I Can Kill You With My Brain

The big announcement from Marvel this week, which was only big if you didn’t pick up on the blatant hints that they had been dropping for months, is that Captain America, who was gunned down back in March 2007, would be coming back.  I’m not sure how this is all going to go down, but I think it may be started in anniversary issue Captain America #600 (out today) and then continuing in the announced five-part series “Captain America Reborn”, starting in July.

I’m not thrilled with this, even though I prefer the original character of Steve Rogers as Captain America to Bucky’s current Captain America.  I know this is comics and this is how the industry works.  A character is killed off and is then brought back sometime in the future.  But I’m  new to comics, having started reading seriously less than 2 years ago, and that doesn’t mean I have to like this practice.  In my opinion, two years is not long enough for a character to be out of the books for their return to get any kind of huge, news-making hype.  Ten years, maybe, but two?  At least Cap’s death lasted longer than Superman’s, which was only about a year.

But I’ll deal with it because I trust writer Ed Brubaker to do the right thing with Captain America.  Brubaker is an amazing writer and I know that even if Marvel wanted Cap’s death to be a big publicity stunt, he won’t write it as one.  I may also be ultra sensitive to this whole thing as it’s my first big death-rebirth as a relatively new reader; a new reader that was hoping the death-rebirth cycle that I’m not fond of would possibly be abandoned by Marvel for a while.

I’ve already sat down over the past few weeks and made decisions about which comics to keep reading and which ones to let go.  While this was originally done as a measure to cut down on the amount of money I was spending on comics from week to week, it also reflected I slight loss of interest in comics.  Instead of reading anything in main Marvel continuity I could get my hands on, I was choosing the few writers/characters I really liked and getting rid of the rest.  I’m not giving up on comics, but the voracious reader I once was is gone, replaced by a selective reader that is more concerned with how he spends his free time and money.

At a time when I’m looking to significantly cut back on the number of comics I read, it doesn’t work in Marvel’s favor to employ the one device that I really don’t like.  What were they thinking?  They really should have consulted with me first.  If they really wanted a big return, I would have pushed them to bring back the not-actually-proven-to-be-dead Kitty Pryde from the X-Men.  They get their big return without having to resurrect a character, as we don’t know for sure that she’s really dead.  I love Joss Whedon, but I still haven’t forgiven him for “killing” one of my (and his) favorite characters.  But I should have expected that from Joss.  He takes characters that you love and destroys them, either metaphorically or by actually physically doing it.  But that’s another blog post for another time.