Five Best Comic Book Love Interest Deaths

Everyone knows that hanging around a superhero is dangerous–being his girlfriend, doubly so. The shelf life on those ladies–and the handful of gentlemen who hang around the female leads–is short enough, and tends to end badly enough that not only did Gail Simone rise to Internet fame after setting up a website dedicated to the phenomenon, but a recent issue of Savage Dragon saw Malcolm’s girlfriend leave him for no reason other than “I know what happened to Gwen Stacy and I’m not stupid.”Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead. But if you don’t want to be spoiled and you clicked on this article then you’re kind of asking for it. The specific titles for which there will be spoilers are Transmetropolitan, The Walking Dead, Identity Crisis, The Amazing Spider-Man and Strangers in Paradise.These characters, also, don’t generally reappear. In a medium where resurrection is the norm, only one of the people on this list could get up and walk around again–and if she did, nobody would be happy. And yeah, usually the characters are offed in a meaningless way meant to heighten “drama,” and they’re rarely effective. But once in a while, the death is so well-done, or so unexpected, that it leaves a crater in the book and changes not just the lead character but the reader, as well. Here are a few…