Lorendiac
04-15-2005, 06:01 PM
[Title should end: Death and Resurrection. I posted the first version a little too soon. Sorry.]
Yesterday I was in a thread on an X-Men forum where people were sharing gripes and suggestions and so forth about one of the perennial problems superhero fans, and particularly X-Men fans, face: the revolving door of death, and how hard it gets to take seriously any "dramatic" storyline that kills someone off, if you just know another writer will bring back that particular X-Man a few years from now in order to get some extra "drama" into his own work! All of a sudden I started typing the following, much to my own surprise, and here's what I suggested I would do for a change if it were up to me.
**********
Here's an idea for a storyline, or running subplot, that could stretch out across the years in a long run of an X-title.
Introduce a new female mutant character. Her name doesn't matter to what I'm planning, but for the sake of argument, let's call her Capacitor and say she has electrical powers.
She falls madly in love with Colossus. They get engaged to be married. Then he dies a gruesome death, doing something impossibly heroic, leaving behind a battered but intact and recognizable corpse.
Capacitor is upset because the other X-Men kinda shrug this off, saying, "We'll sure miss the big lug for the next year or two, until he comes back!" She thinks this shows a profound lack of sympathy on their parts. She wants to be comforted now that her first true love is dead. The X-Men try to educate her by showing her the long, long list of events where members of the X-Men or affiliated mutant groups have died - and come back. She just can't believe that has anything to do with this case. She knows in her heart that Peter is dead.
So Ororo and Jean drag her to an appointment with Doc Samson. "Doc, she's denying reality! She's retreated into her own little morbid fantasy world where Death Is Permanent for Mutant X-Men! Isn't there anything you can do?"
Doc Samson tries to get her to confront reality, but Capacitor keeps chattering about superficial matters such as how a DNA test "proved" it was really Colossus who died, and so did fingerprints, retinal scans, the autopsy, her own eyewitness testimony of the circumstances of his death . . .
Samson finally gives up and tells Jean and Ororo that Capacitor is suffering from a slight case of paranoia - she firmly believes the X-Men have many ruthless and powerful enemies (true) and that these enemies are so dangerous that they actually have developed ways to occasionally kill off individual veterans of the X-Men family in such a way that those veterans will stay dead (obviously false).
However, he says encouragingly, she is physically healthy and her cognitive skills in accurately assessing and solving problems in the real world are still quite sharp in all other respects. So they should treat her wild idea that "when someone I love dies, that person is Really Dead" as a sort of religious obsession that it's more tactful not to quarrel with even if you think it's full of logical holes. We all have to tolerate a few crazy ideas in our friends, after all. Accordingly, Capacitor continues to participate in one of the monthly X-Men titles on a regular basis.
For the next five years, realtime one phony "return from the dead" after another takes place in that title. Often featuring Colossus, but also featuring any other X-Man who is currently "supposed to be dead." In each case, other X-Men tend to take it at face value: "Cyclops! Good to see you again! We've been worried sick!" In each case, Capacitor is the voice of skepticism, having recently fallen under the dangerous influence of some fictional organization that will be closely modeled on the real-world CSICOP. In each case in those five years, she turns out to be dead right in suspecting it's a robot, a clone, an alien shapeshifter, an analog from an alternate timeline, or some other type of substitute for the real thing. The other X-Men grow increasingly frustrated with her pig-headedness, particularly because additional members are also dying during this five-year span . . . and, oddly enough, NOT coming back a year or two later! Worrisome!
Doc Samson advises them that sooner or later Colossus will really come back, and then Capacitor will have to do some serious soul-searching and make a successful adjustment to "reality" when it's staring her in the face - or else she won't, but he thinks she's tough enough and resilient enough that she'll weather the storm when the time comes.
Eventually, as my long run as a writer on an X-Title comes to an end (okay, I'm veering into wild fantasy here - bear with me, though!) I decide that if I leave Capacitor around for the next writer to play with, he'll probably just kill her off anyway. So in my final story arc I have the rest of her teammates decide that her profound skepticism combined with a previously-unsuspected aspect of her electrical powers is creating "negative vibrations" which act as a sort of karmic static, blocking out all the subtle influences in X-Continuity that would otherwise be causing the real resurrections of fallen comrades at regular intervals several months apart, or whatever. In other words, her insistence that dead loved ones won't come back is a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as she hangs around the X-Mansion too much! So they finally come up with some incredibly convoluted mission statement that requires one brave young female mutant do undercover work in some odd corner of the globe for a long time and trick her into thinking that this is the only way to Save the World. Off she goes (into a solo series) and as soon as she's offstage, the next writer to take over on this title can celebrate his arrival with a Triple Header by bringing back Colossus, Wolverine, and Storm from the dead in a Triple Header! (All of them having died sometime in the past five years!)
Sales figures on the issue in which they come back go sky-high, and all good X-Fans can mutter, "Now, why didn't Lorendiac think of doing that? Didn't he realize that bringing back popular dead heroes is always a good way to boost sales? At least this new guy really knows his stuff!"
Okay, okay, I'm raving there. Just had to get that idea off my chest while it was still fresh, before I lost interest in typing it out . . . :)
Yesterday I was in a thread on an X-Men forum where people were sharing gripes and suggestions and so forth about one of the perennial problems superhero fans, and particularly X-Men fans, face: the revolving door of death, and how hard it gets to take seriously any "dramatic" storyline that kills someone off, if you just know another writer will bring back that particular X-Man a few years from now in order to get some extra "drama" into his own work! All of a sudden I started typing the following, much to my own surprise, and here's what I suggested I would do for a change if it were up to me.
**********
Here's an idea for a storyline, or running subplot, that could stretch out across the years in a long run of an X-title.
Introduce a new female mutant character. Her name doesn't matter to what I'm planning, but for the sake of argument, let's call her Capacitor and say she has electrical powers.
She falls madly in love with Colossus. They get engaged to be married. Then he dies a gruesome death, doing something impossibly heroic, leaving behind a battered but intact and recognizable corpse.
Capacitor is upset because the other X-Men kinda shrug this off, saying, "We'll sure miss the big lug for the next year or two, until he comes back!" She thinks this shows a profound lack of sympathy on their parts. She wants to be comforted now that her first true love is dead. The X-Men try to educate her by showing her the long, long list of events where members of the X-Men or affiliated mutant groups have died - and come back. She just can't believe that has anything to do with this case. She knows in her heart that Peter is dead.
So Ororo and Jean drag her to an appointment with Doc Samson. "Doc, she's denying reality! She's retreated into her own little morbid fantasy world where Death Is Permanent for Mutant X-Men! Isn't there anything you can do?"
Doc Samson tries to get her to confront reality, but Capacitor keeps chattering about superficial matters such as how a DNA test "proved" it was really Colossus who died, and so did fingerprints, retinal scans, the autopsy, her own eyewitness testimony of the circumstances of his death . . .
Samson finally gives up and tells Jean and Ororo that Capacitor is suffering from a slight case of paranoia - she firmly believes the X-Men have many ruthless and powerful enemies (true) and that these enemies are so dangerous that they actually have developed ways to occasionally kill off individual veterans of the X-Men family in such a way that those veterans will stay dead (obviously false).
However, he says encouragingly, she is physically healthy and her cognitive skills in accurately assessing and solving problems in the real world are still quite sharp in all other respects. So they should treat her wild idea that "when someone I love dies, that person is Really Dead" as a sort of religious obsession that it's more tactful not to quarrel with even if you think it's full of logical holes. We all have to tolerate a few crazy ideas in our friends, after all. Accordingly, Capacitor continues to participate in one of the monthly X-Men titles on a regular basis.
For the next five years, realtime one phony "return from the dead" after another takes place in that title. Often featuring Colossus, but also featuring any other X-Man who is currently "supposed to be dead." In each case, other X-Men tend to take it at face value: "Cyclops! Good to see you again! We've been worried sick!" In each case, Capacitor is the voice of skepticism, having recently fallen under the dangerous influence of some fictional organization that will be closely modeled on the real-world CSICOP. In each case in those five years, she turns out to be dead right in suspecting it's a robot, a clone, an alien shapeshifter, an analog from an alternate timeline, or some other type of substitute for the real thing. The other X-Men grow increasingly frustrated with her pig-headedness, particularly because additional members are also dying during this five-year span . . . and, oddly enough, NOT coming back a year or two later! Worrisome!
Doc Samson advises them that sooner or later Colossus will really come back, and then Capacitor will have to do some serious soul-searching and make a successful adjustment to "reality" when it's staring her in the face - or else she won't, but he thinks she's tough enough and resilient enough that she'll weather the storm when the time comes.
Eventually, as my long run as a writer on an X-Title comes to an end (okay, I'm veering into wild fantasy here - bear with me, though!) I decide that if I leave Capacitor around for the next writer to play with, he'll probably just kill her off anyway. So in my final story arc I have the rest of her teammates decide that her profound skepticism combined with a previously-unsuspected aspect of her electrical powers is creating "negative vibrations" which act as a sort of karmic static, blocking out all the subtle influences in X-Continuity that would otherwise be causing the real resurrections of fallen comrades at regular intervals several months apart, or whatever. In other words, her insistence that dead loved ones won't come back is a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as she hangs around the X-Mansion too much! So they finally come up with some incredibly convoluted mission statement that requires one brave young female mutant do undercover work in some odd corner of the globe for a long time and trick her into thinking that this is the only way to Save the World. Off she goes (into a solo series) and as soon as she's offstage, the next writer to take over on this title can celebrate his arrival with a Triple Header by bringing back Colossus, Wolverine, and Storm from the dead in a Triple Header! (All of them having died sometime in the past five years!)
Sales figures on the issue in which they come back go sky-high, and all good X-Fans can mutter, "Now, why didn't Lorendiac think of doing that? Didn't he realize that bringing back popular dead heroes is always a good way to boost sales? At least this new guy really knows his stuff!"
Okay, okay, I'm raving there. Just had to get that idea off my chest while it was still fresh, before I lost interest in typing it out . . . :)