Emery Calame wrote: Matt, if it makes you feel any better Ted Kord is now alive and fighting "time foes"with Booster Gold but it's secret and he has to remain in temporal exile so everyone just thinks he's dead or....DC history will...make...even LESS sense? Or something..

I'm reading BOOSTER GOLD (excellent series, BTW, for anyone interested) and I can't believe I forgot that Blue Beetle was alive and well albeit unknown to anyone but Booster.  Thanks for reminding me!  That said, his was a death in a manner and fashion that I thought should never have happened.  Just as cheap and schlocky as the death of Sue Dibny.

I'm liking the Booster Gold series a lot. It reminds me of the old "Quantum Leap" TV series with superheroes.

The Kraven death worked okay for me as an out of continuity "OMG! like Dark Knight" type of off the rails, mini-series story.

Still it seems to me like it came about because someone thought that Kraven was a joke so he should have one last big party where he transcends his joke status to become a real threat and is then immediately " put out of his misery" so no one else can return him to joke status (beautiful naivete!) . Plus Vermin could get beat up after we learn he's not just Arnim Zola's lackey but an actual psycho cannibal.

Of course " Dark Knight-ing " and "Seriously-a-nizing" things can be a HUGE mistake if taken too far and given undue weight of influence on the original property. 

Spider-Man Reign is an unintentionally hilarious example of what happens when you try to make something too dark and serious and "gritty" just for the sake of grit and noise. 

Once upon a time comic book deaths were RARE. It seems every week now today's comic book writers are killing off another character. It's become so commonplace that I just shrug my shoulders. There's no way any of these deaths will affect me the way Jean Grey's and Electra's did. Writers need to find other ways of making the stakes high besides just upping the body count. It's become a joke.

And never ever ever bring back Uncle Ben or Bucky.[I know, too late!]

Bing back Captain America NOW!

I have to respectfully disagreed with anyone who thinks Barry Allen staying dead is reasonable at all.

Wally West is not the Flash, for me, nor will he ever be the Flash. Period.

You want another dude to be the Flash, great, that's fine, but don't give me a weaker duplicate of Barry Allen and call him the Flash, just because. I don't like the character of Wally, never have and never will AS LONG AS BARRY ALLEN REMAINS DEAD.

It's a moronic adherence to rules of corporeal existence, and I'm sick of Barry as martyr. Martyr for WHAT? Heroism? A cheap ploy in the 1980s to drum up interest?

Captain America being murdered is so incredibly crude that it defies description.

Geoff Johns will always be my favorite asshole, as he's great when he's great (HAWKMAN), but I'll never forgive him for the murders of Phantom Lady and one of my favorite characters of all time, the Human Bomb. And worse, just to replace those characters with more Extreme Versions of the same character. It's goddamned retarded.

If I ever get to any level of professional status, I can assure you I WILL be bringing back Barry Allen. I don't care how it happens. I don't care if Barry Allen is a zombie, the Fastest Man Dead, he WILL return. Or I'll kill Wally West and replace him with someone else entirely.

Oh, and I'm going to kill Tony Stark, bring back Steve Rogers, and make Moon Knight non-psychotic. All in one issue.

I forgot...Earth 2 Superman needs to be alive and well. The KINGDOM COME version can rot in hell for all I care, but the Earth 2 Kal-l is coming back.

1. Jean Grey, Bucky, Norman Osborne, the second Richards child.

 2. Captain America, Barry Allen, the deceased members of the Justice Society (they could either be in semi-retirement and used a occasional guest stars, or placed on their own Earth like they used to be.) 

Forgot about the second Richards child.

Also, count me in as to see the return of Barry Allen.