I mean really, they had theirown little thing. Why kill them all off?
This rationale seems kind of lame for destroying an epic concept.
I think Grant Morrison brought them back in Final Crisis anyway.
The whole experience is an amazing Charlie Foxtrot of shared-universe publishing, considering there are ostensibly editors.
OK, I’m going to vent something that’s been brewing due to almost every comic book forum I’ve been to recently…
WHY THE FUCK SHOULDN’T THEY?
These are not real people. They are fictional characters.
You can get a good story out of killing them. (That Starlin failed to do so doesn’t change this. Morrison did.)
You can get a good story out of bringing them back. (Again, see Morrison.)
Hell, killing them is the best thing that’s happened to the New Gods since the Great Darkness Saga - they’ve gotten more use, and better use, since they were ‘killed’, than they have in over a decade.
Because killing them should be the last story you ever tell with them. Even though resurrection is a well-worn comics trope, there’s a significant portion of the fanbase who finds resurrection distasteful, because it means that nothing matters. No death is irreversible.
The problem there, then, is if you satisfy that desire for final death, your options become very limited when you kill the character off.
The argument works in the inverse too - why bother to kill them, if resurrection is so easy? It doesn’t really raise the level of tension. It’s not that novel a story.
Death of the New Gods / Countdown / Final Crisis got the New Gods some exposure, but it wasn’t exactly compelling reading. The only good thing that came out of it is that the New Gods get to have a little reboot that might shine them up for new readers.
Meh.
I read them back in the '70s, when Kirby was inventing them. They were interesting and different then. I do not think the grim-n-gritty age was kind to them.
Now, I admit I would be just as happy if the publishers just ignored the characters, but if they feel killing them will sell more books, so be it. The publishers have made worse editorial decisions and will make worse ones in the future.
Killing off characters in the DCU so Grant Morrison or Geoff Johns can do something retarded with them is pretty much de reguire at this point.
At least with the New Gods, Jack Kirby wanted to ultimately kill them in the first place and just never got the chance.
Then they shouldn’t be reading superhero comics - these are universes where gods - LITERAL gods - walk the earth. Beings who can erase death on a whim. Any death should only be considered final until someone thinks it’d be a good idea to undo it, even before you ever see a character killed and resurrected.
Then there are characters who only exist because death isn’t the end - Simon Garth, Deadman, Resurrection Man, etc.
Congratulations, you’ve just invalidated the entire superhero genre - and all other relatively light adventure genres.
Why bother putting a character in a death trap? He’ll get out of it. There’s no tension.
Why bother having a criminal commit a crime? He won’t get away with it. The hero will save the day. And they do it every week. There’s no surprise there.
A good story can create tension and emotion even when stepping back, you know the hero’s in no real danger.
Again, DotNG and Countdown being badly done doesn’t make the killing of any fictional characters a bad thing.
Actually, that’s gotten a bit off topic, because the people complaining about killing characters, nine times out of ten, aren’t complaining about death being cheapened by resurrecting characters, they’re just pissy over a character they like dying.
The people ruining the ending of the latest Blue Beetle series, by turning a great ‘passing on the mantle’ moment into an overly complicated plan to resurrect Ted Kord aren’t annoyed because death is cheap, they’re annoyed because nobody’s decided they’ve got a good story to bring Ted Kord back with, yet.
The ‘there’s only one Batman!’ people aren’t annoyed that Bruce is rather inevitably going to come back, they’re annoyed that there’s going to be a replacement in the meantime.
The people complaining about the death (and zombification) of the Earth Two Superman aren’t upset that ‘death is meaningless’, they’re upset that ‘the first superhero’ is being ‘disrespected’ (the fact that they’re wrong on the first point, and the second is nonsensical doesn’t stop them).
Considering how much they were being used right before “Death of the New Gods” started, I disagree. The Superman books had introduced a bunch of young New Genesis gods, Knockout was a regular in Secret Six, Darkseid & the Female Furies were standbys in the general villain stable–all that was lost for a badly done stunt.
I wasn’t annoyed at the thought that the New Gods were going to be killed off.
It was the actual “Countdown” and “Death of the New Gods” storylines that I found annoying.
Either the New Gods were taken down like chumps (as in “Countdown”), or the plotline was a hot mess (= “Death of the New Gods”). Neither presented anything particularly interesting… which was, indeed, with about half of the New Gods storylines DC had churned out since Kirby.
Morrison’s take on the New Gods was at least interesting, and although I wasn’t particularly enamored of the Super Young Team, it has the possibility of being something I’d read and enjoy.
… even though I’m still irked that Lightray got taken out like a chump as a literal plot-anvil raining down in “Countdown”.
Countdown was awful. DotNG was okay, in the sense that it had a bit of the Kirby flair to it: more of an echo than anything, but okay, fine. Of course, none of it ended up making any damn sense thanks to the apparent inability of DC writers to talk to each other. Or maybe just no one could make any sense of what Morrison was proposing.
But let’s not forget the royal screwups of all screwups: that Countdown has Orion and Darksied fight to the death on Earth. Orion, who is actually already dead and is sort of a spirit or something, kills Darksied, totally laming up this long prophesied story event. He then stumbles off, clearly dying himself. Some people want to help him. Superman, for some reason, says “no, I think collapsing in that garbage heap over there is how he was meant to go, we shouldn’t mess with it, he’s a god and that’s all majestic and stuff.”
Then, in Final Crisis, Orion is found, dead, in a garbage heap. And it’s suddenly a GIANT MYSTERY as to who killed him. WHAT?! It was Superdickery that killed him, end of story.
And what the hell ever happened to the merged New Genesis and Apocalypse we see at the end of DoTNG? What happened to the idea of merged Gods? A 5th world? I love Morrison, but he really is not the sort of guy who makes any attempt to tell a story that is anything other than awesome, continuity be damned. And so no one has any idea what the hell is supposed to have happened.
The real problem is that there are these very very long standing story elements in the DC universe that deal with Kirby stuff. Things like the Source and the Source Wall and all that. And DoTNG sort of resolves a lot of that stuff: but because it makes no sense, no one has any idea what the hell happened. And now the Source wall was, like, covering up the Bleed and… it all doesn’t make any goddamn sense anymore. They didn’t end up killing off the New Gods at all, giving any sort of peace to Kirby’s world. Instead, they layered and incoherent babble of retcons all over and on top of each other that leaves the status of the Gods as “alive” but just plain incoherent.
And that really was the very worst part. The incoherent plotting, the lame rationale for the deaths, the “Source” reveal etc., “the Source is really kind of a dick” meme etc. made absolutely no f’ing sense whatsoever. This amazing world born in a blaze of epic glory puffs out of existence like a mouse fart because of a petulant deity.
The whole thing was so poorly done
Death of the New Gods was a clusterfsck of epic proportions. There is simply no way to salvage anything out of it while retaining the higher-profile events of Final Crisis. Because of this – and because it was poorly written as well – Morrison outright stated he was ignoring it. Even though some nod to retconning it into use was made in one of the Final Crisis tie-ins (Secret Files, IIRC).
Anyway, I do understand what was supposed to happen in Morrison’s take; it’s the Countdown/Death of the New Gods combo that’s a hot mess.
The Fifth World is what was once Apokalips, now to become New New Genesis. The New Gods are returning to there, but the panel in Final Crisis showing them was just symbolic; they’re still supposed to be around in human hosts (as Shilo Norman is Mr. Miracle).
The Super Young Team are the new Forever People of the Fifth World. They’ve got Mother Boxxx (via Shilo), and possibly the Judge of All Evil is the new version of the Infinity-Man. (although that’s just my guess for now.)