According to the old saw, there are only two certain things in life: death and taxes. Unless you happen to be a comic book superhero. Then, it's just taxes.

When it comes to comic book hero death, there's almost no such thing. Really, there's no other entertainment medium in which death is less a cause for drama than mainstream superhero comics. Unless you count video games, but then all you have to do is select "continue" and it's like nothing ever happened.

And yet we still have freakouts when a major character is killed off in comics. Why is that? Is it due to selective amnesia that makes us forget the absurd ways characters have been eliminated and then resurrected?