Young Justice: Phantoms is modeling the best path through temporary superhero death

polygon.com:

If there’s one good thing about superhero stories dominating mainstream media, it’s that journalists have gotten much savvier about covering the deaths of prominent superheroes as publicity stunts, rather than as massive cultural milestones. DC Comics’ 1992 “Death of Superman” arc got such widespread mass-media attention that it launched a fad for killing off major legacy heroes — who inevitably returned in one way or another once the novelty wore off. Meanwhile, longtime comics fans mostly snickered, knowing full well that superheroes rarely stay dead for long. Usually, killing a hero is just another gimmick to sell comics, goose sales, and shake up the status quo — so the 13-episode first half of Young Justice’s fourth season has been a compelling change of pace.

Temporarily dead protagonists in comics are a well-established cliché, which makes it much harder to get emotionally invested in a hero going down for the count. Even hero deaths that were initially intended as permanent — like Captain America’s sidekick Bucky, or the Jason Todd version of Robin — usually get reversed when new writers take over. In the worst cases, they’re reversed instantly, as with the X-Men series’ Dark Phoenix saga, where Cyclops is dramatically declared dead in the final-panel cliffhanger for Uncanny X-Men #133, then offhandedly returned to life in the first panel of issue #134.

Young Justice, co-created by Brandon Vietti and Greg Weisman, has previously killed heroes, villains, and even innocents without retracting their deaths later. That’s given the show more credibility and gravitas for its current running plotline about one of the series’ primary protagonists dying in action. It’s always seemed obvious that the character was coming