A cape gets draped over a body on the last page. A narrator explains that the city can sleep tonight, and the final panel pulls back to a skyline with one light still burning. The issue has an ending in the shape of an ending, and it stepped around the only question the story had been asking. Nobody ever has to say what any of it cost.
Killing the villain reads as decisive, yet it's the cheapest move available. The hard part of an ending is working out what the conflict took out of somebody, and a body on the floor answers that with nothing at all. Death only means something when something outlasts it, and the appeal of the move is that nothing has to. Comics reach for it harder than any other medium, for reasons built into the way the business runs.
Nothing Is Allowed to End
A monthly book cannot conclude; the character has to be on the stands again in thirty days and on a lunchbox the year after, so no story in the line gets permission to finish anything for good. Death is the only punctuation available that looks final from the outside. It photographs well on a cover and it fits in a solicitation, which is most of why it keeps getting ordered.
In superhero comics, death rarely means a character is gone for good. Superman died in the early 1990s in one of the biggest sales events comics had ever seen, only to return within a year. Jason Todd was killed off after readers voted on his fate by telephone, then returned decades later. Jean Grey has died and come back so many times that her resurrections have become a recurring part of her story.
Killing off a character creates a dramatic moment without requiring the writer to resolve the larger story. When that character inevitably returns, the death loses much of its meaning, especially if nothing has changed in the meantime. Readers learn to expect the reversal, so even major deaths become difficult to take seriously. Eventually, the shock wears off because everyone knows there's a good chance the character will be back.
A Villain Is an Argument
The villains worth writing about are positions rather than obstacles. Magneto is a claim about what mutants owe a species that wants them dead. Mister Freeze is a man refusing to accept a death. Ra's al Ghul has a thesis about what civilization costs the planet, and he has done the arithmetic on it. None of them is in the book to be punched.
Stopping a heartbeat leaves all of that standing where it was. The argument never lived in the body. The next writer finds somebody else making it behind a different mask, and readers recognize the shape before the first fight starts. The position holds its ground while the costume changes hands.
That's the double charge against it. It substitutes for a resolution the writer never built, and it aims at the one part of a villain that was never the point. A story can put Magneto in the ground and still owe its readers every question Magneto arrived with. The next arc tends to pay that debt by printing the question again.
The Exceptions Prove It
The stories people reach for to argue the other side are running a different play. In Kraven's Last Hunt the villain wins. He buries Spider-Man alive and takes his place in the costume, and the story closes with Kraven taking his own life because nothing is left to hunt. Nobody defeats him and no conflict gets settled by his death. DeMatteis has said he never read it as a noble death, and the comic treats it as the end of a sick man.
Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? takes a different approach. After killing an enemy, Superman decides he's broken the rule that made him who he was. He exposes himself to gold kryptonite, giving up his powers and disappearing into an ordinary life under a new name. The killing has a permanent consequence. Superman wins the fight, but the price is giving up everything that made him Superman.
The Dark Knight Returns comes at it from the other direction. Batman breaks and goes for the neck but stops short of finishing the job, and the Joker twists his own neck knowing the police will hang it on Batman. The death lands as the Joker's last move instead of Batman's victory. Every example here leaves something behind that outlasts the body, and not one of them uses a dead villain to tie off a plot. The lazy version sits waiting in the editorial calendar, and it never asks the writer for a thing.
