1. JLA # 30 - "Crisis Time Five: Part 2":- writer, Grant Morrison, artist, Howard Porter
I'm not one to be frightened by the things that happen in comic books, and I don't think that I ever have been. I suppose, on one level or another, that I've always known that suffering and loss in comics are nothing more than metaphors, markers of virtue or its absence in someone's heroic journey, and that all the bad stuff that happens in the once four-coloured world is always about something other than itself. In short, and I know you know this at least as well as I do, what's shown happening in comic books isn't real. Out here in a slightly more objective reality, death is of course death, a great final and silent full-stop, and if it means anything at all, it means something to the people who're still alive and faced with the challenge of trying to make sense of it. But in comics, death isn't anything of the sort. It's reversible, there are great beyonds beyond great beyonds, and ghosts, and spirits, and Spectres, and, whatever else death may be, it surely isn't an end in a great many of the comic book worlds. In fact, even in those rare comics where death really is final, it's still just a story-tool, a symbol, a trick to both make the reader more upset and, perhaps, to pass judgement on fantasy conventions where nothing so final as "the end" is ever printed without "to be continued" being either stated or implied straight afterwards.
They're just comic books, it's not actually death, and it doesn't usually matter, does it?
But there are rare moments when an unlikely and unlooked for horror rears up and surprises me, disturbs me in those unexpected mental recesses where the abhorrent can nestle and stab and sting. And just when I should be processing imaginary events in terms of script and art, symbol and intent, enjoyment and even absent-minded entertainment, the oddest shiver of unease can make itself known. One such bizarre example can be found, to my consternation, for nobody should be scared of something they've read in the Justice League Of America, in "Crisis Times Five: Part Two", where the reader is presented with a war being fought between great other-dimensional magical beings on DC Comic's Earth. And as is the way of these events, skyscrapers come to life, passers-by are mystically altered, and superheroes fly around looking for things to hit while bemoaning their inability to hold back the end of a scientifically understandable world, as if they were any less magical than the opponents they face.
In the above three-panel sequence, magically-transformed giant cockroaches roam the land while the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern struggles to process the sensory overload that is this mystically-mutated world. And the visual narrative presented to us concerns how our hero succeeds in holding his sanity together while raising the will to create a ring-powered, and obviously scientifically-explicable, giant canister of bug spray.
But it's not the cockroaches or the psychological traumas inflicted by a bewitched battlefield upon a superhero that frightens me here. Indeed, I'd be curious if not even a little bemused to come across anybody over the age of ten who was indeed a little shaken by the main body of what is, after all, a commonplace if somewhat bizarre sequence set in superhero-land.
The fear, however, lies in the word balloon which has been laid across the giant cockroach-killing scene in the third panel above, where an unseen character is "heard" to say;
"My wife's turning into ice-cream! She's dying in the sun! Help me!" (Beat: new balloon) "For God's sake help me!"
We never discover who's crying out for help, but the story shows no heroine or hero going to the assistance of the melting ice-cream woman or her husband. In fact, those bystanders disappear unseen as soon as their suffering has been signed up in those two brief word balloons. And yet, while the details of the five issue-long, superhero-saturated "Crisis Times Five" crossover epic largely escape me now, the suffering of the ice-cream woman and her helpless spouse are impaled like a small and yet fierce splinter in my memory, and can still serve to induce a shiver if I think of them.
Ridiculous, I know, but true all the same, though we're never shown the awful circumstances of the woman's death, for death she's surely enduring. All there is to mark that nuclear families existence are those apparently laughable 17 words that mark the totality of their comic-book existence. We never even see their faces, fleshy or ice-creamed, but then, that mixture of the absurd, and the awful, and the absence of information, is a beguiling business even for the reluctant imagination. And while a drawn and coloured image of a man bending over his melting ice-cream wife and screaming for help would inevitably run the risk of seeming either laughable or unmoving, the absence of such can inspire the heart to summon up a response of its own to those few and ludicrous details. The horror, for example, of discovering the body dissolving into, of all things, ice cream, is a strangely easy and unsettling matter to imagine. And such silly imaginings of death and panic and regret are made all the more disturbing because ice cream belongs to the world of entertaining trivialities, and the juxtaposition of the apparently innocent and the irreversibly murderous, creates a space in the mind where unusual and unsettling ideas can percolate. To see in a comic book panel the sight of a man or woman dissolving into goo is not at most times to be in any way shocked, or, indeed, in any other way moved. But to imagine hearing a man emasculated by such an unbelievable situation pleading for rescue, to almost hear him shouting desperately for help while his wife's existence is transmuted into the melting uselessness of ice cream, is to be forced to ask not only "Why does Grant Morrison bother with those clever-silly lines?", but also, "What would I do?".
Of course, it's a stupid question, and there are only two classes of responses to it, the first of which is that there's surely no need to even consider the matter, because people don't get turned into ice-cream, in the heat of the day or indeed at any other hour. But, a second approach might be to consider in passing how terrible that scenario is, how inconceivably upsetting it would be to be changed so irreversibly and so irrationally, or to witness the change in a dearly-loved one, and to stand so impotently in the face of it, as if some Hot Zone version of Alzheimer's or CJD were wiping out an identity and a life with no hope of ever reversing or even retarding the process.
After all, not even the superheroes could help the melting woman, for they were focused on the cause and not the symptoms of the comic book disaster, and helpless they continued to prove themselves to be for tens of pages yet. So, they seem to flown away, killing giant bugs, punching sentient buildings, and, I can't help but imagine, in their absence the poor melting woman was soon quite gone.
But of her husband, I fear to even try to raise the ghost of where his story took him. To do so, to even write this, compels me to think of my wife, and our marriage, and the future, and in such an apparently daft way do these stories of folks in their costumes with their super-powers trip powerful emotions on occasion despite the likes of those talking buildings and fifth-dimensional magicians and, yes, those bloody stupid throwaway lines about the wife and her husband and that melting ice cream.
Not, of course, that they're throwaway lines at all.
2. Spider-Man # 30, "Transformations, Literal Or Otherwise", writer: J Michael Straczynski, artist: John Romita, Jr
Death counts for nothing in comic books, but the death of the German superhero Bundesadler terrifies me every time I think about it. In fact, I try not to think about it. If I've reason to scan the story, I'll stop short of the end, and yet it's that very scene at the end of "Transformations" that sticks in my mind regardless of whether I read it again or not. And if you've read the story, then perhaps, to one degree or another, it's the same for you too.
For it's not the fact that Bundesadler dies, or dies horribly, that's so upsetting. There's nothing so out of ordinary in the fact of a horrific death, in real life or in comic books, that demands the mind returns to it in the absence of any great knowledge of the victim concerned. Context, after all, is everything. But what does resonate is the manner of Bundesadler's fate, for it breaks every rule of how a superhero should die. It's a deliberate violation of the comic book tradition that the meaning of a super-woman or super-man's life, their absolute virtue and worth, is defined by the manner in which they meet their death.
Poor Bundesadler. There's simply no circumstances in which we can imagine Captain America or Superman meeting their end in such demeaning circumstances. For not only would Steve Rogers and Kal-El refuse to beg for mercy, but they'd spit defiance too, and they'd find a way to escape their onrushing end and defeat the villainous Morlun while they're at it.
But then, they would. That's what superheroes do, or at least, what nearly all of them do. They overcome the worst, and they do so with such fortitude and predictability that there's hardly any point in the worst ever happening to them at all. We know they'll win. And, on the rare occasions where they die, they fall while doing the right thing and show, in the manner of their passing, why their deaths diminish the lives of those around them while their existence has been as outstanding and inspirational as a superhero's should be. It's a comforting business, this representation of dying as a litmus test of character, but Bundesadler's death shows it up for the ridiculous confection it is. For if you or I had been abused as he had, been tortured for as long and to the degree that he's suffered, why, we'd be exhausted, and broken, and pleading for an end to our misery too, because those myths about good people surviving torture with no debilitating side-affects, and with all their strength intact to affect a rousing escape are just that, myths, and pernicious ones too. They tell lies about what human beings can do, and about what decency and bravery are, and they're part of the atavistic morality that still haunts our comic book fictions. Good always wins. Evil always looses. Good can never be suppressed. Evil is never triumphant. Decent chaps have the strength to resist any challenge, torture's only a problem for the bad guys, who deserve it, and only the unworthy fail in combat.
And what a miserably inglorious end Bundesadler has. Are we supposed to presume that he was unworthy, that he didn't fight hard enough, that he wasn't good enough to be allowed to be shown to survive? After all, how can a superhero be so defeated, be so helpless, unless he deserved to loose? If virtue is the key to victory, and if even Hawkeye can survive the likes of Kang and Dr Doom with only a bow and arrow and a quip, then what an absence of heroism must have marked Bundesadler's life. Indeed, he's so unworthy that he's not even going to be rescued, just as he was never strong enough to be able to rescue himself. He's a waste of a costume and a code-name, that Bundesadler, or so the very fact of his pathetic, pleading end seems to declare.
Or at least it would, if we couldn't so easily place ourselves in his powerlessness. For unlike superheroes, we're constantly fallible and mortal and, in truth, we're of the stock of the Bundesadler, aren't we, rather than of the line of the Rogers and the Waynes and the Family El. And that's what Mr Straczynski and Mr Romita's panel of the German hero so exhausted by his agonies and so close to his cruel end, is showing us; this is what really happens in a world of super-powers and silly costumes. The big bad fish feed off the Green Arrows and the Ant-Men, they don't get beaten down by them, and Galactus eats the world and the Moon for desert and no-one can do the slightest thing about it.
Bundesadler's death is the universal solvent of the myth of the superhero. It makes most every overblown boy's own adventure and every improbable escape from incredible odds seem cheap and even insulting. This, the heart knows, is what really happens in the erstwhile-comforting landscape of the superhero's Earth.
And, because his fate makes us see how terribly cruel things are over there, it makes it harder for us to deny that such an order of existence stands here too, in our world.
Next time, a look at "Red", the graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, and then, amongst many other possibilities, perhaps more cheeringly scary moments from happy-go-lucky superhero books! I hope, as always, that your days are splendid, and would encourage you, if you would, to offer up any of your own takes on moments from comic books which, for one reason or another, seemed more disturbing to you that might generally be expected.
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