In Drawing Crazy Patterns, I spotlight at least five scenes/moments from within comic book stories that fit under a specific theme (basically, stuff that happens frequently in comics).

Today, we take a look at an interesting narrative techniques that comic book creators sometimes use. When a comic book series is slated for cancellation, creators will often take that opportunity to then kill off their main character. We don't mean stuff like Thor dying at the end of his 1998 series during Ragnarok, as that was clearly intended for him to return from. Similarly, we're not talking Peter Parker "dying" at the end of Amazing Spider-Man #700, as, again, that was just part of an overall plot where he was going to return. We're talking about deaths that, at the time, were intended by the respective authors to be their actual final deaths (as an aside, I'm also not going to use Hitman, as that doesn't seem to fit in with these others, as it would have been more shocking had Tommy made it out of that series alive). I'm only counting superheroes that had their own series, so sorry, Manhunter!

DOOM PATROL HEROICALLY SACRIFICE THEMSELVES

The Doom Patrol were known as the world's strangest heroes and so it is only proper that when their series was canceled, they got one of the strangest final issues ever at the time. What's weird about this issue is that writer Arnold Drake, the co-creator of the series (with artist Bruno Premiani) was leaving DC Comics period at around this time and was starting to work for Marvel. So he was going to be off of the book no matter what and note that Editor Murray Boltinoff actively had him eliminated from the opening page where the creative team talks to the reader directly about how they could "save" the Doom Patrol (again, unlikely to ever have been a realistic scenario where the book was going to be un-canceled, especially with Drake gone)....

Okay, so Madame Rouge, one of the Doom Patrol's main enemies, had reformed and was in love with the Chief, the head of the Doom Patrol. But then the Brain turned her evil again and she just went NUTS. She killed the Brain and she started attacking the Doom Patrol with such deadly attacks that they had to leave the United States because of their fear for innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. She teamed up with another Doom Patrol foe, Captain Stahl, and they ultimately captured the Doom Patrol and Stahl made them an offer - they could be killed or a small fishing village with very few people in it would die instead. He figured that their heroic resolve would crumble in the face of imminent death. He was wrong.

Of course, they all were eventually revived, but that wasn't the intent at the time!

VIGILANTE HAS A SAD ENDING

Introduced in the pages of the New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, Adrian Chase was a respected judge who decided that his court wasn't serving justice enough, so he became the costumed killer known as the Vigilante. He was basically the DC Universe's Punisher (not that the Punisher was a unique concept, either, but you know what I mean).

Marv Wolfman launched the series, but Paul Kupperberg eventually took it over and he decided to have the series end at #50. He set the storyline into place with Vigilante #37, where Chase sort of kind of accidentally kills a cop. From that point forward, he was just slowly descending into madness. It came to a head in Vigilante #50 (by Kupperberg and artists Steve Ervin and Jack Torrance), when Vigilante fatally wounds one of his best friends in the police force. His only answer at this point was to kill himself...

It was a "Mature Readers" book, so it wasn't as shocking as if it had happened elsewhere, but it was still pretty darn shocking.

THE EXILES MESS WITH OUR HEADS

Here was a comic book series that actually led to new rules about soliciting comic books! You see, the Exiles were a sort of X-Men riff initially intended to be a Malibu Comics series, but then the creators of the book, Tom Mason, Dave Olbrich and Chris Ulm, gave the idea to Steve Gerber to use for the Ultraverse, the shared superhero universe created at Malibu Comics. The idea of the series is that a group of people got superpowers from a fatal virus. The doctor who was treating the virus decided to put them together and form a superhero team.

Gerber's idea was that we always see people pulled off of, say, farms in Siberia and crowds in Germany and see them become effective superheroes, but what if that DIDN'T work out this time? What if a bunch of essentially random people getting through together onto a team was just a recipe for disaster?

So, in Exiles #4 (drawn by R.R. Phipps and Dave Simons), one of the members of the team, Amber Hunt, screws up and she sets off an explosion that kills pretty much everyone on the team (one member, Ghoul, was off on another mission. He would become a longtime member of the Ultraforce after this).

The problem was that Malibu had solicited a #5 to hide the ending of Exiles #4, which was the final issue of the series. Diamond Comics made sure that that was a no-no from that point forward. You were not allowed to solicit non-existent comic book issues.

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THUNDERSTRIKE'S STORY COMES TO A CLOSE

Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz have long spoken about how they liked the idea of telling the full life story of a superhero, from his start to his death, and that's what they ended up doing with Eric Masterson, a young divorced architect with a young son who befriended Thor and then was merged with Thor when Eric was injured in one of Thor's battles. When Thor was banished from Earth, Eric took over as Thor in his absence. When Thor returned, Eric was given his own special mace and remained a superhero as Thunderstrike. During his stint as Thor, he encountered the deadly Bloodaxe, which possessed people and turned them evil. Thunderstrike ended up needing to take on the curse himself to defeat the evil god of death, Set.

Then, though, he had to break the curse and in doing so, in Thunderstrike #24 (by Defalco, Frenz and Al Milgrom), he sacrificed his own life to break the curse for good...

That lady Jackie was the previous curse-holder.

AZRAEL GOES OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY

Denny O'Neil created Azrael, but had he known that he was going to write an ongoing series starring the character for over ONE HUNDRED issues (there was a DC One Million crossover mixed in there to get it to 101 issues), I'm sure he probably would have given him a bit of an easier background to turn into a superhero.

Halfway through the run, O'Neil revamped the series and made him into Azrael: Agent of the Bat. He worked with only a handful of artists on the series, as Barry Kitson, Roger Robinson and Sergio Cariello all did LONG runs on the book.

Anyhow, in the final issue, Azrael's nemesis, Nick Scratch, had taken on the name of Azrael and tried to start a new, super-racist Oder of the St. Dumas. Meanwhile, there is an assassin trying to kill Azrael. He doesn't know he is about to kill Scratch, not the real Azrael. The real Azrael shows up, though, to save his mortal enemy and he ends up getting assassinated, while he does apprehend the assassin...

We never actually get to see his body, but the whole "walking into Heaven" thing is a good sign that he was dead, right?

This was a fun installment of Drawing Crazy Patterns. If you folks can come up with five more examples of this theme, I'd gladly re-visit it in the future!

If anyone else has ideas for things that get repeated a lot that you'd like to see me spotlight , drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!