Take Superman at his word and kill him with irony.
Its no problem, thanks, I know what you mean (and I don’t even follow comics, everything I’ve picked up about superheros is from cultural osmosis mostly)
There was that John Byrne story, where Bloodsport has a Kryptonite needle loaded into a small gun and is about to shoot it into the back of Superman’s skull. That would have been a “WHOA!” moment.
I have always maintained that turning Hal Jordan into Parallax was one of the gutsiest editorial calls in a comic book, just terribly executed.
But getting back to the premise: a soldier’s death for many of the All-Star Squadron on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima would have been a very good way for Roy Thomas to end that series. A letter to the editor once observed that the series moved slower than the war itself, so we were never going to get there. But to have had Johnny Quick, Robotman, Tarantula and others not have seen the end of the war would have been as poignant as it must have been for many solders’ families.