At the time of its original publication, "The Death of Jean DeWolff" was considered to be a groundbreaking comic book story. Peter David commented that "we flew in the face of standard comic book tradition by giving a character, not a noble death in battle at the climax of the story, but an inglorious death, in her sleep, at the beginning." The antagonist of the story is not a supervillain with fantastic powers, but a psychopathic vigilante with a shotgun; also, rather than presenting the bylines at the beginning of each installment, the white-on-black credits were presented in the last panel of each chapter.