There is an art to doing a really good death scene, and we can quickly recall the most haunting ones of all: Shepherd Book. Condor Joe. Kara Zor-El. A truly impressive end can give depth and emotional context to a rubbish character, as in the case of Thunderbird, or make you love a great character that much more, as happened with the loss of the Golden Age Superman. I spend a lot of time mocking the excesses and habits of Geoff Johns, but the man can write one hell of a last chapter. (Even if many of them have the “stabbed from off-panel through the thorax” bit that drives me nuts.) Unlike life, fictional characters’ deaths can advance the plot, can save the world, and they don’t even have to be final to do it, leading to today’s posthumous query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) found the end of The Calligrapher in ‘Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra’ to be incredible, especially the part where you only have 10 or 15 minutes once your heart has been slapped out of your ribcage, asking: Which death scene is the most touching of them all?
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Snowman.
I’ll give a nod to an obscure one: Captain Marcus from Exo Squad. The man was a right dick and a really hate-able character. But in his last chapters, as his misguided mutiny led to a massacre and his own self-sacrifice, I managed to feel for the fact that he really thought what he was doing was for the best.