A couple of weeks ago, my mother was driving to Cardiff to visit a very dear and very sick friend. My mum came from a comfortably endowed family, so when she was a kid she had a nanny, whom she and her siblings knew as Nurse. (For the record, I have no idea where all that money went, but my bank manager can attest that he's never seen a penny of it. I imagine it all went on hiring nannies.)

Now, it was Nurse that my mother was going to visit. Nurse and her sister May have been part of the family for a couple of generations. I've always regarded them as my auxiliary grandmothers (to make up for the fact that I never had any grandfathers). My mother, of course, is devoted to them both.

And thus it was that she was driving to Cardiff to visit Nurse and May, but on her way there her car broke down on the motorway, halfway between Cardiff and London. She called her automobile club and informed them of her predicament. The club makes a promise that it will get to any stranded lone female motorist within an hour. It took them five. It was cold and dark when they got there. It was too late to go to Cardiff, so they took her home. That was Friday.

On Sunday she got a call telling her that May had died.

It would be understating things to say that this came as a shock. May was old, of course, but she wasn't sick - it was Nurse who was sick, and Nurse for whom we were dreading getting that phone call.

And thus I've been thinking recently about death. I learned of May's death on the Tuesday, when I went home for my father's birthday, the same day he received a letter from his doctor telling him he had a suspicious lump on his tongue, which thankfully turned out to be nothing. It was the first time I'd been home since the cat we'd owned since I was five years old had died. When I was told of May's death I found myself recalling that the last time I'd seen her had been a couple of months earlier, at the funeral of my favourite aunt. It is, I think you'll agree, not unreasonable that my thoughts were turning morbid.

That said, I've also had cause to think about life. We've embarked on my family's birthday season again. I'm sure most families have them - a period of about four months where almost everyone's birthday seems to fall. In my family, they're all between May and August, with my birthday being one of the few exceptions.

Thus, as I write this, I'm almost slap bang between the two biggest milestone birthdays in the family. My grandmother's 102nd birthday is two weeks behind me, and my nephew's first birthday is two weeks ahead. There's over a century between them - one was born in 1899, the other in 2000 - and that's a whole lot of living. Life's an extraordinary thing, and it's hardly a revelation to proclaim that mortality goes a long way to making it seem special. Death gives life its value.

'Death gives life its value.' That's why death is such an important theme in fiction. One of the primary purposes of fiction, just under 'entertainment', is 'preparation'. Fiction serves as warning and lesson, to help us cope with the unexpected. Fiction couches the universe in familiar terms and gives us ideas - true or false - about the axis of life, celestial justice, the flow of the seasons and the darkness and the light. Even nasty fiction is trying to prepare you for something.

It doesn't need to be a deliberate function either. Whatever a writer intends, he can't help playing God a little and imposing on his self-made universe a few ideas about how he thinks things are or should be, so every story becomes a microcosm, and every story poses questions about the human condition. The more presumptuous ones even offer answers.

That's the theory, anyway. In comics, though, one of the most important questions has been trivialised. Death, the great definer, the great equivocator, the greatest mystery of them all (because even the question of whether there's a God is really just another way of asking, "is that all there is?") is nothing more than a parlour trick in comics. Because characters don't die in comics. They become temporarily inconvenienced by mortality, and then they come back.

Now, I'm talking primarily about superhero comics here, of course, but the attitude is pervasive. Even when a character dies in a non-spandex book, the readers are trained to doubt that the death was real, to the eternal frustration of creators. Marvel's Joe Quesada recently announced that he would begin to impose stiff limits on resurrections in his books, and so doing, essentially admitted the absurdity of the situation.

I have no objection to life-after-death in principle. Well, obviously in certain circumstances I think it would be a positive boon, but I'm talking about fiction. As a device, I think resurrection is potentially an excellent one. Like a dutiful writer, I've read Joseph Campbell's THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, where he states that the hero's death and resurrection are an essential part of his journey (i.e.: the story).

But as any good Tarot reader will tell, you, in this case death does not mean death. Death is a low ebb, a chance to change direction, gain new perspectives, make radical changes and shed your skin. Yet if you're going to have a metaphorical death in a story, it might just as easily be a real death, if your fictional universe can withstand it. The Bible did it, and it's still a bestseller.

'Resurrection can drive a story or stamp a theme.' Resurrections are usually a comment on the afterlife, God or humanity. Jesus rose to prove God, Frankenstein's monster rose to dethrone him. Deaths can be faked to show a character's malice or guile, as is common in noir. Characters can edge so close to death as to deceive the audience, only to make a recovery that reflects their enormous fortitude and determination, as is common in movies like THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT. Resurrection, or the appearance of it, can drive a story, stamp a theme, accelerate things to a whole new level.

But in superhero comics it's a chance to change your costume and get a power upgrade. In superhero fiction, resurrection is not a comment on anything more than the creators' contempt for the audience's credulity. Perhaps the device was used intelligently once upon a time, but whatever those early intentions were, they've been lost to a thousand layers of echo and 'homage'.

How did superhero comics become so exceptionally disrespectful? Partly it's a symptom of serial fiction, but mostly it's just cretinous writing. When one creator kills a character, he presumably does it because he believes it will have a serious impact, a consequence for the story he's telling. When another creator takes over and sees that the character he loved as a kid is dead, he pouts about not being able to fulfil a dream of writing that character, and brings him back. Not because it's clever or expedient, but because he's too much of a fan and not enough of a writer to have any sense.

And of course, since the previous writer didn't set up his story to be ambiguous, there's no sense of continuity when the resurrection occurs. It doesn't just cheapen the death, it undermines the whole series.

There's nothing wrong with fictional resurrections. There's nothing wrong with allegory or hope. The problem is hack writers and lazy editors who have no inkling of how fiction works and of what it can represent. Like superheroes themselves, there's nothing wrong with the principle, but the application is lacking. The consequence is that when a creator does want to write a meaningful resurrection story, they face the harshest judgement of a cynical audience. As far as comics are concerned, resurrection is dead.

Let me end with a story of my own about life after death. Consider it an illustration of a point. When May died, Nurse was told that the council house that they had shared would have to go back to the council, since Nurse was now living in a rest home. They asked her if there was anything she wanted to collect from the house before it was given back. This sick, elderly lady who had just lost her closest friend and most constant companion shot them back a look. "Of course there is," she said. "I have to get my winter clothes."

There is life after death. Let it mean something.

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

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