The MagazineBatman and the Gray LadyJonathan V. Last, comic collectorOct 24, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 06
• By JONATHAN V. LAST
 It’s never good when the New York Times covers comic books.  Comics have existed in their own, mostly subterranean, culture for about 80 years, attracting very little notice from the wider world. Superheroes are born, villains are vanquished, and the people who care about comics indulge in their guilty, four-color pleasure in comfortable obscurity. But every once in a while, something in comics attracts public notice. In January 1992, the Times pricked up its ears at the news that Marvel comics was unveiling the first openly gay superhero. The hero in question was Northstar, a fourth-rank Canadian crime-fighter to whom no one at the Times had previously paid any attention. Nevertheless, the paper pronounced the development “welcome news.” It wasn’t. Northstar was a lousy character before he was gay; he was lousy after. A few months later, comics caught the Times’s eye again when DC Comics decided to kill off Superman. The paper was shocked that such an icon could be put down by the publisher. But it shouldn’t have been. Super-heroes die so often that there’s an axiom in the industry known as the “Bucky Clause of Hero Death.” The Bucky Clause holds that in comics, only Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben ever stay dead. (For the curious, they are: Captain America’s sidekick, Batman’s second Robin, and Spider-Man’s uncle.) But in recent years, even this iron law has broken down. Bucky and Jason Todd returned to the land of the living, and Uncle Ben popped up in an alternate universe. In comics, no one is ever more than mostly dead. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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