I think fans of Steve Rogers will be pleased.

i guess then we can expect Batman to be back in 2 years. These 2 companies seem to lift the same ideas. Cap dead-bucky takes over. Batman dead-dick grayson takes over.

I prefer death to the alternative. Batman's back breaking? Ugh. Hal Jordan goes crazy and kills everything in sight for a few issues and then becomes a villian and dies a hero? O_o *Bang* Dead. They're back later with some odd logic*, but the story pain only lasts a few panels and it's back to the same. Long drawn out stuff....John Stewart in a wheelchair. Oy!



*Hey, yeah, that was me. I wasn't the machine or the other dude or the other dude...I was the Superman looking guy in black with longer hair. Yup. Mah bad.

Not much to go on with the old standards anymore, though some of the Ultimate lines like the Galacticus Trilogy are good. The Ultimates was good. Haven't read any since the first HC though.

Some Vertigo and Wildstorm titles are still good, like Fables. I still read Ex Machina, though like every other Brian Vaughan comic, the threads started coming apart after a few issues. Shame, dude comes up with great ideas (Y: The Last Man, Runaways, etc.) but can't keep things together.

Still waiting for a new brilliant title like Transmetropolitan to come along.

Picked up Bendis's Alias (first TPB) the other day. Yeah I know it's ancient, but we don't get all the new titles here, so it takes me a while to get around to the good stuff.

I'd have respected it all more if they kept him dead. Is Batman dead, I haven't kept up? Like there's a body, HE IS DEAD, DEAD?! Cause' they did that with Cap, made sure Logan went and smelled the body, it was him, he was dead as far as we could all tell.

Andy, I think Ultimates is awesome too. Why I like it is they can KILL characters and it's not such a big deal because it's not the REAL Marvel U. It's way more fun/interesting.

What a great read that was.

I'll continue to pick up 2000AD every week though. Dredd looks like he's retiring, and I think they have the balls to do it to the character...

Batman isn't dead; just trapped in the past , apparently. This was in Finl Crisis #7.
The world just thinks he's dead.

Well at least WE, the readers, aren't being duped into thinking he's dead as a crappy marketing gimmick.

Yes, Grant Morrison handled that pretty well; the constant killing of characters that we know will return does get tiring.

i hate when characters are killed off and then returned
i also find comics set in "different times lines or dimensions" to be able to do more.
how many times has jean grey died and been brought back with a horrible excuse?

I agree, DC Elseworld titles tend to be some of my favorite stories.

i know it's pretty cheesy, but i LOVE the original kingdom come story.

I have a heard time thinking that anybody mistakes this dying and coming back to life shit as good storytelling. I would much rather have beginnings, middles, and ends, rather than this never ending reincarnation garbage. The big American comic franchises are hard to take seriously. Thank god for Vertigo, Wildstorm and to a far lesser extent Marvel's Icon imprint. It's the big two's saving grace. Books with storylines that end are far more exciting.

I pretty much think the ONLY good Marvel and DC story lines are the mini series/one off types. I love the characters from both franchises, and there are some great writers and artists in both rosters, but a never ending storyline sucks. The characters will "live forever" as long as we're telling stories about them. Why treat them like a real life linear non-stop story? Just tell good stories, they're more like soap operas now than the myths and legends that inspired them.

I agree. I don't get the notions that characters always need stories to be relevant either. Look at Kaneda from Akira. He only appeared in one story. It's six books long and ruled. His image, and character remain undiminished. He doesn't need a new costume or story to keep him hip or fresh. One could argue that the character is stronger because it's been undilluted by multiple stories and incarnations.

No Bat-Mite, or throw away amnesia issue spoiling that franchise!

I think the thing with the marquee characters is they make up a billion dollar stable that any company would love to have. You can *never* kill a character like Superman, Batman, or Spiderman. The revenues they bring in from thousands of licensing partners is massive. Death (if it's permanent) comes once for a character. Lunchboxes, cartoons, and paper napkins go on and on like the Energizer bunny.

What would be nice is if the companies actually would make the death of a character meaningful. When you purport to kill someone and bring them back in another storyline or "universe," you cheapen the character's emotional impact. So yeah I do think they should rethink how they go about knocking heroes off, because these "death of..." episodes haven't got much credibility left.

You can make money off characters who are no longer around. Just look at Goku. Akira Toriyama and Shonen Jump are still milking that cash cow. Just because the story is over the merchandise goes on!

Not to the tune of $1 billion for a single movie.

Check for comic book characters:

http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegr ... world-wide

I don't know Harry Potter has 7 books. LOTR just 3. Those did ok on the list. Endless story telling doesn't necessarily make you the money.

Yeah but it's really apples and oranges. Batman and company over the last 50-60 years have slowly entered into a kind of collective folklore. They've moved beyond being characters in a linear story line and have become larger than life iconic figures. Quite different from characters who only appeared once in an anime film or short series of books.

Now, take a look at the figures in a one-off like Watchmen. OK, there you have an encapsulated ,linear story line with a clear start and finish. Killing the characters is fine, since it fulfills their role in the story.

With Akira, LOTR, and Harry Potter (who could very well see life in a later volume of stories from Rowling, in any case), you're also looking at characters constructed for appearance in a finite story.

Superman and company were not designed for cut and dry, start and finish story telling. From the beginning their books were open ended, But even if you "kill" one of them, the next generation of readers can always enjoy a retelling or re-envisioning of their stories, eh?

Well I always view the Marvel/DC characters the way I view mythological or tall tale type characters. With them each story is about THEM and what THEY'D do and what makes them heroes/villains/less-human/more-human etc. With LOTR, Akira, stuff like that, the story is ABOUT the major conflict/plot. Destroying the Ring etc. Then we just end up loving the characters made who carry out these acts, but the story is not really about them. But with Superman or Spider-Man, ANY story can be told as long as a few character rules keep true.

Anyway, what's up, Rogers back or what? PM's welcome if no one wants to spoil it or just write SPOILER really big than spill the beans.

I understand that these characters were meant to run in serial. My point is that this open ended perpetual story telling is not as good as traditional finite stories. In fact the stories we like best about these characters are encapsulated in story arcs and printed in graphic novels as complete volumes, with beginning middles and ends that are left open for the next writer. There is no reason necessarily however, that finite stories can't be the way these characters are handled. It's not about the money they make or their iconic status. LOTR, makes money, and Goku is iconic. They are told this way because that is the way these two American comic companies chose to tell them not because it is the best possible way to tell stories.

Or maybe it's just me that doesn't like the whole classic comic continuity thing.

I think i'm going to have to start from the beginning.

Yeah I think the continuity issue is where they've really screwed the pooch. For decades, a hero might have had a book or two, but the continuity was there. Well, that was until the 80's. I think the whole mess started with Crisis on Infinite Earths. But even then, they did a nice job keeping things tight and connecting it with stories from other books.

These days, there's not even any pretense of staying true to a character or developing him in a way people can follow, since so many characters are fragmented through use in all sorts of parallel/multi/alter universes.

So I still think open-ended use of these characters is fine, but it would be nice if some semblance of order was restored in the DC/Marvel Universes, not to make things neat and tidy, but to give new (or old) readers a chance of getting into a character with any hope in hell of figuring out what's going on.

Or, you could say eh, screw it all, stick to books like Transmet and Fables and live a happy life free of geek angst.

Warren Ellis also wrote most of "The Authority" titles, they're collected as trade paperbacks. I thought it was far superior, but it involves a psychotic superhero team instead of a psychotic journalist so also very different.