japanese animation, I will suggest Gurren Lagann (although I never finished it because I'm bored with sexist shit in general but that's another point).
In infinite comics, potential is way more important. It's not "What's the story ?" but "Where could the story goes now ?".

The thing is, for me, if the story is good, I don't care. I don't care if it's "relevant", if I know the characters will come back, if the story impact the overall "narrative". I take most runs by one writer as one big (or short) story and judge it on its own.

[Wolverine12]

Since this isn't an X-Men specific thread I'm going to merge it with the off topic thread. I'll leave a redirect link.

Edit to address the comic book death thread.

I don't think resurrection automatically "cheapens" a characters death, especially in the big 2 where they rely on these household names to stay afloat. For example, in HoX #4 the scene where Kurt and Logan sacrifice themselves to stop the Mothermold was brilliantly written imho. With just a few sentences and a few images that scene left a lasting impact on me, to the point where it is one of my favorite sequences of any comic I've ever read. Both of those characters were back the next issue but that scene still stays with me, much more than their resurrection did. That whole issue was a set up to announce mutants had solved death but even though death was now a revolving door it still left an impact, at least on me. I also think that in the case of the Krakoa era this was something new and it flipped the whole non permanent death in comics trope on it's head. Honestly I hope the 5 stay around for a long time, which I think would actually address your issue, seeing as we already know that death is not a permanent thing in comics, both in a meta sense and in a "in universe" sense it seems that we wouldn't need to have character death events that span months and then when they come back you get another event. With the 5 now bringing back non mutants it could create new story telling ideas.

Just to spit ball a basic premise here using the 5 as a story telling prop. Kingpin is now living on Krakoa but Daredevil still wants to bring him to justice for all the crimes he has committed over the years. In his pursuit of justice he finally has the evidence he needs to put Fisk away for life but before he can capture/extradite Fisk, Daredevil dies. It doesn't even have to be spectacular, he could just get into the wrong uber on the wrong day and die a mundane death but since he is a known hero he jumps the queue and is resurrected swiftly. The problem now is DD doesn't get regular memory back ups because he's not a mutant. You can hand wave that ever since Captain America got rezzed that most big name superheroes get a monthly back up from a telepath in their area and then it is added to Cerebro. Well it's been almost a month since DD's last back up but since we're so far out he lost the memory of where he stored the evidence to put away Fisk but he remembers he had it in his grasp, or some other hurdle he has to overcome to achieve his goal. Now instead of getting a "death of DD" and "return of DD" mini series event, we get a continuation of the existing plot but with a new challenge to face. We could have DD trying to do some detective work on his own life trying to figure out what he needs to do the achieve his goal.

Just my .02 on the issue.

[sunofdarkchild]

The way comics have been for the last 30-40 years, why wouldn't Marvel and DC kill off characters left and right? After multiple early death stories became classics, Gwen Stacy, Mar-Vell, Dark Phoenix, other writers began chasing the trend to try to create their own classics. But when people start trend-chasing, they often miss what made the originals work in the first place. Beyond that, since so few new characters actually catch on compared to established characters, killing off a character is the easier way for a writer or editor to leave their 'mark.' So there's very strong incentive to kill characters off.

The other side of the coin is that there's no disincentive because the constant resurrections remove any risk that killing a character might entail. Death has been a joke ever since Jean was first brought back in 1985. Since it's all but guaranteed that whoever is killed off will be brought back sooner or later, no matter how stupid the method of resurrection, why not kill them off left and right and let the next writer worry about bringing them back?

[marhawkman]

The way comics have been for the last 30-40 years, why wouldn't Marvel and DC kill off characters left and right? After multiple early death stories became classics, Gwen Stacy, Mar-Vell, Dark Phoenix, other writers began chasing the trend to try to create their own classics. But when people start trend-chasing, they often miss what made the originals work in the first place. Beyond that, since so few new characters actually catch on compared to established characters, killing off a character is the easier way for a writer or editor to leave their 'mark.' So there's very strong incentive to kill characters off.

The other side of the coin is that there's no disincentive because the constant resurrections remove any risk that killing a character might entail. Death has been a joke ever since Jean was first brought back in 1985. Since it's all but guaranteed that whoever is killed off will be brought back sooner or later, no matter how stupid the method of resurrection, why not kill them off left and right and let the next writer worry about bringing them back?

but if people expect the dead guy to be back... how much do they care about the death?

[Rift]

Speaking of dogs, you guys should see how big Salty has gotten

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These pics are from a couple of months back, and he's already changed a bit. The spot between his head is more defined, so it looks like a heart.

[Arachne]

Aww, so cute! And so patient to wear a hat.

It's been snowing here, non-stop, since Wednesday afternoon.

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K. doesn't even want to roll in it, at this point.