"Dying is pointless." (and Rule #5)

My pal Michael Evans emailed me in disgust a few days ago to say he tripped over this nonsense about the death of Captain America in the Guardian of all places, while looking for the obituary for the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It was only a couple of days later I realised how clever that was.
Obituary . Jean Baudrillard. Wednesday March 7, 2007 Guardian Unlimited
"Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place. 'Dying is pointless,' he once wrote. 'You have to know how to disappear.' The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: 'What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?' Baudrillard replied: 'What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.'
Baudrillard, whose simulacrum departed at the age of 77..."

March 12, 2007 02:19 PM Guardian blog. Why Captain America had to die
"The superhero's demise is being analysed in the blogosphere as a damning indictment of George Bush's America.
You've probably heard by now, Captain America - the comic-book superhero - is dead. Certainly if you live in the United States, it's a story that's been hard to miss."
Here stands the noble chap while he was still a picture of health:


That's from one of the two issues I drew in 2004. I thought it would be a good move for the overall benefit of my career to do a short stretch of that kind of work as I had once been in danger of getting a reputation for not being a team player. That happened way back in '93 when I was writing a thing for Dark Horse's ambitious superhero universe, and got to sit in on the script committee for a session. I figured the experience might make for some useful observation. Now those guys are good at their jobs and long may they thrive, but there was one odd issue that came up during the long conference. Having created the superhero team at the centre of this 'universe', they put one member in there who died at the end of the first story. This is standard practice. I call it the Eden effect. These characters lived in a state of grace, and then one died. Mortality has now 'been seen' (remember that phrase) to exist in this 'universe' (Junior Juniper RIP, Thunderbird RIP... I'm embarrassed to admit I know all this crap). The character that had to be offed also happened to have the power to restore mortally wounded people to life by the laying on of hands. No more immortality. Symbolically it all fit exactly so. But one of the notions that got kicked around briefly was of bringing this character back from the dead, except that her powers would now be in reverse and anybody she touched would be turned into a zombie. I exerted all my energy to shoot that one down since it threw the whole universe out of whack, as horror stories operate on reverse principles and you can't play it both ways simultaneously (matter/anti-matter). Or you could, and it would be shit, and besides I'd be the muggins who was going to have to write this particular series. And what would I know, the kids would perhaps have thought it was a 'cool' idea. I lasted five issues before I got the boot.
(The ideal zombie story needs to take place in a separate world because it will be an atheistic apocalypse. It must annihilate without hope. The scene going on behind the end credits in the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead is what a good zombie movie is all about. I threw that in just in case you think I'm being snobby.)

Death in comic books is just this kind of clay pigeon kind of death, a video game where everything is back in place the next time you plug it in. And I'm not the bloke that should be writing it. In my own books, every character I ever offed I can explain exactly why it was done. No gratuitous death in my 'universe'. The only vid game I ever had any time for is the original version of Mario Kart. In fact, I'd play it right now if wee Cal was home from school.
When wee cal was actually 'wee' instead of six foot two, he said a thing which had an effect on my thinking. This was way back in August 1997, when he was five and the news was coming through about the tragedy of Lady Diana Spencer. The lad was getting pissed off because he wanted to watch his superhero animations, and the adults had taken over the television, and eventually he complained loudly and said what was on his mind. "I don't think she's really dead anyway, because you didn't see the car hit the wall".
This would become one of Eddie Campbell's RULES*.
RULE #5: In a visual medium, an event has not occurred unless it can be seen to have occurred. Thus, you can't refer back to something that only happened in a word balloon. Technically it didn't happen at all. (Well, of course you can do it, but you must recognise that your reader will probably be doubting your veracity. You may wish to use that to your advantage, but now we're getting complicated.)

Without wishing to get into arguments about Baudrillard, as I am not equipped to do so, this line, taken from a review of his writings, strikes a note relevant to the current blather, and allows me to exit without leaving you with the bad taste of comic books on your palate: "(essay by Baudrillard...) proposes the familiar notion that we are imprisoned in a world of media simulations, video phantasms, and that we cannot come to know the real not because we are ignorant but because we are overinformed: 'we will never in the future be able to separate reality from its statistical, simulative projection in the media.' This isn’t an uncertainty we’ve experienced in the past, but a brand new kind of uncertainty brought about by an excess of information."

postscript. My pal Evans is the fellow who killed me inThe Fate of The Artist. He would perhaps be fair in claiming as justification the fact that I had killed him in three other books. One day, when I think my publisher is not looking, I will tell you the whole sorry story, and how he got his ultimate revenge, apart from killing me I mean, because as I have been at pains to demonstrate, in comic books Death is pretty bogus.