I don't want to dig too deep into this, but the '80s were a bad time to be a supporting character in a comic book:- There was Karen Page, Daredevil's ex-girlfriend, whom Frank Miller had become addicted to heroin and eventually sell Daredevil's secret identity to the Kingpin.
- Jim Starlin killed off the second Robin when the Joker forced his mom to hand him over and then beat him with a crowbar before blowing them both up with a bomb. Readers could vote for whether Robin would live or die by calling in to a 900 number. The killers won.
- We've already talked about Moore's Killing Joke and what he did to Batgirl.
The '90s didn't start off much better, with Ron Marz writing a story about Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend being killed and stuffed in a refrigerator by the villain Major Force.
One interesting thing that came from this last one was that comic writer Gail Simone created a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed,
maimed or depowered," in particular in ways that treated the female
character as merely a device to move a male character's story arc
forward, rather than as a fully developed character in her own right.When the list was circulated, several comic book creators indicated that the list caused them to pause and think about the stories they were creating. Often these responses contained arguments for or against the use of death or injury of female characters as a plot device.
Marz replied, too: "To me the real difference is less male-female than main character-supporting character. In most cases, main characters, 'title' characters who support their own books, are male. [...] the supporting characters are the ones who suffer the more permanent and shattering tragedies. And a lot of supporting characters are female."
Simone maintained that her simple point had always been: "If you demolish most of the characters girls like, then girls won't read comics. That's it!"
There's been a strong push lately to try to increase female readership and strengthen the female characters in comics. Maybe the comics industry understands what Moore understood in the late '90s: the grim '80s should remain in the past.
