How Many Dead People Did You See Today?

1.

The older you get, the more dead people you know. They're everywhere you go. In the mornings, when I head out on my wood-scavaging walks, I pass the scratch-built chicken shelter where T. kept her beloved chickens, each of which she michievously named "Mary". Another few strides and there's the path off to the left beside the old railway sleepers where K. would walk himself every day towards a few more hours of half-healthiness. Those dead people. They're everywhere. And more of them keep arriving all the time.

It's not as if I were John Constantine, haunted by the spectres of old friend's betrayed. I'm not weighed down by death or the dead. .It's simply that the reality of death and the number of the familiar-deceased increases as we shuffle our way forwards to our own demise. The banal fact of death and the number of the dead, with us as we breakfast, with us as we brush our teeth before bed.


In Simon Critchely's "The Book Of Dead Philosophers", he collects the details of what philosophers have thought about death, as well as the details of how these great thinkers met their own ends. It's an exhaustive, erudite book, seasoned with a great deal of entertaining tittle-tattle about the lives and thought of our great deep thinkers. And after Critchely's long, detailed survey of more than two thousand years of deathly specualtion, we're left with only one fact we can be sure is true, and just the lone single probability to clear our own minds about The End. The fact is that we are going to die. The probability is that this will be the end of us. Forever. It's coming, we'll all going, and that's the end of that.

Best to focus on living then. Wave "hi" to the shades, to T. and K., and then walk on, in search of more kindling.

2.

Superhero comic books, however, have taken the opposite tack to the "let's-focus-on-the-living" approach. There's not a square foot of the Marvel and DC Universes which aren't tips-of-the-fingers-held-high-in-the-air stuffed deep with the souls of the deceased. The ghosts of friends, families, comrades, enemies, the dead of untold numberless parallel universes, of infinite and terminated alternate timelines. The dead are swarming over there in the superhero worlds and they don't stay quiet. They don't stay dead either. They don't even stay dead dead for long. Their time in purgatory is so short for most of them that you'd think ten-million-monk monastries were singing for their souls and winning for them God's favour for their resurrection.

It wasn't always this way. It's a sign of the coarsening of the grain of an already pretty crass genre that if "death" suddenly meant the same on Marvel and DC Earth as it does here, there would hardly be a single costumed character, friend, family member, arch-enemy or bystander left to construct a story with. (I've long since lost track of the times the entire universe, indeed the whole of creation, has been destroyed and then resurrected.) If dead meant dead-and-staying-dead, there'd be nothing but empty white pages bound within empty white covers for each monthly shipment from the big two publishers.

But death means little where super-folks are concerned. It was never a particularly tenacious opponent, but death did take and keep a few significant souls as the decades past. Both Superman and Batman lost their parents long before they pulled on their coloured tights , and Spider-Man his Uncle Ben just after becoming a wall-crawler. And it is a fact that those five souls who are pretty much the only ones still lost beyond the veil. They've stayed dead, but nobody much else has. Even the most inconsequential characters have nipped in and out of the afterworld, often many times over, and to ever-diminishing effect. The sensational effect of death has been gutted of all sensation except the lassitude of under-whelming familiarity. They will all be back, and back quickly, so why ever be concerned?

And if death has been gutted of its capacity to frighten or excite or shock, then nothing much else in a fictional world can be too fearful either. The end of the universe, the death or absence of god, any number of plagues and tortures and tragedies; it doesn't matter. Because the very worst that can happen is that beloved characters get some brief between-lives breathing space, as if they'd been sent off to an isolated seaside hotel off the beaten track, before returning restored to the fray, there to wait to be slaughtered and raised again.

3.

I was only ever once visited by the dead. A remarkable thing, you might think, but I'm afraid the visitation occured in a dream. It was a powerful dream, amazingly real, but then so was the dream I used to have in which my much-maltreated first girlfriend forgave me, or the teenage-era nightmare where the mushroom cloud of a nuke landing on Heathrow Airport roared up into the sky behind the Staines by-pass.

In my dream, N. came back to see me. He had committed suicide 5 years before, destroyed by the machinations of his wife and his best friend. That he had been the kindest, most gentle and capable man I'd known in that period of my life had meant that his lonely death was inconceivable to me. It stayed with me. It haunted me, you could say, though not in a full-on "The Exorcist"-like fashion. It was a whispering ghost, his suicide, standing behind me at moments dark and bright, whispering how fragile life was and how awful death is too. I was frightened, I think, that, if I let go of the cautionary tale his life had become to me, the same thing as happened to him would close in on me. It became a parable, the one about the good man and the faithless others. Except there'd been no God to inspire salvation, or even to lend the parable a comforting conclusion. N was dead. That was all there was to it.

Then, years after the event, N. appeared in my dream, and in it, I was thinking how I'd been expecting him to be pleased to see me, but he wasn't. He was irritated by me, his irritation straying on occasional into a simmering, repressed anger. Yet his message from the other side was as clearly expressed as I'd have expected from such a fine teacher, as he'd when alive. He asked me: would I please stop thinking about him? Would I stop obsessing about him? I was keeping him back, he explained, calling him in my direction with my strong emotions and my reverential thoughts, when he had things to be doing, things far more important and far, far away. It wasn't even as if we'd been that close when he was alive, he told me, which was a shock, and somewhat hurtful, and somewhat true, too. It was time for me to show him some real respect, he said, and let him go. I had the idea that he was involved in something so seperate and alien to me that it was quite beyond my comprehension, and that it had no bearing on my life, or anything to connected to my life, or anyone to do with life at all.

I never dreamt of his shade again. Though I still treasure his memory, he suddenly become of no importance to me at all beyond the times we'd once shared.

4.

To escape from the lands of the dead today in a superhero comic means nothing. It's less impressive than running a 10 minute mile. It seems to be far more difficult not to escape back to life. This "scared you - elated you" scenario, the use of heroic and reversable deaths, is more than just sensationalist hookum. It's also a plot component which far too many fans have argued is "realistic", thereby missing the fundamental point that superhero comics are not, and never should be, "realistic". Yes, in a universe where Superman and Doomsday might daily hurl skyscrapers at each other, what is so obscenely called "collatoral damage" would be inevitable, as would be the maiming and killing of the mighty fighting protagonists. But there's no point in arguing that "if superheroes were real, they'd get hurt like real people do". The superhero isn't about realistically portraying reality and it never was. The "superhero" isn't real. It's a way of talking about reality. Or, to put it bluntly; it's a metaphor, stupid.

Superheroes can be reimagined to function as more than one metaphor, obviously, and the one that I think is most apt and powerful and relevant here concerns how the endless battles of costumed heroes and villains reflect the endless battles of our own day-to-lives. We never win our battles without cost, and the things we contend with tend to return again and again and again day. Alcoholics are never recovered, they are recovering. Fearful children grown to brave adults still shiver at unexpected noises and the slightest trembling of shadows. We never reach a day when the everyday become easy. Yes, we have occasional victories. We have good days as well as bad. But each day is a litany of routine banal battles against commonplace foes that we faced off against yesterday and will do so tomorrow. Boredom, routine, tiredness, fear, illicit desires: the litany's components are so familiar they are almost invisible to us as we struggle with them. They are rarely driven away, are perhaps never never defeated. But we do our best, because that's what we do, and that's what, in their own way, superheroes do too.

5.

One of the many reasons why the Lee/Ditko "Spider-Man" comics were so revolutionary and appealling in the early 1960s is because Peter Parker hardly ever won an outright victory against his foes. And if he did, there were a thousand other worries, great and small, that would tend to swamp any exhultation at knocking out The Shocker or exposing The Fixer. You might think, following the logic of sensationalism, that an audience would feel cheated by this low-key approach, but gradually exactly the opposite happened. Instead of feeling dissatisfied because Spider-Man was a hard-fighting serial-loser, the audience recognised a reflection of their own lives. It wasn't realism. It was a heightened form of everyday existence. Where you and I might be worried about scientists not taking care of the lethal potential of their discoveries, Spider-Man was terrified by Dr Octopus. Because that, in one reading, is what Dr Octopus is, a comic-book super-villian standing for our fears of the Dr Hellers of the world, with their theories of Mutually Assured Destruction and Hydrogen Bombs. We might be scared that emotionless, violent people dead to empathy might threaten us and attack us. The Lizard hissed his cold-blooded way through Spider-Man's life a hundred times. And none of those hundred return appearances needed be dull or over-familiar, as long as the writer and artist comprehended, consciously or unconsciously, that they need to be reflecting the recurrent and unresolvable conflicts of Monday-morning life, just as they needed to show this by having one big green bloke punch a smaller red-and-blue one.

If, on the other hand, the Lizard is written and portrayed as just a big lizard with a dangerous tail who says "Hhhhssss" quite alot, then the character will get old quickly. Which he did. And the temptation to kill him, and any other character in the same misused and over-used situation, will be strong. But there are few characters so mined out or so intrinsically flawed in their basic conception that it's best to do away with them, and, in a very real sense, killing them is always a profoundly unrealistic thing to do. Because those qualities of conflict which the best villainous characters embody can't ever be done away. There will always be boredom, and colds, and postal strikes. Similarly, the characters embodying these conflicts can't be made boring through repititious use, unless they're used badly. The Joker constantly returns to Gotham because random tragedy and anarchy constantly threaten our lives. And so it is with super-heroes too. The best cape-and-tights characters capture us because they mirror our little lives against their vast, absurb canvas, blowing up our everyday taken-for-granted struggles up onto a huge scale so that we can see our lives better reflected in theirs. The same fights, over and over and over again.

And that's why death is nearly always the wrong choice to make for a superpowered character. Death is obviously not something we experience in everyday life. It is not the everyday. We can experience dying, but not death: death is by definition the absence of experience or experiencer. Kill a super-hero, or a hundred super-heroes, and they are immediately thrown out of the metaphor which shines back at us our own everyday experience. (Bring them back from death and the similarity is shattered beyond repair.) Death is the negation of the superhero genre's power to entertain and, in its' own overblown way, illuminate. Without it in the equation as the unknowable termination point from which rescue is impossible, we can no longer see ourselves in the super-heroes' fate. Take away death and a caped crusader has all of eternity to deal with his problems. And we don't. Time is swiftly running out for us. The collapse of similarity at that point is too much for the metaphor to carry.

6.

I once wondered why Chris Claremont's "X-Men" books were so incredibly popular when story-lines dragged on forever, the soap-opera machinations never concluded, and no apparent plot-climax was ever truly resolved. The X-Men's world seemed to be an endless squabble between an numberless cast for reasons which even the writer seemed to often lose a precise grip of. And hardly anyone ever seemed to die! What could be the appeal of this universe?



7.

There are no dead people in my dreams anymore. It was just the once. In my sleep these days, I am constantly travelling to places which I will never reach, cycling beside or along great motorways close to towns for which I cannot find the exit roads for. I dream of being in charge of grand projects, plays and exhibitions and excavations, but I have no real specialist knowledge to guide my decisions and my authority dwindles until I find myself far away from the action. My frustrating non-life inside my dreams goes on and on, repeats itself over and over, until my wife's alarm clock sounds off, and I get up, and I worry about the bills, and I wonder if I remembered to buy the milk for my cornflakes, thinking how I was doing exactly the same yesterday morning too.

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