What (or who) is in the fridge in comics?

“Stuffed into the fridge” is the term used to describe a secondary character who gets killed off mostly as a plot device to show the effect of the death on the main character. Unfortunately, this happens a lot to women in comics, giving rise to the critical term “Women in Refrigerators.” This trope gets its name from an old issue of Green Lantern when a villain brutally murdered the hero’s girlfriend and stuffed her into the refrigerator for him to find.

This phenomenon seems to happen a lot at DC so today I’m going to venture afield and talk about Marvel’s rival publisher. A prime example is what happened to Batgirl in the late ‘80s. In the story The Killing Joke, the Joker showed up at Barbara Gordon’s door and shot her through the spine, mainly as an attempt to mentally torture Commissioner Gordon. I think the writers turned this on its head later by having Gordon bounce back from the injury and become the wheelchair-bound Oracle, a sort of repository of information for heroes behind the scenes. She was just as effective in that role as she was as Batgirl. Of course, in the Nu52 continuity, Gordon is back as Batgirl after recovering fully from her injury and walking again.

The mini-series Identity Crisis had a particularly brutal fridging for Sue Dibny, the wife of the Justice League member the Elongated Man. Jean Loring, wife of JLA member the Atom, shrunk down and walked on Dibny’s brain, causing her death, and then burned the corpse. Dibny was pregnant at the time. Then a retcon revealed that Sue had been raped years past by villain Doctor Light. This is a story that notoriously began with a writer at DC suggesting, “We need a rape.” (This begs the rhetorical question, “Do we?”) It’s a distasteful story because it never shows the woman dealing with the fallout of her rape. She’s dead by the time the readers find out about it. There were also a number of other editorial problems that left the story infamous.

This fridging has happened a few times at Marvel but seems to be less pervasive at that company. Daredevil has lost his wife and almost every other girlfriend he has had. This includes Karen Page, a secretary who left Matt Murdock’s law firm to do porn and ended up addicted to heroin and in trouble with gangsters in my favorite comics story ever, Born Again. The Wasp also apparently died in a Skrull invasion because the writer felt Hank Pym would be more interesting with a dead ex-wife. The Avengers overturned this later by revealing that the Wasp was alive but missing. I guess the Avengers Disassembled story could be a gender-reversed fridging since the Scarlet Witch killed the Vision, Hawkeye, Ant-Man and Jack of Hearts, although most of these deaths were later overturned.

Marvel avoided fridging a character when Mockingbird got sexually assaulted in West Coast Avengers. Most of the story was about her reaction to the assault and her dealing with it (it did not end well for her attacker) and she actually called out her husband Hawkeye for going on a macho kick and making her attack all about him.

There are probably more examples of this but now I’m depressed and need to go home from work and lie down for six or seven hours.