While it's true, comics are cyclical and very little progress is ever made, I'd have to imagine part of the Karma Houdini controversy comes from the fact that many supervillains have gotten progressively more violent and depraved in recent years, so the reaction from readers is more visceral. I mean Poison Ivy went from poisoning people to putting women in lesbian snuff films. The Chameleon went from tying up and gagging people and stuffing them in closets to dumping people in acid and then fucking their love interests while disguised as them. Dr. Light became Dr. Rape.
I mean obviously villains were always violent and lethal, but I'd think they've become much more so in the last 15 years or so, which why some people are getting a little tired of the Cardboard Prison trope.
Okay, for one thing, for a long, long time in comics, it was forbidden for someone to do something wrong, malicious and evil and get away with it. That was flat-out an Enforced Trope via the Comics Code. At that point, the Code had lost a lot of power, but it still held a lot of influence then (as it does now). Many of the tropes that comics uses in excess to this day were codified because of the Code, or as a result of the Code.
Jean "had" to die because that was just the way it worked in comics. Heroes needed to be, despite all their flaws, heroic. Jean had reached the point where it was going to be extremely difficult to sell her as heroic because of her actions. And we all know that creator teams don't want anything to do with "difficult".
I don't agree with the decision personally—I don't find that justice needs to be a Perfect Solution Fallacy. A person can be heroic without ever being able to make up for something they did wrong in the past. Many a character makes for a fine Atoner because no amount of good can forgive what they've done.
edited 26th Mar '13 5:08:48 AM by KingZeal
This wasn't a matter of the creators not wanting to do something difficult, or a case of the Perfect Solution Fallacy, or anything like that. This was Jim Shooter saying that letting Jean Grey commit genocide and then basically walk away from it scot-free is unacceptable. It's immoral, unsatisfying, and utterly unfair to her victims.
Imagine if Jeffrey Dahmer's only punishment had been to be deafened, and then he was sent back into the world. No one would've accepted that. People would've been outraged. But that was basically what Claremont's plan for Jean was. Except instead of killing 17 people, she killed several billion.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.I just reread X-Men #137. It actually is stated that the Phoenix is a cosmic force. I forgot about that. So my comments earlier about that not being known at this point were wrong. Disregard it.
Anyway, yeah, had the planet been uninhabited, sure, killing Jean wouldn't have been necessary. But it was. Claremont didn't ask Byrne to redraw those pages, so he's responsible for it, too.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.Which is a Perfect Solution Fallacy. Because not-dying doesn't mean you get away "scot-free".
Well that sort of goes back to the Cardboard Prison dilemma. Because she wasn't going to end up in jail and whatever brain damage Claremont had planned would've been undone anyway soon enough. Of course the stupid retcon that alleviated her of all guilt made all that moot anyway.
But that could be a whole other trope in itself. Tony Stark betrays the Avengers and kills two of his teammates. Then the reset button gets hit during Onslaught and Heroes Reborn and he's back without any consequence.
Hal Jordan murders his friend and a bunch of his fellow Lanterns but it'a okay! The yellow fear bug made him do it! Hal goes right back to the Justice League and being one of the most respected members of the superhero community.
Tony Stark and the Pro-Registration side pull all sorts of crap during Civil War but then oop then comes the Heroic Age and everyone's back to being best buds!
There's rarely any sort of lasting consequences for Face–Heel Turn heroes.
edited 26th Mar '13 9:48:41 AM by comicwriter
That's my point. Death is the easy way out of that situation.
The way the creators make it seem, they want all the Shocking Swerve of a Face–Heel Turn that jumps past the Moral Event Horizon, but none of the responsibility. I'm actually glad they didn't kill off Cyclops at the end of Avengers vs. X-Men because of that.
I find the Cruel Mercy of dealing with the mess they've created to be a far better punishment than a meaningless death.
edited 26th Mar '13 10:10:11 AM by KingZeal
Well, it's only a cruel mercy if they disagree with their previous actions. Scott's actually a good example: he believes he was fully justified in everything he did, and is going on to continue doing more actions of the like. Letting someone who has done wrong continue to do wrong isn't really a Cruel Mercy.
edited 26th Mar '13 10:11:47 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.But that's not exactly the case in the incidents we're talking about.
Jean was unquestionably consumed by a power beyond her comprehension, and did not agree with the actions she took under its influence. You can liken her to junkie who truly wants to get better, but is still Drunk on the Dark Side. I can buy killing her as a precaution to save lives, but not as a punishment.
Scott's case is even more ambiguous, because he was pretty correct. There's been countless debates about whether or not Marvel's treatment of his actions is a case of Informed Wrongness. He made some pretty shifty decisions in the end, but just like Civil War, the Conflict Ball made both sides look pretty idiotic.
You know, I really wish people would let them live Civil War down. Because there was a very important detail that, once I actually read it, I noticed most summaries left out: yes, something like, say, Genosha was worse, but the thing is, Genosha was caused by a supervillain attack. Civil War? The impetus for that was largely down to a hero admitting on live camera that he was putting innocent lives at risk to get TV ratings. That was a totally-believable impetus for controversy in my opinion.
And what does this have to do with Stuffed into the Fridge, anyway?
"Which is a Perfect Solution Fallacy. Because not-dying doesn't mean you get away "scot-free"."
It's not. She was going to lose her telepathy. Yeah, that's a fitting punishment for mass genocide. Again, it's like Dahmer being deafened and let go. Forget a perfect solution - letting her go is not a solution at all. It's a slap in the face to her 5 billion victims. Claremont's original plan didn't even have her going to prison. Her punishment was being made into a normal person - how awful. Now she gets to retire from risking her life and health, settle down and lead a normal, peaceful life. Yeah, that would've been totally a fair solution to a person committing genocide.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.@Comicwriter Stark was mind controlled. Due to retcons upon retcons it's ambigous if he even killed anyone, but he was mind controlled.
As for whose fault it is that the genocide got published, Jim Salicrup bears some responsibility. He was the edititor and apparently always lent towards Byrne when there were creative differences. He got taken off the book an issue early because of it, although he's still credited as co-edititor. Of course Claremont did embellish Byrne's drawings with prose, which didn't help things.
As for the debate as to whether Jean needed to die; it's basically a capital punishment debate. This probably isn't the best place to have that discussion.
Am I a good man or a bad man?I actually disagree with this being a capital punishment debate. I'm opposed to the death penalty. I actually think the justice system as a whole should be geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment.
But genocide tends to be a different matter.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.Like the man above said. This is pretty much a capital punishment debate. I don't deny that their are some offenders who need to die for a greater good. I don't consider Jean one of them.
Strawman. No one said anything about letting her go. And deafening would probably qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
Yes, I'm sure they're much happier now.
A normal person who has to live with the deaths of billions. As I recall, she wasn't exactly thrilled about that.
And again, no one said anything about letting her go. That's the fallacy. There's a lot of leeway between "death" and "let go".
Not in this context it isn't.
edited 26th Mar '13 12:26:04 PM by KingZeal
Claremont's original plan did have her entirely let go. Literally the only punishment she was going to get was the loss of her powers. That was it. It was an insultingly lenient punishment Claremont had planned, given the scale of her crime.
Also, from a storytelling perspective, I think it did make more sense to kill her. It all started with her death, it's only fitting that it should end the same way. Also, Claremont and Byrne had spent the past year or so steadily ramping things up, building and building to the climax. I think they did ultimately build things up to where anything short of Jean's death wouldn't have quite lived up to what had come before.
There was only one way the story could end. Shooter made the right call in telling Claremont and Byrne that the story as it sat didn't deal with the consequences properly, and Claremont and Byrne made the right call in redoing those final five pages to kill her. The original ending, when you read it, just feels completely wrong.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.![]()
Again, screw what Claremont wanted. The point I was making is that there's a lot of leeway between letting someone "off" and death. There are plenty of stories about someone who has done something unforgivable (even genocide) and sought an unattainable redemption.
The writers didn't write it because they didn't want to, not because it was impossible.
I'm a little hazy in this, but didn't Claremont plan for her to suffer some form of brain damage along with losing her powers? I do remember he planned for her redemption to come along in the form of her refusing Magneto's offer of repowering her. Edit:
Thanks for reminding me. I think a couple of pages of that got published as being the "original ending" at some point, which I read before learning of the actual original idea.
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Then again, would X-Men have been the best book for that story to take place in? A team superhero book aimed at a reasonably young target audience?
edited 26th Mar '13 2:52:36 PM by C0mraid
Am I a good man or a bad man?Well, my whole point was that the original ending was wildly insufficient. That Claremont and Byrne had basically originally let her off with genocide, scot-free.
As far as finding an alternative goes, part of the problem is that, by the time Shooter saw the issue and expressed his problems, they didn't have much time to figure out an alternative. They had a day or two to come up with something, and Byrne had three days to pencil it. They didn't want to delay the issue, because of their obligations to the retailers. So it was less a matter of not wanting to do something else, it was that they didn't have the time to figure out an alternative.
And I really don't think any other alternative would've been as good, from a story sense. With all the build-up, the ending needed to be as dramatic as possible, and it needed to deal with the consequences of her actions. Losing her powers and being thrown in an alien prison wouldn't have been as dramatic, and I don't think it would've been satisfying for fans of the character. Having her sacrifice herself gave her a triumph to go out on, allowing her fans to be more satisfied with it.
While it's possible to write a good story about someone trying to atone for genocide, I don't think it would've been the best way to handle this particular instance. I think this particular story worked so well because she died. Had she lived, it wouldn't have been as good.
Edit:
The brain-damage thing was actually one of Byrne's ideas. His idea was that she would basically be mentally reverted back to before she got her powers - so, 9 years old. Claremont disagreed with that idea. I think there was also a bit of debate between them on whether she should keep her telekinesis, and so stay a member of the X-Men, or whether her powers should be completely gone, leaving her as supporting cast.
edited 26th Mar '13 2:41:35 PM by Tiamatty
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.I like how that was totally ignored? Why should I bother to continue contributing to this discussion when it is largely based on instances where the Stuffed in the Fridge trope was not being used?
Modified Ura-nage, Torture RackIIRC, didn't Jean stand there and let a blaster turret kill her because she was overcome with guilt, and afraid she could lose control again?
In universe, she committed suicide by cop.
"What purpose is there in killing a character if nobody will care that they're gone?"
Well, obviously, there are lots of reasons.
To up the body count/gore factor (part and parcel of the slasher movie genre). To motivate a revenge plot. To demonstrate that a character is a badass. To demonstrate that a character is evil. To demonstrate that the situation is serious (like in natural disaster movies). To enforce a mood shift. To resolve a plot thread—nothing ends a love triangle like the death of one of the 3 points. Because it would logically happen in the setting—for instance, lots of people die in many war movies. Because the tale is based on a true story, and some minor characters died in real life. To get rid of a Scrappy. Tons of reasons, good and bad.

Also, these characters are, well, fictional. In the end, receiving 'permanent punishment' is kind of a non factor. I'd be all up for a Real World Joker getting the death penalty, but in comics, you have gotta measure that against the entertainment value those guys' escapades still provide.
And it's modern comics. Even getting the death penalty is another way of sending villains to brief prison stays, since no one stays dead anyway.
Although that isn't the best example, because becoming Oracle actually made Barbara more of an empowered, psychologically stronger character, rather than yet another sidekick running around being Batman Lite.
edited 25th Mar '13 3:43:35 PM by NapoleonDeCheese