Mark Dudley, an illustrator and sequential artist, writes in to comment on the recently released Captain America #600 (see "Captain America Coverage") and the upcoming Captain America: Reborn miniseries (see "The Original Cap Is Coming Back"):

I know how the comic industry is in terms of the longevity of death, but this is getting a little damn ridiculous.  Captain America: Reborn?  Awe come on.  Not only is the constant killing and resurrecting of characters far to excepted by us readers to the point where it is the comics community's biggest inside joke, but the publishers expect us to gleefully fill their pockets because of this crap.

I am now starting to understand that mainstream comics is merely the printed version of the soap opera.  I can't count how many times I have seen people on Days of Our Lives die only to return  a few years later.  This has happened multiple times on most of these soup operas.  The funny thing is that I have heard people in comics criticize how stupid soap operas are.  That's a laugh.

So you kill off the main character of the comic to explore what it would be like if another person took on the mantle, and sometimes it's handled very well.  Marvel not to long ago, killed the Thor character off and they brought him back a far more interesting character.  Yet I fear that when the current writer leaves the book is going to wane.  Still, I have to give kudos to the team on Captain America, these guys have really explore Bucky Barnes.  We get to see what Cap meant to a guy who knows him better than anyone.  Yet ultimately, this will be little more than a "what if" comic in terms of any real lasting ramifications.  Cap comes back and it will be business as usual, oh and Bucky will probably die himself only to be resurrected in some hokey scheme by the Red Skull.  That's a laugh.

DC has done something similar with Batman, killing him and all.  Their Battle for the Cowl miniseries arc in which after Batman's apparent death in DC's latest crossover event, the race to find a successor to Batman
occurs is about as interesting as watching paint dry.  I believe that it could be interesting, with the mantle of Batman falling to the logical choice Dick Grayson, but again it's only temporary.

Asian sequential mediums and most European comics on the other hand feature stories with a definite begining, middle and end, thus they don't suffer from the same nuances  as western comics.  Even when a character does die, like Goku in Dragonball Z, it's all apart of the story and the character is usually depicted as observing and interacting with the story in some angelic or spiritual form.  The self contain nature of these comics and their diverse subject matter, particularly in manga, is what makes them so attractive to young western audiences.  This is particularly true for young female readers.

Why is it death in American comics temporary?  One reason is the fans who eligiously follow these books.  A vast majority of people who follow mainstream comics grew up on them and love these particular characters.  When they get older and their pockets get fatter, they want to maintain this diet.  So any real change to an iconic character is frowned upon and doomed to only be short lived.  The second reason is licensing and marketing.  These companies have huge licensing agreements outside of comics that have to be maintained, so if Bruce Wayne is Batman then Bruce Wayne must always be Batman.  Sure you can play around with that but money talks and the money dictates that Bruce Wayne must always be Batman.

Marvel has done the same thing, making liberal licenses agreements with there characters.  The fact that the licensees totally through out anything resembling the character to  build there own version and mess it up like with the X-Men is proof that companies will sell their souls for a dollar.

It's all about pushing that intellectual property dope.  I am going to put my money where my mouth is on this Captain America thing and I won't be buying it.  This is one of the reasons that comics are looked upon as a joke.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.