In May I became a headcanon necromancer.

To explain: last month my parents visited, and brought a few old friends along.

Those of you who aren’t geeks of the comic-shop variety may not recognize these white boxes, but those of you who are probably felt a distinct pang of nostalgia and lost wages just now.  This is my comic collection, such as survives.  Plenty of Dark Horse Star Wars in here (the whole Tales of the Jedi arc!), not to mention the Indiana Jones comics and, of course, Iron Man.

I started with Iron Man in the Heroes Reborn era.  Cue more geek disbelief—that storyline, basically Marvel’s Ultimates reboot a decade-plus early, guiding a handful of characters back through their origin stories—isn’t held up as one of Marvel’s shining moments, but it did provide a good on-boarding point for a young fan.  And in spite of confusion about pocket universes I followed Iron Man back from Heroes Reborn into mainstream Marvel.

See, the Heroes Reborn universe was this insane pocket dimension created by a god-child to protect his parents and their friends from Evil, Omnipotent Charles Xavier by the mighty magic of Rebooting.  Or something.  [Non-geeks you can start reading again here. -everlovin’ ed.]  Point is, eventually the characters trapped in this pocket dimension escaped—to find they’d been declared dead for some time in the “mainstream” universe.   Which isn’t such a problem for, say, the Incredible Hulk (HULK SMASH PROBATE COURT)—but is a Big Biden Deal for an international mogul like Stark comma Anthony.  In Tony’s absence Stark Industries has been acquired by the Fujikawa Corporation, an enormous zaibatsu; Tony’s all but penniless.  Which is a good look on Tony Stark, to be honest.  He’s at his best when scrounging.  (IN A CAVE! FROM SCRAPS!)  Tony builds a consulting business, which is great.  And he meets Rumiko Fujikawa, heiress of the zaibatsu that bought his company.

I was a kid, and I haven’t re-read these comics in a while; I’m not saying Rumiko Fujikawa is the best-drawn character in Iron Man history or anything like that.  Maybe she was really problematic in ways I didn’t recognize back then (I was, what, fourteen? and unkissed in rural Tennessee).  But as a kid reading Iron Man, I thought she was awesome.  No superpowers, but she was fierce and rebellious and not evil and wore cool clothes and had a good sense of humor and liked to dance and, well.  She dated Tony, which was also interesting, though I didn’t think that relationship was going anywhere—she was into him physically, and he was into her, and they had the super-rich thing in common (though Tony wasn’t so super-rich any more), so good for them until they broke up up.  It seemed to me, at the time, like a relationship two adults might have, if one of the adults was a recovering alcoholic superhero and both had net worths in the quintillions.

I stopped reading Iron Man a few years later; Marvel underwent one ubercrossover too many.  When you live in rural Tennessee a forty-five minute drive from any comic store, and you’re the child of two high school teachers and work a pizza job for spending money, you can only deal with so many “GET AVENGERS MEGA-ANNUAL #77 AND ALSO THESE NINE RANDOM FANTASTIC FOUR COMICS OH AND THIS SEVEN YEAR OLD X-MEN ISSUE AS WELL IF YOU WANT TO HAVE ANY CLUE WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE, TRUE BELIEVER!” bits before you give up.  I went to college, which didn’t help; the only series I collected in floppy form while at school was 1602.  (Still missing one issue of that run!  Gah.)

I’d skim an Iron Man collection once in a while to see if Tony was still Tony.  Didn’t see Rumiko anywhere, which seemed as it should be.  They were a horrible long-term couple; eventually their differences would pull them apart.  Somewhere in the Marvel Universe, Rumiko was maybe struggling with her brother for control of the Fujikawa Empire—or had thrown herself 100% into aid work, trying to do the Jeffry Sachs bit, zipping around the globe with Marvel Universe Bono.  Hell, maybe she went back to school, or ran for parliament.  Or the entire Fujikawa Empire finally pissed her off and she’d left to practice her asanas in an ashram or twirl fire poi in Phuket.  Maybe she was secretly Deadmau5, or half of Daft Punk.  Or both of Daft Punk!  (Clones?)

When the long boxes arrived, I reread a few issues of Iron Man.  “I wonder what ever happened to Rumiko?”  As if wondering the same about a high school classmate you haven’t seen since graduation.  “It’s a shame I oh wait we have the Internet now.”

So: Google search.

Some of you who’ve played this game before know what comes next.  Quoth Wiki:

“Rumiko is murdered in Invincible Iron Man vol. 3 #87 (October 2004) when she is attacked by an Iron Man impostor named Clarence Ward.”

Damn.  Right in the gut.  I felt sick.

Who the hell is Clarence Ward? I ask the Internet, furious.  What kind of situation gave rise to Rumiko’s death?  How did it work, dramatically?  Are we dealing with a Book 6 of Locke and Key situation here, something tragic and personal and intense?  There’s no proper Wikipedia page for this one, but Marvel Wikia supplies the following one-line summary of Ward’s entire history:

“Clarence Ward used a stolen armor to kill nearly all of Stark Industries‘ board and Rumiko Fujikawa.”

A villain of the fucking week.  Further internet research suggests Ward’s motive was “pissed at Tony for stuff.”  Dude has three total all-time appearances according to the web, which means he’s less significant to the Marvel Universe than Fin Fang Foom.

Yeah, I know, comics do this.  Gail Simone started the Women in Refrigerators site to highlight this precise issue, of horrible fates befalling characters who happen to be (1) in comics and (2) female.  It’s a big problem.  Much digital ink has been spilled.  By the time I became aware of the WiR website, and the fact that this was an endemic issue in comics generally, I’d been out of collecting for half a decade, so I cheered from the sidelines, and offline.  In fiction I’ve fought my own version of the good fight, by thinking very critically about murder, rape, and assault in my own work, and by reviewing manuscripts and encouraging fellow authors to think deeply as they deal with squicky stuff.

I am not saying all stories need to be shiny and happy.  Quite the opposite.  Violence has consequences.  To switch Starks for a second: I have no idea what’s going on in Game of Thrones these days, but Ned Stark’s death matters, for plot purposes and, much more vitally, for his friends and family.  People, and readers, deal with the trauma of Ned’s death; the series stands in its shadow.  That bit of violence has a powerful effect on the narrative world—it endures, and refuses to be ignored.  By contrast, I’ve read big thick hardcovers of more recent Iron Man comics, and it doesn’t seem like Rumiko’s death endures in anything like the same way.

Which is where headcanon comes in, the wonderful world of decisions I make about other peoples’ stories.  I never read those Iron Man issues, and what’s more, they don’t seem to have had a long-term effect on the narrative world of Iron Man or the Marvel Universe.  Which means I don’t need them to have happened.  Far as I’m concerned?  Tony and Ru broke up.  It sucked for them both, but them’s breaks when you date a recovering alcoholic superhero who has a crush on his robot suit.  Rumiko moved on.  She’s in parliament.  Or a band.  Or an ashram, or she’s lying on a Phuket beach, or taking a honeymoon in Goa with her wife who she met when she lost to her at baccarat.  She has problems of her own.  She has her own story to tell, and that story has nothing to do with superheroes.

It’s not a permanent solution, nor is it political.  It works, though, until something better comes along.

Besides, a bit of necromancy never hurt anyone.