snap judgments

Okay, cheezy title and a little something written off the top of my head but…

… is it me or is Marvel kind of big on killing off kids these days? I mean, it’s a dramatic statement made now over four times within the past year, set to be this big change in the story and all poignant and stuff, but… it just seems a little strange.

The first that comes to mind is the busload of mutants-turned-human children that Reverend Stryker blew up in New X-Men. Something like fifty kids died in that, a good portion of them characters with names and previous on-panel time. There was a great big funeral where a lot of the kids were buried out back at Xavier’s (*insert your own bad pet cemetary joke here*), Nightcrawler did the services and later on, Emma Frost brings up the lack of superhero involvement in the tragedy. She has a point, but at the same time, mutants constantly have a bad time of things, with or without a helping hand from the Fantastic Four. People just kind of leave them alone and let them kill each other off with viruses and psychopathic cyborgs and everything else that’s sort of everyday mutant life. New X-Men has done the best handling of the bus explosion, the characters seem truely out of sorts and coming to grips with their friends’s and students’s deaths. The other X-Men books didn’t really take it as seriously, but on the whole it changed at least one book and the influence is seen in each issue.

The next big kid explosion comes from Civil War #1, as Namorita shoves Nitro into a school buss and he explodes to wipe out the town’s elementary school (if not the entire town). We see children playing next to this fight, so we know that children that have faces will die; it’s not an ambiguous ‘innocents’ death, we know for a fact that some kids are going to die for something as useless as reality show ratings and something as dangerous as bounty hunting supervillains. It was big news the first issue then sort of ‘forgotten’ in the way that Sue Dibney’s rape was ‘forgotten’ after it was used as the explination for the mindwiping of Dr. Light. A means to an end to tell a story and considering Civil War is going to last us until February, I can’t say if that rather blatant use of schoolyard death is going to have as a lasting an impact as the New X-Man schoolbus’s death did. The mother of one of the dead schoolshildren comes back as kind of a cameo/excuse for Iron Man to chage his moral compass, but the lives themselves are sort of back burnered.

Another one than comes to mind is Iron Man’s ‘I Ching’ killer from the recent ‘Execute Program’ storyline. Now I will filly admit to being shakey on the current state of affairs in that book, so do correct me if I am wrong, but the way it looks is that a kid who’s father had been pushed to extreme means thanks to … something Tony Stark did as a inventor and businessman… and who was killed for those extremes, goes for revenge against Iron Man. Now, SHIELD is on the scene to keep the kid from doing anything drastic while looking for a way to take him out. A SHIELD sharpshooter is ordered to take him out and the sharpshooter does bring to the readers and his superior’s attention that this is in fact ‘a kid’. My guess is that he was around his mid-to-late teens. I say ‘was’ because the order was given to shoot and the kid dies, because his threat of something terrible to happen should he perish is hinted at in the last page. I will admit that they could bring him back, make it a medical miracle, no problem. But a kid was shot in broad daylight in front of heroes who are registering to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen. Or that’s just my take on it.
A child death that was brought to my attention by a co-worker was Fantastic Four #539 in which the the Thing decides he has had enough of all of you and leaves the country. Why does he leave? A kid dies in a skirmish between Cap’s rebels and Iron Man’s agents.  mind you, the Thing doesn’t actually leave until a few issue later (and is he actually gone just yet?  We’ve seen Sue and Johnny storm from the Baxter Building..)

Much like the double feature of the Chaos Theory in the X-books, there seems to be some recycling at the House of Ideas.  You think there would be a person who would read all these stories and notice when writers would repeat themselves…