Why DEAD should mean DEAD!

I am a firm believer in the "dead is dead" policy Marvel had a few years back. I really wish they hadn't gone back on it.

I believe death in comics should be permanent for several reasons:

When you are trying to recapture the past, like the recent return of Hal Jordan, I think you are simply catering to the desperate fans who can't or won't move on. I am a big proponent of books moving on, so going back to the past for nostalgia is just recycling old ideas with a slightly fresh twist. In my opinion it usually fails, as shown in the recent Green Lantern. Hal is now officially the most boing character in the DCU again... and it only took 7 issues!

Death in comics becomes trivial if everyone (or almost) comes back. It looses its effectiveness as a storytelling tool because there's no permanence. Why get pissed because So-and-so's dead when they're eventually going to be back?

Bucky's death was a retcon itself... so all Ed did was alter that. Jason Todd's death had relevance to Batman and his entire cast. The return of such a pivotal death takes away from the "realism" of Batman (he's more realistic than Spidey!) and adds nothing to the mythos. Batman's GREATEST failure was his inability to protect and save Jason. Now it's undone... so what lesson was learned? Why should Batman worry about his helpers when they can just come back?

Sometimes they are handled well (Bucky) and other times not (Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Jason Todd... all DC books... Hmmmmmm...)... but overall I think death in comics should be a LAST resort for the writers... and have SOME permanence to it.

Otherwise it's a temporary gimmick. At best.