LOL Deaths

If you're a comic reader, by now you're familiar with the concept of Women in Refrigerators.

For the uninitiated, this is a 'technique' used by some writers wherein they kill off a loved one (usually a woman) of the protagonist purely to get an emotional response out of them, usually to inspire them to go out and get revenge on the perpetrator and in the process move the plot along.

Gail Simone coined the term as the name of a website in response to a Green Lantern comic in which Major Force kills GL's girlfriend and leaves her body in the fridge for our hero to find―apparently because he wanted to catch a beating from someone whose power is to hit you with anything he can imagine.

The whole thing's been debated, pointed out, and overused for the past decade, so I won't dwell on it.

Besides, there is a new kind of lazy, disrespectful writing to bitch about. I call this phenomena 'LOL Deaths'. Find out what they are and why they need to be stopped under the cut.

SPOILER WARNING for Second Coming, Necrosha, and several older comics.




Where Women in Refrigerators is meant to manipulate characters, LOL Deaths are meant to manipulate the audience, usually into believing that a) a situation or villain is more dangerous than they actually are or b) that a crossover event was important.

Often, these deaths are characterized by the dying character being a D-lister or lower, usually a character who was only recently reintroduced in the franchise in that arc or the one before. Such characters are rarely if ever mourned for longer than the page on which they died, and if they even get a funeral, it will only serve as a backdrop for characters to discuss the ongoing event or aftermath of it, completely unrelated to the deceased.

LOL Death victims rarely get last words because they're usually killed instantly. If they do get last words, it's because they're boasting or doing something stupid so as to make the kill ironic to the point of near comedy and disrespect for them. Expect the killer to make a crack about it.

Reactions to these deaths, as noted, usually happen on the same page (or the page where the body is discovered) and nowhere else in the series if at all. These are usually limited to the character closest to them screaming their name and being restrained by another character who tells them that the plot is more important than comforting their dying friend/love. Inevitably, the character agrees and never mentions that person again.

There's a fifty percent chance that once the body drops, we the audience never sees them again, leading to the illusion that they're just left to rot there. If they're lucky, if there's enough of the body left (this is a super powered murder we're talking about here) someone will close their eyes or cover them with a sheet before forgetting about them forever.

The most lucky of these will get a memorial story, usually written by a different writer. Expect these to be back-up stories or parts of anthologies where they're used as filler. A true LOL Death will never get a memorial issue or one shot; that implies that editorial actually gives a crap about the character, which is the anti-thesis of a LOL Death.

Examples and Analysis

Here are a few examples of character deaths in the last three years and a breakdown of what makes them LOL Deaths or not. Once again, fair warning that spoilers abound.

1) Bill Foster (Goliath/Black Goliath) in Civil War. Among the many, many other sins against comics perpetrated by Mark Millar's Civil War event, it also manages to execute an almost pitch perfect LOL Death.

Black Goliath was a short lived replacement for Hank Pym who served an even shorter stint as his own hero before going into comic book limbo. So of course, he would be the man essentially sitting at Captain America's right hand when a big event came up. Honestly, he should have seen it coming.

In the only actually exciting battle of the main book of the crossover, Black Goliath tempts fate by pulling off an awesome move involving a tanker truck, spouting a one liner about it, and paying for it near instantly by way of having a van sized hole blown through him by an evil robot clone of Thor.

Bill lucked out though. He got a funeral in the main book itself! A humiliating funeral where he was stuffed into a tarp and buried in giant form while Tony Stark recaps the plot and foreshadows all over the place. We never heard from Bill Foster again.

Wikipedia says Bill's nephew took up the name, but have you heard of him? I thought not.

2) Diamond Lil, Onyxx, and Wither in Necrosha. Let's face it: Necrosha was made of this trope. It was advertised as being conceptualized by Chris Kyle and Craig Yost, two writers who used this device so much in New X-men that the tagline of Necrosha was “From the Murderers of Mutants”.

Seeing as the X-men franchise averages three of these a year, it almost seems natural to base an event around all those pointlessly murdered characters coming back and... dying needlessly. Seriously, Characters like Banshee and Pyro appear solely so we can see Cyclops blast them to dust again in an event where nothing important happened at all.

Not that nothing happened. Namely, people died. For no reason. First, we have Diamond Lil and Onyxx who died from bum-rushing a team of villains, all of whom (Except Blink) have the explicit power of 'kill people'. They die instantly, with Onyxx literally exploding (something we've never seen Wither's power do to someone). Both get the obligatory “First name!” shout and Madison Jefferies, a man who can animate machinery to kick people's asses, has to be restrained from running head long into Team Death over Lil.

Lil actually managed to get a touching send off in the Nation X anthology (because an important character loved her, you see), and both plus Meld (who died slow so we could have this scene in Second Coming) were then subjected to Bill Foster level humiliation as Cyclops shows their pictures and bemoans fate not because three people are dead, but because three more numbers ticked off the 'mutants left until end of franchise' ticker Joe Quesada seems to have mandated to be mentioned in every comic with an X in the title and now Plan B for reversing Decimation (apparently a massive, unprotected mutant orgy) won't work because it totally would have with 180 or whatever ridiculous number Marvel thinks is a minority.

Another death in Necrosha was former Hellion, Wither. His isn't a LOL Death, despite having all the earmarks: a d-lister returning for a big event, no funeral, not even mentioned when the mutant counter went down. For one, he manages to take a whole page to die, complete with dialogue detailing why he should die and a chance offered to him to stand down and not die. Even though he did nothing in the rest of the crossover besides kill Onyxx (who I didn't even know had a real name until I wrote this post) and bitching and whining at Blink and Eli Bard, he still managed to have an (off camera) effect on Elixir, thus making his death horribly pointless (especially since Kyle and Yost talked forever about having plans for him) but not a LOL Death.

3) Steve Rogers (Captain America) in Captain America #25. Unlike the other alums on this list, you'll notice that you didn't need to use Wikipedia to find out who this guy is. Which in and of itself should be enough to tell you that Cap's death was likely not a LOL Death. In fact, this event makes my list as an example of what might, in fact, be an anti-LOL Death.

The actual death, in Captain America #25 had all the earmarks: Coming off a big event, Cap is literally gunned down in the street while handcuffed. There is a small comfort in seeing that Cap was shielding the officer walking with him, but it didn't really make the death look more respectful of the character. Things got worse as we learn that Cap did not in fact die taking a bullet for the officer, but was shot by his brainwashed love interest.

But in the wake of Cap's death, things started to happen that do not happen with a LOL Death. First was the aftermath of his death: it was mentioned in other books, characters reacted to it franchise wide, and there was not just a funeral issue, but a funeral mini-series. His comic didn't even end, it continued telling the story of the aftermath and his immediate replacement.

In the end, the entire event turned out to be a two year Death and Rebirth storyline, culminating in Steve coming back and better than ever. While I'm still not exactly enamored with the storyline, the end result not only had meaning and weight in the world, but turned out to be respectful to Cap's character. It was definitely not a LOL Death.

Quick Examples

- New Warriors members Microbe, Namorita and Night Thrasher in Civil War. C-listers that show up to trigger an event with their deaths, no bodies, no burial, no funeral and universally reviled in universe to this day.

- 40+ students of the Xavier Institute in New X-men. Killed off by a rocket attack following Decimation as they were literally already leaving the series, got a funeral, most still don't have names. The aforementioned Kyle and Yost still joke about this scene and admit they did it because they didn't know what to do with the characters.

- Tattoo/Longstrike in New Warriors vol 4. Depowered mutant from Morrison's run with one story under her belt, killed in first arc of a new (and short lived) series.

- Banshee in Deadly Genesis. Killed to show off a new, overpowered villain while failing at an act of heroism. Only his daughter seems to remember or care, corpse bought back for some more humiliation in Necrosha.

- Ariel in Second Coming. This might be premature as it happened very recently, but this is what the X-verse does to characters. Killed by missile attack while in a jeep with effective immortals Wolverine and X-23. It's not clear that she's dead or if she used her power to escape, but Wolverine doesn't even care enough to check. No one even screamed her name.

Why it's a Problem

Cut to bare bones, it's just lazy writing, plain and simple. It's very easy to show that something's dangerous by having it kills someone, it takes actual skill to make it clearly dangerous without.

But the use of red shirts is also lazy writing, but not so egregious because no one is attached to a red shirt with no name. I can guarantee you that every character made by Marvel or DC has a fan. When you toss that character out for a LOL Death, it's disrespectful to the character and unwelcome by those fans.

What's more, the entire point of having the death is to emotionally manipulate the reader. But to people with no connection to that character, it's just another redshirt. So you're either making a reader mad, or failing at the whole point of the exercise in the first place!

Beyond that, you face another problem: someday another writer is going to want to use the character you killed. Everyone has a random D-lister that holds a place in their heart (NXM's Hellion, Loa and Mercury for me) and because of your shock death, they will have to resurrect that character instead of just pulling them out of comicbook limbo. Resurrections are notoriously never clean or pretty storywise and fans hate the convoluted plots that spin from them.

So just lay off, guys. Think up a new method of getting some emotional torque and drive that into the ground for a while.