Marvel Knows You Love Wolverine. So It’s Killing Him.
Those sales are what Marvel wants to tap into. However, we’re not in the comic bubble of 1992. There have been plenty of iconic superhero deaths since Superman’s (Jean Grey multiple times, Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Magik — and that’s just X-Men characters alone). And each one of those deaths chips away at the idea that superhero death is somehow final or rare.
Miller explained that it’s rare to find a comic book today that achieves a great deal of value and retains it. There are no $30-million days in the business anymore. What retailers are aiming for are sales spikes (200,000+ issues sold) when a character dies and when he or she returns, plus hopefully some new readers.
One of the more recent examples of this was in 2012, when Marvel killed Peter Parker. He returned in April of 2014 and sold a megaton of comics:
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