The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. Here the whole sense of the life is epitomized. Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave. –Joseph Campbell
Clearly this was serious stuff, and I sat, stunned, staring at that cover until my barber summoned me to the high red chair. He draped the long white bib round my neck, and for a second I saw myself in the mirror opposite, wide-eyed and speechless behind my own glass wall. Then the barber spun the chair, picked up comb and scissors, and solemnly set about his tonsorial task. It was 1961, I was eight years old, and a door had just closed on the Age of Innocence.
But the incontrovertible fact is that 156 years ago David Crockett crossed the Red River into Texas and met his death at the Alamo, though historians still argue about the circumstances of his demise. And so the stories surrounding his name are not called myths but tall tales, which means we admire their artistry while recognizing them as bald-faced lies. Davy couldn’t beat the death rap, nor can any hero, man or woman, born into this civilization called America–and so all our heroes must be tragic, and all our stories, carried to their true end, unhappy.
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Of course Big Blue was back in action a month later (in what I suppose might be called one of his unimaginary tales), but I never returned to his adventures with the same enthusiasm. He got along fine without me. Until two weeks ago, when it was again time to face off with hoary death. Only this time it was for real. The villain was neither Luthor nor green Kryptonite but Doomsday, a killing machine from the earth’s core who died along with Superman in a fight for Metropolis. Once again the world mourned.
Of course, that could just be the cynics talking. Let’s admit the possibility that Carlin and his ilk are more interested in Superman’s heroic proportions than in his contribution to their bottom line. And instead of allying the Man of Steel with the likes of Crockett or Herakles, they have their eye on bigger game. The great cults of the ancient world centered on “heroes” who were slain and then miraculously reborn. In Babylon they revered Tammuz, “the son who rises.” In Egypt they honored Osiris, in Phrygia Attis, in Greece Adonis. All of these deities were associated with spring’s arrival and the renewal of life–what Joseph Campbell called the “continuous miracle of vivification which wells within all things”–and when the early Christians were organizing a religion around the Nazarene messiah (another son who rose), they wisely appropriated much of the symbolic ritual of those earlier “pagan” cults for Lent and Easter, their own annual spring observance of death and resurrection.
Surveying the DC universe of late, I feel a little like Dante at the gate of hell, for I too would never have believed that death had undone so many. It seems that in the last decade whenever stories–or sales–stalled at DC, the deus stepping from the machina has been, as often as not, the grim reaper. The most notorious instance was four years ago, when DC killed off Batman’s longtime sidekick, Robin. For those who have lost touch with Gotham City, this particular casualty was not the original Boy Wonder, Dick Grayson (who had been transformed into Nightwing, leader of the Teen Titans), but his replacement, Jason Todd, a streetwise urchin whose glib patter had alienated some readers.
