Well it doesn’t have to be your favourite, any superhero will do.
We all know that its incredibly difficult to actually kill off a popular superhero, no matter what you do to them they keep coming back. However for the purposes of this thread you are a comics writer and the direction has come down from above that you are to write a story featuring the permenant death of Superman (or Batman, Green Lantern, Wolverine, whoever) and this time they are definitely 100% never coming back in any way shape or form, no resurrections, no alternate versions, no hidden mirror dimensions, completely and utterly dead (or not appearing in any more stories at least)
So how would you write them out? What would be a suitably climatic final storyline or appropriate send-off for Superman for example? Literally have him killed or would you have him simply flying off into the sunset, “My job here is done…”
It’s already my headcanon that, when the USSR was on its last legs – with its nuclear arsenal on the brink of going who-knows-where – the Pentagon sent in its peerless master of disguise, a Medal of Honor winner known only as The Unknown Soldier, to secretly replace Boris Yeltsin and spend years presiding over the task of making damn sure that atomic hellfire wouldn’t rain down on America.
Oh, and also presiding over tasks for the good of Russia, but, y’know, that was kind of a secondary priority, and anyway his health was failing – and so, despite the best doctors in Moscow, he eventually passed away in his eighties, looking like he was in his seventies, never having broken character or failed in his primary duty.
Won’t work-one of those supermystics(or worse yet, a publisher who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about continuity) will just find a way to undo or reboot the universe, or a version from an alternate universe will pop in to take the hero’s place.
Well while we know that would happen in reality (there’s no way they’re going to kill off a money maker) the purpose of this thread is just to see what interesting ideas people would come up with to give a character a send off with the premise that it really is going to be permenant.
Like ‘The Other Waldo Pepper’s’ example, though I’m not familiar with that character.
Disgrace them. Utterly humiliate them. Destroy their reputation so thoroughly that no one** wants **them to come back.
Granted, this is tough. Peter Parker gets hooked on heroin and gets killed in a gunfight when he tries to rob a liquor store. Bruce Wayne is discovered producing child pornography, goes to prison and is killed in his cell. Superman threatens to destroy the Earth unless he’s made dictator and all the other superheroes have to gang up to kill him.
No plot twists, no “under the influence of magic” explanations, no redemption. Just a feeling of “that sucks, but he deserved it.”
I can’t really take credit for this one, since I’ve seen it hinted at enough times over the years, but the go-to idea for Superman dying would be for him to do it while getting Luthor to see the error of his ways and dedicate himself to helping humanity.
Figure the beauty part is, if you thereby get a solid enough character, and inextricably build it around Luthor only doing it because Superman is dead – such that it all falls apart if the big guy ever comes back – then the whole “reformed super villain now playing futuristic MacGyver” thing can make the death stick.
Speaking of which: folks deride Batman for not killing the Joker, right? All those deaths on Batman’s hands, because it’s obvious the Joker will eventually escape from Arkham again. Wait, how does he keep escaping from Arkham? Well, never mind that now, and forget Batman; wouldn’t some GCPD cop have simply killed the Joker by now, while transporting him there? You know, He Went For My Gun, or something? Heck, forget the cops; how does a mass-murdering celebrity with no superpowers keep surviving when a civilian would’ve surely killed him by now?
I say, let’s maybe retroactively justify all of that.
Let’s say the Joker has been killed before. Let’s say he has a creepy superpower: anyone who kills the Joker becomes the Joker. So he’s gotten gunned down during the occasional crime spree; it did no good, the shooter slowly became pale and slim and deranged – and that corpse slowly twisted into the likeness of the killer. That’s how he escapes from Arkham: he inevitably baits a guard into killing him – and then makes his way out. That’s why, as it happens, Batman was right never to kill the guy; it’d be a case of If You Kill Him, You’ll Be Just Like Him – only, like, literally.
But if a dying Batman finally succeeds in rehabilitating the guy – why, then, we get a madman with an insane sense of humor serving as an invincible champion of justice: any criminal apprehended by the all-new heroic Joker merely loses; but any criminal who kills him simply carries on as the all-new heroic Joker!
One of my biggest complaints in superhero deaths is the impermanence of them. I totally get why they can’t, but I’d really love to see one of the major two, DC or Marvel, have the balls to kill off a major hero and leave them dead until they do the next universe continuity reset, not just putting them on the bench for a few months and having them come back through some convoluted means. Also, not counting killing them only a month or two before a continuity reboot, I want to see one stay dead for a at least a year or two If they’re a major tent-pole hero on the level of with Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, they will survive a year or two, especially if they go out well, and when they finally do come back in the continuity reboot, the anticipation will be great. Even more, it’s a great opportunity to take that spotlight that usually goes to a prime hero and let another one or two step up and get some more mainstream attention.
All of that said, my favorite hero is Superman, and as they’ve already done the Death of Superman and it was an iconic story line, it just doesn’t make much sense to essentially redo that, except this time “it’s for real!” Really, a major hero that I think could really benefit from something like this is Batman. What makes him such a great hero is his mortality, and while he’s been broken, he’s never been straight up killed. As an example, using the Nolan version since we’re all familiar with it, one of my biggest complaints about Dark Knight Rises was the heroic sacrifice he apparently made was undermined by showing Bruce survived and lived happily ever after. Batman was born in tragedy and he deserves an equally tragic death. And, of course, if they want they can lift up another member of the Bat family to fill that spot, whether it’s Nightwing (as Nightwing or wearing the mantle, as he’s done before), someone else, or even a new character. It be an opportunity to bring his character full circle and serve as a means to galvanize a new generation of heroes.
As for how he should die, I’m torn between whether it should be something heroic, along the lines of staying behind to defuse a bomb or giving the last parachute to someone else or dying in an epic fight to stop some apocalyptic event, or if maybe the Joker should finally kill him and see the repercussions of that, or what I’m kind of leaning towards, which is actually having some random street thug just get in a lucky shot, not unlike how his parents were just in the wrong place and that’s how they died. Either way, even though I really like Batman Beyond, it seems to me that the whole idea that Batman was able to survive long enough to retire is hard to swallow.
About the most underwhelming potential hero death scene I’ve seen occurred in a Batman vs Joker story. The Joker told Batman he didn’t commit mass murder and he was being framed by some other goon. So, Batman investigated the goon’s HQ. The goon saw him first, shot him, and ran away. In the next act, Batman is in a hospital bed with Commissioner Gordon lecturing him. Batman’s still wearing his mask and cowl in bed; otherwise the batsuit’s been removed and he’s all taped up. So none of the hospital workers took the opportunity to unmask him? Surely they would have checked to see if any bullets hit his head.
When Gordon leaves, Batman recovers the rest of his suit and escapes out the window. He did have a hard time swinging between roof tops, evidenced by his scowling and nervous sweat, so at least they took the fact that he was SHOT into account.
The Other Waldo Pepper brings up an idea that has been floating around in my noggin recently. That someone convinces Luthor that the key to greatness is through his unique scientific gifts. “Kill Superman and cure cancer. You’ll be remembered forever.”
You know there’s going to be a camera in that room.
If there was the slightest suspicion that you knew the secret identity of the Batman you would be lucky to see the sunrise, because every bad guy out there will want to be the one to grab you and rip that info out of your hide.
The story was from the 70’s I think, so not sure if there were any security cameras back then. Also, the news of Batman being in a hospital would spread like wildfire. Any hospital employee would have been accosted by BM’s enemies for info, whether they were involved or not. This was just something the writer & artist didn’t bother to consider.
In one pre-Crisis story, an attempt to build a kryptonite reactor led to a runaway reaction that caused all the kryptonite then on Earth to instantly decay into iron.
