I was only five years old when Chris Claremont and John Byrne killed Jean Grey, one of the founding members of the X-Men, at the end of "The Dark Phoenix Saga," but even at the young age when I started reading Marvel Comics in the early 80s, I knew the story of her death was a big deal. I had no idea what the word "audacity" meant back then, but that's definitely how I felt about what Claremont and Byrne had done. The sheer moxie of these guys to kill off a main character of the book was simply unheard of at the time, and the fan community, years before the internet, apparently knew how to make their displeasure known. So vehement was the reaction to Jean Grey's death that Byrne who had moved on from Uncanny X-Men and who was now writing and drawing Fantastic Four, ended up bringing Jean back in the pages of that book.
This death marked the first time that a leading character, and not a supporting character like Gwen Stacy or even Bucky, had died in the pages of a mainstream comic book. Unlike Gwen Stacy, the love interest, or Bucky, the sidekick, Jean Grey, was an actual leading character, and in her guise as the Phoenix, she was one of the book's central characters. Not long thereafter, Marvel upped the ante by killing another of its characters, Mar-Vell, in a graphic novel just dedicated to telling that story. Marvel's rivals at DC followed suit, with hard-hitting deaths like Supergirl and the Flash taking place in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Spanning the first half of the 80s, these stories all hit pretty hard for those of us old enough to remember.
When Marvel succumbed to fan pressure and brought Jean Grey back from the dead about five years after they had killed her, this marked the beginning of the end of death having any real meaning in comics, at least as far as main characters were concerned. Sure, characters continued to die in the years that followed, but suddenly, resurrecting them, regardless of the storytelling device used, was a real option that neither of the "Big Two" hesitated to shy away from.
In the early 90s, DC Comics, whose Superman comics were not selling all that well, made what was arguably the most successful use of the whole "death" of a character in comics history: they killed off Superman, and then resurrected him. That basically blew the doors off the whole death and resurrection of a main character: it was no longer just a gimmick to boost sales on a flagging book, it was the gimmick. It became a running joke that a character had not really arrived until they got to die. High profile comic book deaths since then have included Batman, Wolverine and Captain America, all of which were heavily marketed by DC's and Marvel's respective hype machines. These came with tie-in titles galore, big build-ups and epilogues and, of course, the inevitable return of the character. To my mind, with each death and resurrection, the concept honestly felt less and less meaningful as a storytelling device, and more and more crass.
With the death of the popular Gen Z character Kamala Khan, aka the current Ms. Marvel, I'd argue that the concept has hit a new low.
Only the folks at Marvel know how it was decided that Ms. Marvel would die in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man, but however this process may have taken place, this was easily one of the worst-conceived "deaths" that I could possibly think of since Marvel started the ball rolling on this forty three years ago. Rather than die in her own book, which, incidentally is missing in action, Kamala Khan dies as a bit player in someone else's story, and as a "twist" death. It's no secret that Marvel was hyping up The Amazing Spider-Man #26 to be the title's most shocking issue since the death of Gwen Stacy, and so all eyes were on Mary Jane Watson. Even allowing for a twist death, though, a more likely candidate would have been someone from Peter's supporting cast like Norman Osborn. Kamala was an outside choice, especially since she barely showed up in the book, so it would have been a surprising twist, if nothing else.
Except, thanks to Marvel's marketing department, it wasn't even that; apparently deciding at the last minute that it would be better to hype up the death than surprise readers, Marvel plastered her death all over the entertainment press weeks before it actually happened, robbing the story of any impact whatsoever, and highlighting how sad Kamala Khan's plight actually was; she didn't even have her own book, even just a miniseries, to die in. Pretty much anyone who's ever read a comic book knows she'll be back, but there is something especially pathetic about how Marvel has packaged this particular death gimmick.
Kamala's return will most likely coincide with her feature film debut in November's The Marvels, possibly in a miniseries, followed by the return of her own monthly book. If and when that happens, I hope Marvel has the decency to put it in the hands of creators that will treat her better than Zeb Wells and the rest of Spider-Man editorial have.
And maybe...just maybe...Marvel can lay off the gimmick deaths for a while after so clearly botching this one.
