Lorendiac
01-20-2006, 06:42 PM
People occasionally complain that death in the X-Men titles has become a bad joke. By “occasionally,” I mean such complaints can only be heard about 99.9% of the time. After all, every once in awhile all the people who love to complain about this all have to stop for breath! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
I finally decided it was time to measure the exact size of the problem, by putting together a comprehensive list of X-Men Deaths (and Returns). As far as I know, no one else has ever tried to list them all at once, in the same document, complete with specific issue numbers. (If someone has already done this, I hope one of my readers will point me to the correct URL so I can compare my work to my unknown predecessor’s work and see what I missed on the first pass.)
DISCLAIMER: This is not yet a completely comprehensive listing. I am counting on my fellow fans, people who are more up-to-date on their X-Men continuity than I am, to help me fill in the gaps. (For instance, I couldn't even remember just when it was in the 1990s that Havok died all over again, so I left it out! Anybody have the answer on the tip of your tongue? Speak up!)
Likewise, if you know of any other "Deaths" or "Returns" of X-Men that I missed, please say so! I know they're out there; I spent much of the mid-to-late 90s largely ignoring the X-Titles, so there's no telling how many I'm missing from that era in particular! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
A Few Ground Rules
These are subject to change without notice as I work out the bugs in my approach to the problem http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
1. I only want to list “deaths” of characters who were serving as X-Men at the time, or had previously done so before they died. Right now, I don’t care about people who had only been members of the New Mutants, X-Force, X-Factor, Alpha Flight, Excalibur, or any other group (or any combination of the above).
As one example: This rule means I don’t list the first apparent “death” of Emma Frost back in the Dark Phoenix Saga, when she clashed with Phoenix and was declared (by Phoenix) to have not survived the experience. It must have been about twenty issues later that we found out she had (somehow) pulled through. Emma later became affiliated with the X-Men, but that was far in the future.
2. I’m taking a fairly liberal definition of “death.” If the character was definitely, undeniably dead, with an identifiable corpse and all that, I count it. But I probably will also count it if the character was firmly believed to be “dead” by surviving X-Men and other friends and relatives, for more than a couple of minutes, even though they were wrong. Or if there was later a retcon explaining that the dead body had been someone else entirely – an impostor was buried at the funeral everyone attended! It’s hard to tell where to draw the line, and I may redraw it at any time! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
3. I’m trying to report each case “straight” – if readers were meant to think a character was dead at the time, then in the listing for that event, I generally just describe it as “that person died.” If there were later retcons, I deal with those separately. So Professor X’s death in X-Men #42 is described as if he really died in #42, without mention of the later retcon until we reach the story of his return on my Timeline.
4. I’m ignoring stories from alternate timelines. I don’t really care about the death of an evil analog of Professor X in Exiles #2, nor the deaths of any other “analogs” of characters we know in the “regular” X-Titles. By the same token, I don’t bother listing the time in 1982 that Chris Claremont wrote the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover, with a temporary “resurrection” of Dark Phoenix, because as far as I know the events of that story were never referred to again as being “established history” in any later Marvel or DC comic, so I figure it’s “out of continuity” from both publishers’ points of view. Likewise, I have no interest in trying to include "Ultimate X-Men" continuity in this Timeline.
NOTE: I generally abbreviate "Uncanny X-Men" as "UXM."
THE X-MEN FATALITY TIMELINE
1968. X-Men #42. Written by Roy Thomas.
Professor X dies fighting Grotesk He is critically injured when Grotesk’s equipment explodes, and, going for the extra point, gasps out to his loyal X-Men that he had already known he was dying from an incurable disease, anyway!
The text on the cover includes this stirring promise: “Not a hoax! Not a dream! Not an imaginary tale! This is for real!”
(It somehow fails to offer to us a nice price on the Brooklyn Bridge.)
1970. X-Men #65. Written by Denny O’Neil.
Professor X returns. Which isn’t too difficult, from his point of view, since he was never dead and buried to begin with! Someone else was in the coffin at the funeral! As a retcon, we are now told that it was actually Changeling (formerly a villain) who died. For some reason, Professor X had given Changeling telepathic powers and then told him to take Xavier’s shape and fill his shoes with the X-Men, without bothering to bring the X-Men (except for Jean Grey?) up to speed on this “clever plan.” The Professor was going to be occupied with getting ready for a big showdown with an alien invasion when it showed up (as it did in this issue).
1973. The Incredible Hulk #161. Written by Steve Englehart.
Calvin Rankin, Mimic, dies after absorbing a great deal of radiation from the Hulk’s body. He did this deliberately, in the end, because his power to suck energy out of other people was increasing in range and he might eventually end up killing people without even trying. (Reminiscent of Superman’s enemy The Parasite.)
1975. UXM #95. Written by Chris Claremont.
Thunderbird (John Proudstar) dies.
1980. UXM #137. Written by Chris Claremont.
Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, aka Phoenix, aka The Black Queen, aka Dark Phoenix, dies in the concluding chapter of what later became known as the Dark Phoenix Saga. It looks as if she telekinetically triggered an alien energy weapon to blast herself before she could relapse into the insanity of the Dark Phoenix. Her funeral occurs in the following issue.
1983. UXM #167. Written by Chris Claremont.
Professor X’s body has been previously infected with a Brood egg, and his body now is transformed into a Brood Queen. So as far as his original body is concerned, the Professor has essentially “died.” Fortunately, Shi’ar technology is equal to the challenge of transferring his mind to a clone-body which does not suffer from the crippling injuries experienced by the original body many years earlier.
1985. Fantastic Four #286. Written by John Byrne (or I think that’s what the credits said – I’ve also seen an assertion that Chris Claremont was brought in to “revise” some of the dialogue at the last minute, uncredited, for some reason).
Jean Grey emerges from a “survival pod” which had just recently been found over in Avengers #263. It turns out she is not the “Jean Grey” who went nuts and wiped out a star, complete with billions of sentient residents of one of its planets, in the Dark Phoenix Saga.
1987. X-Men Annual #11. Written by Chris Claremont.
Wolverine gets his heart ripped out, which would normally mean that a character was dead, even when that character is Logan. However, one drop of his blood falls on an alien god-gem thingie which conveniently goes into third gear and restores Wolverine, alive and well, from that single drop of blood.
1988. UXM #227. Written by Chris Claremont.
The concluding chapter of the Uncanny X-Men’s share of the “Fall of the Mutants” event. Claremont apparently decided to go for the all-time record and kill off at least eight X-Men, and one woman who was arguably affiliated with them despite the lack (we thought at the time!) of mutant powers, in a Nine-For-The-Price-Of-One Death Scene! As far as I know, no other comic book story set in “regular continuity, using the characters of Timeline 616” has ever managed to kill off that many X-Men at once!
(Watch – now someone will dust off an old story I either never read or long since forgot, and tell me how badly mistaken I am! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif)
In alphabetical order, the following characters voluntarily sacrifice their lives in order to power up a special magic spell cast by Forge: Colossus, Dazzler, Havok, Longshot, Madelyne Pryor, Psylocke, Rogue, Storm, and Wolverine.
Later in the same issue: All of the nine characters I just mentioned are miraculously raised from the dead by the great sorceress, Roma. The only faster X-Men resurrection that I can think of, offhand, was that stunt with a drop of Wolverine’s blood falling on that god-gem.
1988. X-Factor #38. Written by Louise Simonson. Part of the "Inferno" crossover.
Madelyne Pryor, wife of Cyclops, now calling herself the Goblyn Queen, also now revealed as a clone of Jean Grey, created by Mister Sinister way back when, kills herself after ranting about her entire Secret Origin, etc., to tie up some loose ends.
1989. UXM #247. Written by Chris Claremont.
Rogue and Master Mold get knocked through the Siege Perilous and vanish from mortal ken (the Siege Perilous was previously provided to the X-Men by Roma after she resurrected a bunch of them). As near as I can recall, the other X-Men subsequently react as if Rogue has “died.” In the sense that her body probably no longer existed anywhere in Timeline 616 until such time as the Siege Perilous gave her a second chance on her life, I suppose they had a point.
1989. UXM #248. Written by Chris Claremont.
Storm dies. There is a perfectly identifiable corpse left behind in the wreckage of villain Nanny’s airship after a dazed and confused Havok blasts it out of the sky. What more proof could you want?
1989. UXM #251. Written by Chris Claremont.
In a “Fever Dream” flashback possibly connected with Gateway’s access to dreamtime (or not?), a captive Wolverine “watches” something that apparently “really happened” at their Australian base some days earlier, well before he returned to base from personal business elsewhere – and promptly got ambushed by the Reavers. In the “vision” that he sees: Psylocke uses her telepathy to “encourage” Havok, Dazzler, and Colossus to go through the Siege Perilous, and then follows them herself. Her apparent motive was that otherwise all four of them would get skragged by the Reavers, who were fast approaching – according to a possibly “prophetic” vision which Psylocke, in turn, had experienced in the previous issue. (Was all that clear as mud?)
[Score card: At this point, Storm is dead (everybody thinks), and five other X-Men - Rogue, Psylocke, Havok, Colossus, and Dazzler - have all passed through the Siege Perilous recently, which is supposed to be very nearly the same thing as dying in anticipation of possible rebirth. Thoroughly confusing the issue: At this time, and for quite some time thereafter, most of the other people in the Marvel Universe (including some former X-Men and the other close friends and relatives of the missing ones) still firmly believed that a group of eight X-Men had “really died” in Dallas back in UXM #227, being totally unaware of a) the resurrection and b) the Siege Perilous thing.]
1989. UXM #253. Storm is back! Albeit in the body of a young girl, and apparently with her memory, as well, regressed back to her days as a child thief in the streets of Cairo, Egypt, with no recollection of the X-Men at all. For some reason, she has ended up in Cairo, Illinois. Whoever passes judgment on the souls that enter the Siege Perilous may have thought it would be a real howler to “accidentally” send her back to the “wrong” Cairo, on the far side of the world from the one she used to live in? Or maybe it was all a bureaucratic filing error?
(About a year later, it will finally be explained to us that Storm never actually “died” in the first place. A S.H.I.E.L.D. LMD (Life Model Decoy) “died” in her stead. Nanny just loves playing her little mind games.)
1989. UXM #255 Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke is back, totally amnesiac (we are told). Roma, or whoever passes judgment on the souls that wander through the Siege Perilous, apparently thought it would be a very uplifting and appropriate experience for her to lose her conscious memories and fall into the clutches of the ninja outfit known as The Hand (the same outfit that trained Elektra, back in the day) so that they could change her to look rather Asian (but keeping the purple hair) and brainwash her to be a loyal telepathic ninja assassin who just happened to be loyal first and foremost to Iron Man’s old sparring partner, The Mandarin. (No, I don’t quite follow the Siege Perilous’s “logic” on this point, either!)
1989. UXM #259. Written by Chris Claremont.
Colossus is back, totally amnesiac, except for having a vague idea that his name is “Peter Nicholas.” (Actually the Anglicized version of part of his name.) He is considerably luckier than Psylocke in the resurrection sweepstakes, however. He ends up in the SoHo apartment of a couple of friends from a previous adventure, although he doesn’t recognize them and they don’t recognize him (since they previously only met him when he was in his giant organic steel form). He also gets shot in the arm by their enemies, but he’ll pull through.
Meanwhile, in a separate subplot that has zero contact with the “Colossus in SoHo” one that starts in this same issue, Dazzler is back. Totally amnesiac – unlike Colossus, she doesn’t even remember any part of her name. On the other hand, she also lands among friends – the Siege Perilous apparently dumped her on a nice quiet stretch of beach near the Malibu residence of singer Lila Cheney, and she is conveniently found by Guido, an employee of Lila’s who quickly recognizes her as a former member of Lila's band and makes sure she gets good care.
1990. X-Men Annual #14. Second story in the Annual. Written by Chris Claremont.
The concluding installment of the “Days of Future Present” arc that ran through four annuals in 1990.
In a backup story set before the conclusion of the lead story in the Annual, a high-powered adult Franklin Richards (from the future of an alternate timeline first shown to us in “Days of Future Past”) meets Wolverine in Madripoor and is annoyed by the presence of Jubilee and Psylocke, total strangers who never had any part in the X-Men history of his timeline. So he makes them vanish into thin air. In context, it appears that he didn’t just “teleport” them somewhere else – he “erased” them entirely! Wolverine, of course, manages to persuade him to bring them back by the end of the story.
The way I figure it – and I could be wrong – during the panels between when Franklin made Jubilee and Psylocke disappear, and when he brought them back, they did not physically exist anywhere. I figure that qualifies as being “dead” even if they made complete recoveries with no particular trauma suffered from the experience.
1990. Marvel Comics Presents #54. The relevant story is the first installment of an 8-part serial, written by Michael Higgins.
Mimic is back! We don't know that right away; he is currently a Wolverine impersonator, but by the end of the serial we will get it all explained to us in loving detail.
1990. UXM #269. Written by Chris Claremont.
Rogue is back. Oddly enough, not the least bit amnesiac! (Maybe the Siege Perilous is biased in her favor? On the other hand, it dumps her back at the old base in Australia, which had long since been reclaimed by the Reavers, so maybe the Siege wasn't really doing her any huge favors after all.)
It also turns out that Carol Danvers is back – but I don’t think she had ever been considered to have a separate, personal membership in the X-Men, just as herself. (I think. I am not an expert on the intricacies of Carol’s continuity.)
1990. UXM #270. Written by Chris Claremont.
Havok is back. He has suffered a fate similar to Psylocke’s; evidently he landed some time earlier, amnesiac, in Genosha, and was somehow conditioned to be a loyal servant of their oppressive, bigoted (against mutants!) government. He doesn’t remember that he used to be an X-Man, or that Scott is his brother with a partial immunity to his power (and vice versa), or much of anything. (Why the Siege Perilous wished this upon him is far from clear. Had he and Psylocke in particular accumulated an awful lot of bad karma that they had to pay for?)
1999. X-Men #97. Written by Terry Kavanagh, but plotted by Alan Davis if I have this right.
Cyclops sacrifices himself and is merged together with Apocalypse. Professor X offers the shocked comment that now he can’t detect any trace of Scott’s mind or soul! Most of the X-Men apparently interpret this to mean: “No question about it, boys and girls - Scott is dead! May he rest in peace!” His wife Jean has more faith in him – but I believe that hers remains the minority opinion for quite some time. So I’m taking this as a “death scene” for him, and listing it on that basis.
2000. UXM 390. Written by Scott Lobdell.
Colossus dies voluntarily, as a human sacrifice to stop the Legacy Virus. (Yes, I personally believe a “super-powered mutant” can still be a “human” sacrifice. I have serious trouble with the assumption that one stupid mutant gene makes a guy a “nonhuman.”)
(In a later comic, we learned his body was cremated and the ashes scattered, so you'd think he would have been dead by the time that cremation process was finished if he hadn't already been when it started. But when did a little thing like that ever stop an X-Man?)
2000. UXM 391. Written by Scott Lobdell.
Although this story does not show Cyclops’s “miraculous return,” it is published before the story that does! So chronologically, it is arguably the “first” reappearance of a healthy Cyclops who is his own man again, free and clear. His memory apparently got somewhat damaged by the psychological trauma of the whole experience with Apocalypse, however, because he simply can’t remember that he already asked his long-lost father “why did you never come back for me?” almost twenty years earlier (our time), and Corsair already explained.
(If I recall correctly, the basic excuse provided by Claremont in the early 80s was that Corsair "knew" his two sons were dead, since he last saw them dangling from a burning parachute thousands of feet above the ground, so what was there on Earth that he really wanted or needed to go back to? When he broke out of captivity, he preferred to dedicate his life to getting revenge for the deaths of his wife and children! Only many years later did he find out the kids had survived because of the mutant superpowers he never knew they had. Made sense to me!)
2000. X-Men: The Search for Cyclops #4. Written by Joseph Harris.
Better late than never? Now that UXM #391 had already shown us that Scott Summers was back in the land of the living, good as new (except for those ugly memory problems I mentioned), Marvel finally decided it might as well publish the last part of the miniseries that was dedicated to explaining how he did, in fact, get separated from Apocalypse and returned to active duty with the X-Men. Pity that UXM #391 had already destroyed any faint shred of “suspense” regarding just how this was going to play out, though.
2001. X-Treme X-Men #2. Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke dies when Vargas runs a sword right through her and then flees the scene, leaving the corpse behind for the other X-Men to grieve over. Seems like an open-and-shut case of death.
2003. New X-Men #148. Written by Grant Morrison.
Jean Grey and Wolverine are trapped on Asteroid X as it goes hurtling straight toward the sun, courtesy of Magneto. Wolverine finally kills Jean with his claws on the theory that it's a quicker, more merciful death than being roasted alive as the heat increases.
She gets over it, though - we see her eyes fire up before the issue ends. Somehow the death was a necessary preliminary step before she could access the full power of the Phoenix or some such thing (according to what she says later. You know how Phoenixes are). Wolverine had not anticipated that result, incidentally, but it saved him from dying himself.
2003. New X-Men #150. Written by Grant Morrison.
Magneto, previously posing as Xorn for many issues, manages to fatally injure Jean Grey with a big electromagnetic pulse, so that she soon dies.
[Yes, yes, I know, it was later retconned to not be Magneto at all. But for the moment, I prefer to describe things as they seemed to be happening at the time.]
2004. Astonishing X-Men #4. Written by Joss Whedon.
Colossus is back.
2005. UXM #455. Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke is back! As I recall, no clear explanation is provided in this issue.
***** END OF TIMELINE *****
Down here at the bottom, later drafts of this Timeline will try to list Grand Totals for how many times a character has "Died" and "Returned." But I know I don't have all the data yet; I'm waiting for helpful feedback from my readers before I try to commit myself on the subject of who has done it the most often, who is in Second Place, and so forth http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
I finally decided it was time to measure the exact size of the problem, by putting together a comprehensive list of X-Men Deaths (and Returns). As far as I know, no one else has ever tried to list them all at once, in the same document, complete with specific issue numbers. (If someone has already done this, I hope one of my readers will point me to the correct URL so I can compare my work to my unknown predecessor’s work and see what I missed on the first pass.)
DISCLAIMER: This is not yet a completely comprehensive listing. I am counting on my fellow fans, people who are more up-to-date on their X-Men continuity than I am, to help me fill in the gaps. (For instance, I couldn't even remember just when it was in the 1990s that Havok died all over again, so I left it out! Anybody have the answer on the tip of your tongue? Speak up!)
Likewise, if you know of any other "Deaths" or "Returns" of X-Men that I missed, please say so! I know they're out there; I spent much of the mid-to-late 90s largely ignoring the X-Titles, so there's no telling how many I'm missing from that era in particular! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
A Few Ground Rules
These are subject to change without notice as I work out the bugs in my approach to the problem http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
1. I only want to list “deaths” of characters who were serving as X-Men at the time, or had previously done so before they died. Right now, I don’t care about people who had only been members of the New Mutants, X-Force, X-Factor, Alpha Flight, Excalibur, or any other group (or any combination of the above).
As one example: This rule means I don’t list the first apparent “death” of Emma Frost back in the Dark Phoenix Saga, when she clashed with Phoenix and was declared (by Phoenix) to have not survived the experience. It must have been about twenty issues later that we found out she had (somehow) pulled through. Emma later became affiliated with the X-Men, but that was far in the future.
2. I’m taking a fairly liberal definition of “death.” If the character was definitely, undeniably dead, with an identifiable corpse and all that, I count it. But I probably will also count it if the character was firmly believed to be “dead” by surviving X-Men and other friends and relatives, for more than a couple of minutes, even though they were wrong. Or if there was later a retcon explaining that the dead body had been someone else entirely – an impostor was buried at the funeral everyone attended! It’s hard to tell where to draw the line, and I may redraw it at any time! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif
3. I’m trying to report each case “straight” – if readers were meant to think a character was dead at the time, then in the listing for that event, I generally just describe it as “that person died.” If there were later retcons, I deal with those separately. So Professor X’s death in X-Men #42 is described as if he really died in #42, without mention of the later retcon until we reach the story of his return on my Timeline.
4. I’m ignoring stories from alternate timelines. I don’t really care about the death of an evil analog of Professor X in Exiles #2, nor the deaths of any other “analogs” of characters we know in the “regular” X-Titles. By the same token, I don’t bother listing the time in 1982 that Chris Claremont wrote the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover, with a temporary “resurrection” of Dark Phoenix, because as far as I know the events of that story were never referred to again as being “established history” in any later Marvel or DC comic, so I figure it’s “out of continuity” from both publishers’ points of view. Likewise, I have no interest in trying to include "Ultimate X-Men" continuity in this Timeline.
NOTE: I generally abbreviate "Uncanny X-Men" as "UXM."
THE X-MEN FATALITY TIMELINE
1968. X-Men #42. Written by Roy Thomas.
Professor X dies fighting Grotesk He is critically injured when Grotesk’s equipment explodes, and, going for the extra point, gasps out to his loyal X-Men that he had already known he was dying from an incurable disease, anyway!
The text on the cover includes this stirring promise: “Not a hoax! Not a dream! Not an imaginary tale! This is for real!”
(It somehow fails to offer to us a nice price on the Brooklyn Bridge.)
1970. X-Men #65. Written by Denny O’Neil.
Professor X returns. Which isn’t too difficult, from his point of view, since he was never dead and buried to begin with! Someone else was in the coffin at the funeral! As a retcon, we are now told that it was actually Changeling (formerly a villain) who died. For some reason, Professor X had given Changeling telepathic powers and then told him to take Xavier’s shape and fill his shoes with the X-Men, without bothering to bring the X-Men (except for Jean Grey?) up to speed on this “clever plan.” The Professor was going to be occupied with getting ready for a big showdown with an alien invasion when it showed up (as it did in this issue).
1973. The Incredible Hulk #161. Written by Steve Englehart.
Calvin Rankin, Mimic, dies after absorbing a great deal of radiation from the Hulk’s body. He did this deliberately, in the end, because his power to suck energy out of other people was increasing in range and he might eventually end up killing people without even trying. (Reminiscent of Superman’s enemy The Parasite.)
1975. UXM #95. Written by Chris Claremont.
Thunderbird (John Proudstar) dies.
1980. UXM #137. Written by Chris Claremont.
Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, aka Phoenix, aka The Black Queen, aka Dark Phoenix, dies in the concluding chapter of what later became known as the Dark Phoenix Saga. It looks as if she telekinetically triggered an alien energy weapon to blast herself before she could relapse into the insanity of the Dark Phoenix. Her funeral occurs in the following issue.
1983. UXM #167. Written by Chris Claremont.
Professor X’s body has been previously infected with a Brood egg, and his body now is transformed into a Brood Queen. So as far as his original body is concerned, the Professor has essentially “died.” Fortunately, Shi’ar technology is equal to the challenge of transferring his mind to a clone-body which does not suffer from the crippling injuries experienced by the original body many years earlier.
1985. Fantastic Four #286. Written by John Byrne (or I think that’s what the credits said – I’ve also seen an assertion that Chris Claremont was brought in to “revise” some of the dialogue at the last minute, uncredited, for some reason).
Jean Grey emerges from a “survival pod” which had just recently been found over in Avengers #263. It turns out she is not the “Jean Grey” who went nuts and wiped out a star, complete with billions of sentient residents of one of its planets, in the Dark Phoenix Saga.
1987. X-Men Annual #11. Written by Chris Claremont.
Wolverine gets his heart ripped out, which would normally mean that a character was dead, even when that character is Logan. However, one drop of his blood falls on an alien god-gem thingie which conveniently goes into third gear and restores Wolverine, alive and well, from that single drop of blood.
1988. UXM #227. Written by Chris Claremont.
The concluding chapter of the Uncanny X-Men’s share of the “Fall of the Mutants” event. Claremont apparently decided to go for the all-time record and kill off at least eight X-Men, and one woman who was arguably affiliated with them despite the lack (we thought at the time!) of mutant powers, in a Nine-For-The-Price-Of-One Death Scene! As far as I know, no other comic book story set in “regular continuity, using the characters of Timeline 616” has ever managed to kill off that many X-Men at once!
(Watch – now someone will dust off an old story I either never read or long since forgot, and tell me how badly mistaken I am! http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif)
In alphabetical order, the following characters voluntarily sacrifice their lives in order to power up a special magic spell cast by Forge: Colossus, Dazzler, Havok, Longshot, Madelyne Pryor, Psylocke, Rogue, Storm, and Wolverine.
Later in the same issue: All of the nine characters I just mentioned are miraculously raised from the dead by the great sorceress, Roma. The only faster X-Men resurrection that I can think of, offhand, was that stunt with a drop of Wolverine’s blood falling on that god-gem.
1988. X-Factor #38. Written by Louise Simonson. Part of the "Inferno" crossover.
Madelyne Pryor, wife of Cyclops, now calling herself the Goblyn Queen, also now revealed as a clone of Jean Grey, created by Mister Sinister way back when, kills herself after ranting about her entire Secret Origin, etc., to tie up some loose ends.
1989. UXM #247. Written by Chris Claremont.
Rogue and Master Mold get knocked through the Siege Perilous and vanish from mortal ken (the Siege Perilous was previously provided to the X-Men by Roma after she resurrected a bunch of them). As near as I can recall, the other X-Men subsequently react as if Rogue has “died.” In the sense that her body probably no longer existed anywhere in Timeline 616 until such time as the Siege Perilous gave her a second chance on her life, I suppose they had a point.
1989. UXM #248. Written by Chris Claremont.
Storm dies. There is a perfectly identifiable corpse left behind in the wreckage of villain Nanny’s airship after a dazed and confused Havok blasts it out of the sky. What more proof could you want?
1989. UXM #251. Written by Chris Claremont.
In a “Fever Dream” flashback possibly connected with Gateway’s access to dreamtime (or not?), a captive Wolverine “watches” something that apparently “really happened” at their Australian base some days earlier, well before he returned to base from personal business elsewhere – and promptly got ambushed by the Reavers. In the “vision” that he sees: Psylocke uses her telepathy to “encourage” Havok, Dazzler, and Colossus to go through the Siege Perilous, and then follows them herself. Her apparent motive was that otherwise all four of them would get skragged by the Reavers, who were fast approaching – according to a possibly “prophetic” vision which Psylocke, in turn, had experienced in the previous issue. (Was all that clear as mud?)
[Score card: At this point, Storm is dead (everybody thinks), and five other X-Men - Rogue, Psylocke, Havok, Colossus, and Dazzler - have all passed through the Siege Perilous recently, which is supposed to be very nearly the same thing as dying in anticipation of possible rebirth. Thoroughly confusing the issue: At this time, and for quite some time thereafter, most of the other people in the Marvel Universe (including some former X-Men and the other close friends and relatives of the missing ones) still firmly believed that a group of eight X-Men had “really died” in Dallas back in UXM #227, being totally unaware of a) the resurrection and b) the Siege Perilous thing.]
1989. UXM #253. Storm is back! Albeit in the body of a young girl, and apparently with her memory, as well, regressed back to her days as a child thief in the streets of Cairo, Egypt, with no recollection of the X-Men at all. For some reason, she has ended up in Cairo, Illinois. Whoever passes judgment on the souls that enter the Siege Perilous may have thought it would be a real howler to “accidentally” send her back to the “wrong” Cairo, on the far side of the world from the one she used to live in? Or maybe it was all a bureaucratic filing error?
(About a year later, it will finally be explained to us that Storm never actually “died” in the first place. A S.H.I.E.L.D. LMD (Life Model Decoy) “died” in her stead. Nanny just loves playing her little mind games.)
1989. UXM #255 Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke is back, totally amnesiac (we are told). Roma, or whoever passes judgment on the souls that wander through the Siege Perilous, apparently thought it would be a very uplifting and appropriate experience for her to lose her conscious memories and fall into the clutches of the ninja outfit known as The Hand (the same outfit that trained Elektra, back in the day) so that they could change her to look rather Asian (but keeping the purple hair) and brainwash her to be a loyal telepathic ninja assassin who just happened to be loyal first and foremost to Iron Man’s old sparring partner, The Mandarin. (No, I don’t quite follow the Siege Perilous’s “logic” on this point, either!)
1989. UXM #259. Written by Chris Claremont.
Colossus is back, totally amnesiac, except for having a vague idea that his name is “Peter Nicholas.” (Actually the Anglicized version of part of his name.) He is considerably luckier than Psylocke in the resurrection sweepstakes, however. He ends up in the SoHo apartment of a couple of friends from a previous adventure, although he doesn’t recognize them and they don’t recognize him (since they previously only met him when he was in his giant organic steel form). He also gets shot in the arm by their enemies, but he’ll pull through.
Meanwhile, in a separate subplot that has zero contact with the “Colossus in SoHo” one that starts in this same issue, Dazzler is back. Totally amnesiac – unlike Colossus, she doesn’t even remember any part of her name. On the other hand, she also lands among friends – the Siege Perilous apparently dumped her on a nice quiet stretch of beach near the Malibu residence of singer Lila Cheney, and she is conveniently found by Guido, an employee of Lila’s who quickly recognizes her as a former member of Lila's band and makes sure she gets good care.
1990. X-Men Annual #14. Second story in the Annual. Written by Chris Claremont.
The concluding installment of the “Days of Future Present” arc that ran through four annuals in 1990.
In a backup story set before the conclusion of the lead story in the Annual, a high-powered adult Franklin Richards (from the future of an alternate timeline first shown to us in “Days of Future Past”) meets Wolverine in Madripoor and is annoyed by the presence of Jubilee and Psylocke, total strangers who never had any part in the X-Men history of his timeline. So he makes them vanish into thin air. In context, it appears that he didn’t just “teleport” them somewhere else – he “erased” them entirely! Wolverine, of course, manages to persuade him to bring them back by the end of the story.
The way I figure it – and I could be wrong – during the panels between when Franklin made Jubilee and Psylocke disappear, and when he brought them back, they did not physically exist anywhere. I figure that qualifies as being “dead” even if they made complete recoveries with no particular trauma suffered from the experience.
1990. Marvel Comics Presents #54. The relevant story is the first installment of an 8-part serial, written by Michael Higgins.
Mimic is back! We don't know that right away; he is currently a Wolverine impersonator, but by the end of the serial we will get it all explained to us in loving detail.
1990. UXM #269. Written by Chris Claremont.
Rogue is back. Oddly enough, not the least bit amnesiac! (Maybe the Siege Perilous is biased in her favor? On the other hand, it dumps her back at the old base in Australia, which had long since been reclaimed by the Reavers, so maybe the Siege wasn't really doing her any huge favors after all.)
It also turns out that Carol Danvers is back – but I don’t think she had ever been considered to have a separate, personal membership in the X-Men, just as herself. (I think. I am not an expert on the intricacies of Carol’s continuity.)
1990. UXM #270. Written by Chris Claremont.
Havok is back. He has suffered a fate similar to Psylocke’s; evidently he landed some time earlier, amnesiac, in Genosha, and was somehow conditioned to be a loyal servant of their oppressive, bigoted (against mutants!) government. He doesn’t remember that he used to be an X-Man, or that Scott is his brother with a partial immunity to his power (and vice versa), or much of anything. (Why the Siege Perilous wished this upon him is far from clear. Had he and Psylocke in particular accumulated an awful lot of bad karma that they had to pay for?)
1999. X-Men #97. Written by Terry Kavanagh, but plotted by Alan Davis if I have this right.
Cyclops sacrifices himself and is merged together with Apocalypse. Professor X offers the shocked comment that now he can’t detect any trace of Scott’s mind or soul! Most of the X-Men apparently interpret this to mean: “No question about it, boys and girls - Scott is dead! May he rest in peace!” His wife Jean has more faith in him – but I believe that hers remains the minority opinion for quite some time. So I’m taking this as a “death scene” for him, and listing it on that basis.
2000. UXM 390. Written by Scott Lobdell.
Colossus dies voluntarily, as a human sacrifice to stop the Legacy Virus. (Yes, I personally believe a “super-powered mutant” can still be a “human” sacrifice. I have serious trouble with the assumption that one stupid mutant gene makes a guy a “nonhuman.”)
(In a later comic, we learned his body was cremated and the ashes scattered, so you'd think he would have been dead by the time that cremation process was finished if he hadn't already been when it started. But when did a little thing like that ever stop an X-Man?)
2000. UXM 391. Written by Scott Lobdell.
Although this story does not show Cyclops’s “miraculous return,” it is published before the story that does! So chronologically, it is arguably the “first” reappearance of a healthy Cyclops who is his own man again, free and clear. His memory apparently got somewhat damaged by the psychological trauma of the whole experience with Apocalypse, however, because he simply can’t remember that he already asked his long-lost father “why did you never come back for me?” almost twenty years earlier (our time), and Corsair already explained.
(If I recall correctly, the basic excuse provided by Claremont in the early 80s was that Corsair "knew" his two sons were dead, since he last saw them dangling from a burning parachute thousands of feet above the ground, so what was there on Earth that he really wanted or needed to go back to? When he broke out of captivity, he preferred to dedicate his life to getting revenge for the deaths of his wife and children! Only many years later did he find out the kids had survived because of the mutant superpowers he never knew they had. Made sense to me!)
2000. X-Men: The Search for Cyclops #4. Written by Joseph Harris.
Better late than never? Now that UXM #391 had already shown us that Scott Summers was back in the land of the living, good as new (except for those ugly memory problems I mentioned), Marvel finally decided it might as well publish the last part of the miniseries that was dedicated to explaining how he did, in fact, get separated from Apocalypse and returned to active duty with the X-Men. Pity that UXM #391 had already destroyed any faint shred of “suspense” regarding just how this was going to play out, though.
2001. X-Treme X-Men #2. Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke dies when Vargas runs a sword right through her and then flees the scene, leaving the corpse behind for the other X-Men to grieve over. Seems like an open-and-shut case of death.
2003. New X-Men #148. Written by Grant Morrison.
Jean Grey and Wolverine are trapped on Asteroid X as it goes hurtling straight toward the sun, courtesy of Magneto. Wolverine finally kills Jean with his claws on the theory that it's a quicker, more merciful death than being roasted alive as the heat increases.
She gets over it, though - we see her eyes fire up before the issue ends. Somehow the death was a necessary preliminary step before she could access the full power of the Phoenix or some such thing (according to what she says later. You know how Phoenixes are). Wolverine had not anticipated that result, incidentally, but it saved him from dying himself.
2003. New X-Men #150. Written by Grant Morrison.
Magneto, previously posing as Xorn for many issues, manages to fatally injure Jean Grey with a big electromagnetic pulse, so that she soon dies.
[Yes, yes, I know, it was later retconned to not be Magneto at all. But for the moment, I prefer to describe things as they seemed to be happening at the time.]
2004. Astonishing X-Men #4. Written by Joss Whedon.
Colossus is back.
2005. UXM #455. Written by Chris Claremont.
Psylocke is back! As I recall, no clear explanation is provided in this issue.
***** END OF TIMELINE *****
Down here at the bottom, later drafts of this Timeline will try to list Grand Totals for how many times a character has "Died" and "Returned." But I know I don't have all the data yet; I'm waiting for helpful feedback from my readers before I try to commit myself on the subject of who has done it the most often, who is in Second Place, and so forth http://newsarama.com/ubb/smile.gif