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A couple of months ago I wrote a piece about 10 Motives for Killing Comic Book Characters. That one dealt with the reasons the writers and editors might have had for making the decision to slaughter poor old Character X.
Now I’ve decided it’s time for the sequel about different excuses that can be used by a writer who wants to bring back Character X after a decent interval. I came up with a list of 15 Excuses that seem to cover the basic possibilities I’ve seen used in the past. If I forgot any, let me know!
01. Missing In Action – PRESUMED Dead
02. Somebody Else’s Body
03. Exact Replica
04. Only “Mostly Dead”
05. Act of God
06. Parallel World
07. Massive Retcon – It Never Happened!
08. Dead But Still Active
09. Didn’t You Know I’m a Professional Corpse?
10. The Original is Dead; Long Live the Clone
11. Reincarnation
12. Time Travel
13. Continuing a Proud Tradition
14. The Flashback Option
15. Never Apologize; Never Explain!
01. Missing In Action – PRESUMED Dead
“We never found the body after things quieted down, so how do you know he’s really dead?” is the basic idea. Years after Character X was declared dead and his will went through probate, he may come knocking on the door, saying, “I’m back! Did you miss me?” This one has actually been known to happen in real life, unlike some of the other excuses on this list. There were many cases of soldiers who were declared dead during the turmoil of World War II, for instance, and came home years later to discover their “widows” had remarried to other men.
In fact, this “we never found the body” gimmick may be the most popular excuse. Particularly if the writer of the original story that “killed” the character specifically anticipated that he should “leave the door open” for a comeback years later – or perhaps was ordered to leave that door open by an editor, even if the writer personally wanted to believe he “really” killed the guy and said so during interviews and convention appearances and so forth. “Yes, I killed Character X! Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to apologize! I’m glad I killed him, do you hear me? Glad, glad, GLAD!”
A very common method to “kill” a character, setting things up for this excuse to be easily used later, is the Huge Explosion that Conveniently Obliterates the Physical Evidence. “Of course he must have been killed in the explosion; but it was so horrendous that there’s nothing left to prove it in court! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, you know what I mean?”
One example is the fate of the first version of the Doom Patrol, way back when. When their first series was facing cancellation anyway, all four of the original members died heroically in a terrible explosion. It was such a terrible explosion that various stories subsequently referring to that bleak day repeatedly stressed the point that their bodies had (apparently) been annihilated and were not even salvageable for funerals. Over the next couple of decades, I believe this absence of nice solid bodies was also used as the excuse to bring back three out of four, at different times. Robotman, Negative Man, and the Chief. (Elasti-Girl was the odd woman out – she stayed dead all through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Until a different Excuse was just recently used to bring her back in a new Doom Patrol series – we’ll get to that one later.)
02. Somebody Else’s Body
“Yes, you found a body in terrible condition, and yes, you assumed it was mine based on strong circumstantial evidence, but it wasn’t really me. You just couldn’t tell the difference.”
An early example in popular adventure fiction was the time Tarzan’s wife Jane “died” and “returned” in stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’ve read that initially, when the material about her death and Tarzan’s reaction to it was being written and published as a magazine serial, ERB really meant to have her stay dead so that he could have Tarzan become eligible for romance with someone else later on, but then he changed his mind and the book version which reprinted the stuff about Jane’s death in a wartime atrocity as the opening portion of the novel modified a few details, so that (a) we only “knew” Jane was dead because Tarzan discovered the charred skeletal remains of an adult female wearing his wife’s rings after an attack upon their African home during World War I and assumed the otherwise unrecognizable body was that of his beloved, and (b) Tarzan eventually discovered at the very end of the book that a villainous German army officer had captured Jane alive, but stuck some of her jewelry on another woman’s corpse to confuse the issue.
As a rule of thumb, this excuse works best if (a) the body is clearly that of a dead human being, but it was so hideously damaged as to be beyond positive identification, or (b) nobody on the scene knows just what the character’s real face ought to look like underneath a mask, so observers look at the recognizable costume on the corpse and say “Case Closed!”
The “beyond positive identification” option was easier before DNA testing was readily available, but some writers still use that approach today when it suits them.
03. Exact Replica
“Sure, there was a recognizable corpse. Sure, it was positively identified as mine. But guess what! It wasn’t really me! It was just a carbon copy of me!”
The most notorious use of this Excuse was probably the return of Jean Grey in 1985, five years after she had died a tragic death in the Grand Finale of the classic Dark Phoenix Saga by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. Her beloved, Scott Summers, was looking right at her when she died (implicitly by suicide, using her telekinesis to activate some sort of high-powered energy weapon aimed at herself before she went totally nuts and committed genocide again), so it seemed open-and-shut that this was in fact his sweetheart’s body that received a decent burial in the following issue of the Uncanny X-Men.
However! Years later, when someone at Marvel decided it was time to reunite all five of Professor Charles Xavier’s original students for a new title called X-Factor, a way was found to have the Avengers stumble across the “real” Jean Grey, who had been in suspended animation all this time. It was eventually determined that well before the Dark Phoenix Saga began, the cosmic Phoenix Force had somehow created an exact replica of Jean’s body, duplicated Jean’s memories and something of her personality, stuck its own consciousness into that replica, replaced Jean among the X-Men for the next several months without anyone (not even Professor X the super-telepath) ever knowing the difference, and so on and so forth.
The X-Men and their associates have actually provided several other examples of this “Exact Replica” excuse over the years. Storm seemed to die in battle in Uncanny X-Men #248, leaving behind a recognizable corpse for her friends to grieve over. That was in 1989. I had just recently started buying the title at the time and didn’t know how Chris Claremont was going to wiggle out of this one. But I was sure he had something in mind! It all happened so suddenly – within a single-issue-story, with no dramatic build-up to speak of, and Storm’s abrupt death serving no particular purpose that I could see - that I was absolutely certain the whole thing was somehow contrived and did not represent a Permanent and Significant Change in Storm’s status. She was too central to the X-Men concept to be permanently disposed of in such a hasty and pointless fashion.
Guess what? I was right! First, she mysteriously came back onstage just a few issues later as a young girl who had no conscious memory of anything after her time as a child thief in Cairo, Egypt (although it was a long time before her fellow X-Men found out about her return), and about a year later, we finally got a full explanation of how the villain called “Nanny” had substituted a SHIELD LMD for the real Ororo Munroe back in #248. An LMD, or Life Model Decoy, apparently can do such a good job of mimicking a living (or dead) person as to fool that person’s friends and family (in this case, the other X-Men). Please don’t ask me how that works. I gathered, however, that Claremont didn’t invent the idea; some other writer had already created the LMD years earlier as a plot device, and once it was part of Marvel continuity, any Marvel writer could take advantage of it.
04. Only “Mostly Dead”
INIGO: He's dead. He can't talk.
MiIRACLE MAX : Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
INIGO: What's that?
MIRACLE MAX : Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
(This dialogue was quoted from “The Princess Bride”)
Or, to put it another way, if Character X ever comes back from a “Mostly Dead” condition, his line will be: “Yes, you identified my body. Yes, you checked for a pulse, and didn’t find one. But couldn’t you tell I wasn’t really dead?”
One of the most high-profile and shameless examples of this particular excuse is the infamous return of the Spider-Clone after he had been presumed dead and cremated for almost twenty years realtime.
The Spider-Clone had originally been Cannon Fodder, created by Gerry Conway so he could briefly live and quickly die within the pages of a storyline in the mid-70s. The evil mastermind called the Jackal had grown a clone of Spider-Man, complete with memories copied from the original, for some odd reason which I can’t for the life of me remember at the moment. (I mean, if I wanted to defeat a superhero, my strategy would NOT involve creating a carbon copy of him, right down to the same memories and personality as the guy I already hated.) At the end of the story, the Spider-Clone had been caught in an explosion. Peter Parker examined the body, found it was dead, and regretfully carried the corpse to the smokestack of an incinerator and dumped it in, figuring it was best to cremate the mortal remains in order to avoid compromising his own secret identity by trying to explain to the authorities where this dead lookalike had come from.
Almost twenty years later, someone at Marvel decided it would be a cute stunt to bring the Spider-Clone back. So Peter Parker had apparently done an incredibly superficial job of examining the body before dumping him in the incinerator. Before the device was fired up, the clone had woken up, dragged himself to safety, eventually recovered from his injuries, and changed his name to Ben Reilly and left town for a few years. Now he was back. This said marvelous things about Spidey’s ability to distinguish between a dead carcass and a living human being who should be rushed to the emergency room, eh? Remind me not to let him perform triage on me and my friends if we ever become battlefield casualties!
(If I had been working on the Spider-books in the mid-90s, and if I had become convinced that what the world really needed was an exact duplicate of the Amazing Spider-Man rubbing shoulders with the original, I would have taken an entirely different approach. Instead of finding a specious excuse for dusting off a corpse from two decades earlier that most fans of the mid-90s had either never heard of or had long since forgotten, I would have started over from scratch in order to get exactly whatever it was I thought I needed without messing up someone else’s previous work. I would have started by establishing a brand new storyline about cloning and genetic engineering and whatnot, to serve as an excuse for a new clone character that shared all of Peter Parker’s memories up to a certain point in his life. Without needing to shamefully insult Peter’s intelligence by basing my concept upon the assumption of his utter incompetence at checking a body for vital signs, way back when. Not to mention one or two other gaping plot holes I would have avoided by doing it my way. But what do I know?)
05. Act of God
“Yes, I was dead. For awhile. But a Miracle happened, and now I’m alive!”
Not necessarily an act of the Biblical God. I’m using the “Act of God” catchphrase to refer to any “supernatural” and “miraculous” event that seems to have been contrived by some Very Important Entity with resources and abilities much greater than those of any mortal man. Comic books are full of such Entities, and from time to time they exercise the power of Life and Death to raise the dead or heal “incurably” sick or injured patients.
When Kevin Smith wrote the story arc that brought Oliver Queen, the original Green Arrow, back to life in a new monthly title, he used this excuse. Hal Jordan, at a time when he was endowed with godlike power, had scraped up a few molecules of residual material from Ollie’s body (previously obliterated in an explosion) and used that as the basis for arranging for Ollie to come back to life, missing a good many years of his memories however.
On a similar note, Chris Claremont had eight of the X-Men die in a heroic sacrifice in Dallas in the late 80s (Colossus, Dazzler, Havok, Longshot, Psylocke, Rogue, Storm, Wolverine) and then promptly brought them back to life through the good graces of Roma, super-sorceress and daughter of Merlin. Something the eight heroes had no particular reason to expect would happen.
06. Parallel World
“That wasn’t ME who died. It was my analog, my genetically-identical duplicate from a parallel world or alternate timeline or whatever!”
Or, alternately, “Yes, the ‘me’ from the ‘main world’ of this series died, but I’m a duplicate from another world, and I’m still alive and kicking!”
After all, if we grant the idea of alternate histories where key events developed differently, then the question of which Parallel World should be regarded as the “baseline,” as opposed to being disparagingly labeled as an obscure “spinoff” of the Prime Reality, is all in the eye of the beholder!
Jay Faerber used a cute variation of the “Parallel World” excuse to bring about a happy ending for two characters in one of his “Noble Causes” story arcs. In the “main” world of Noble Causes continuity, at the start of the very first four-part miniseries, the wife had seen her husband obliterated by an energy beam during their honeymoon. A few miniseries later, she conveniently ended up on a parallel world we had never heard of before, one almost exactly like the one she came from, except that in this timeline, her husband had been grieving ever since he saw his beloved wife die during the “same” honeymoon. They were, of course, ecstatically happy to be miraculously “reunited.”
Of course, many stories are labeled as occurring in their own little alternate timelines from the start, and thus the fans reading those stories are not angry when someone important dies, because they know it will have absolutely no impact upon the continuity of the regular monthly titles. Thus, no “excuse” for the character’s future participation in those titles is necessary. On the other hand, if the character has already died “in continuity,” he can still be used again and again in a story set in an “alternate reality” where he didn’t die at all. DC has the Elseworlds line, Marvel has had a couple of What If? series and now has the Exiles, and so forth.
07. Massive Retcon – It Never Happened!
“Retcon” is abbreviated from “Retroactive Continuity.” It means writing a new story in which you reveal that the events of a previous story didn’t happen exactly the way they were presented at the time . . . or possibly that those events have been totally erased and that nothing remotely resembling that old story ever happened!
“Crisis on Infinite Earths” created a lot of opportunities here. For years after that, anything in a DC comic that seemed to contradict older stories about the same characters could easily be dismissed with the Retcon Excuse. “Well, you’re talking about the Pre-Crisis character’s continuity. Don’t you realize that this contradictory material must be part of the new-and-improved Post-Crisis version of this character?” (This excuse started to wear a little thin as it became increasingly clear that sometimes one Post-Crisis storyline blatantly contradicted another Post-Crisis storyline about the same character! Even Zero Hour didn’t make things any better, despite some high hopes.)
For example, the original Supergirl (Kara, cousin of Kal-El) died a heroic death in the middle of the Crisis miniseries and was greatly mourned. But after all was said and done . . . not only had she died, she had never existed in the first place! Which meant that Superman had scarcely spoken a few touching words at her funeral before he ceased to remember having done so . . . and if she eventually “came back” to meet her cousin Kal-El “for the very first time,” the excuse would presumably be that this was the first appearance of the “new” Kara of the Post-Crisis DC universe.
In fact, several different writers have been inspired by Kara’s death to set things up for various “false alarms” over the years - beginning almost immediately, when Paul Levitz in the Legion of Super-Heroes had a mystery subplot stretch out across several issues about the mysterious masked blond character called Sensor Girl who might, conceivably, have been Superman’s cute blond cousin. Now I hear that a new version of the “original” Supergirl is supposed to be back among the living after 19 years in comic book limbo. Presumably using the Retcon Excuse due to the dead one being “erased” in Crisis. Unfortunately, she came back in material written by Jeph Loeb, which means I haven’t been wasting my time and money buying it in monthly installments and then waiting impatiently for the next installment that may or may not make sense out of the weird stuff I just read. (I did it that way with “Hush.” Once burned, twice shy!) When it’s available in trade paperback . . . maybe.
Also, I mentioned the original Doom Patrol earlier in this post. I hear that John Byrne has taken the Massive Retcon approach there and has just started a new series in which all of the previous Doom Patrol stuff, including their “heroic sacrifice” at the end of the original run of their own title, has never happened. So first three out of four of their founding members had “come back to life” at various times via Excuse #1, the lack of corpses to be autopsied and buried, and now those same three (plus the fourth) have come back to us just as they were in the old days, via the Retcon Excuse!
08. Dead, But Still Active
Some characters are definitely dead but still walking around interacting with people; other characters have seemed to be stuck somewhere on the border of Life and Death. Either way, the idea usually seems to be that the person in question did, in fact, “die” – more or less - and hasn’t exactly been raised from the dead . . . but is still running around bothering people. Various “ghostly” characters come to mind as definitely or possibly fitting into this category of excuse. Secret of Young Justice (DC). Ghost (Dark Horse). Deadman (DC).
Zombies and mummies probably deserve to go into this group. How you count all the vampire characters is a matter of opinion. I consider them to be significantly different from “dead, but still active,” but Your Mileage May Vary. Actually, I tend to put Dracula and his ilk in the next category of Excuse, which is . . .
09. Didn’t you know I’m a Professional Corpse?
I wrote about the Professional Corpse in my previous post, “10 Motives for Killing a Comic Book Character.” This is the character whose basic concept has the built-in possibility of his dying a colorful death today . . . and coming back to life just in time to die another colorful death next week . . . and next month, and next year, and so forth. Once you’ve established the basic idea about him, it isn’t necessary to go to all that trouble of inventing and explaining a “new” excuse each time you restore him to life. Just recycle the same old excuse as many times as necessary! Your fans will understand!
Many different “robot” and “artificial intelligence” characters are Professional Corpses. They die; then they come back via this excuse: “He’s not dead; he just needs to be reinstalled on new hardware!”
Likewise, various magical and/or undead characters are routinely “killed” and later “brought back to life.” Count Dracula springs to mind.
Another example: In the days when Jamie Madrox the Multiple Man was a part of X-Factor in the 1990s, I think we went through more than one “false alarm” regarding his vital status. If his original body died, all of the generated duplicates would die (I think?). So upon occasion, a body which was believed to the original would die, leaving behind the nagging question, “Was that really the ORIGINAL body?” A classic case of a Professional Corpse concept that allowed us to see him die again and again!
On a similar note, Ra’s al Ghul’s corpse can always be rushed to the nearest Lazarus Pit, and frequently is. (DC recently claimed to have killed him off for the Last Time, but I don’t have to believe it. Check with me again in twenty years and we’ll see if they stuck to the idea.)
One problem with the Lazarus Pit scenario is that in theory, it can work not just for Ra’s but for anybody (if, apparently, the body is not too badly damaged), so that almost any other corpse in the DCU could receive the same treatment. This tends to throw doubt on the “authenticity” of just about any death with a recognizable corpse that you care to name in the DCU, because it’s theoretically possible that someone carted it off to a Lazarus Pit right after the death certificate was signed! (Jeph Loeb used this possibility to set up a sneaky false alarm regarding the possible return of Jason Todd in the “Hush” storyline.)
As an example of the sort of extreme skepticism that the existence of the Lazarus Pits can inspire in diehard fans of a deceased character, let’s try this idea on for size: If you have fondly examined reprints of some of the “corny” Batman/Batwoman teamups from the late 50s and early 60s, and if you regret the subsequent death of Kathy Kane in the late 70s in a story reprinted in “Batman: Tales of the Demon,” then you can easily “live in denial” by saying, “How do we know her corpse is still in the coffin? Who’s to say Ra’s al Ghul (who walked onstage in that story just as Batman discovered her dead body) didn’t grab it right after the funeral, rush it off to his nearest Lazarus Pit, and resuscitate her?” The answer to that question is very simple: We DON’T know her corpse is still in her coffin! We are simply supposed to conveniently forget the very existence of Lazarus Pits except on those occasions when a writer feels like hitting us over the head with pointed reminders about their capabilities as part of a story he’s telling!
10. The Original is Dead; Long Live the Clone
John Ostrander killed off his hard-boiled hero, John Gaunt, aka Grimjack, in that character’s own monthly series in the 1980s. However, since the title continued to be published each month, it was painfully clear that pretty soon the title character would come back. A clone-body with the original soul restored to it was the excuse that Ostrander ended up using. Conveniently, this clone-body seemed to be younger and fitter than the middle-aged, “not so fast as I used to be” body the Grimjack of the first few years of the title had been stuck with.
Kurt Busiek used the Clone Excuse in his Power Company title a few years ago. In the 1970s, Archie Goodwin wrote a classic storyline in which a hero called Manhunter died after a war with an evil organization that had produced numerous clones of him and trained them to be obedient assassins. It occurred to Busiek that it would not blatantly contradict that old story to suggest that one of the clone-assassins had developed sudden free will in the middle of that storyline and had quietly struck off on his own before the Grand Finale, and had been wandering around as a mercenary and bounty hunter ever since. Wearing a costume clearly based on the one worn in the 70s by Paul Kirk, but with a different color scheme. In this case, however, Paul Kirk’s heroic soul did not seem to have been magically reincarnated within the surviving clone.
11. Reincarnation
I mentioned that Grimjack used the Clone Excuse for coming back from the dead at one point. About a year and a half later, Ostrander had him take the Reincarnation option too! His clone-body died, and suddenly the next issue opened up a couple of hundred years after the previous issue, with the old supporting cast having conveniently died off when we weren’t looking so that Ostrander could start over from scratch with a new set of faces. A young red-haired man suddenly remembered that he was the latest reincarnation of the legendary Grimjack, and things went on from there.
Reincarnation has also been a part of the Hawkman and Hawkgirl concepts, at least intermittently, ever since they started in the 1940s. (The Golden Age Hawkman and Hawkgirl were supposed to be the modern reincarnations of a tragic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style pair of lovers from Ancient Egypt.)
12. Time Travel
“I thought Chronos was dead.”
“Don’t ask. He says he’s the one from twenty-seven seconds pre-his-own death.”
“I hate time travelers.”
(Dialogue from Identity Crisis #2, written by Brad Meltzer.)
Mark Waid used the “Time Travel” excuse in a Flash storyline many years ago where the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, apparently came back from his sad death in Crisis. However, it turned out it was actually Professor Zoom, a speedster criminal from the future. This was something Wally West had never anticipated since he knew darn well that Professor Zoom had been killed years earlier, before Barry’s own death. Waid’s denouement logically pointed out that time travelers were not required to travel back to the 20th Century in the exact same sequence as the order in which their little visits appeared to be happening from the viewpoint of a character based in the “modern era” of the DCU. From Zoom’s point of view, this was his very “first” trip, and all the face-to-face encounters he’d had with Barry Allen still lay in his future!
13. Continuing a Proud Tradition
Here, it is conceded that the guy who died in a previous story is still dead and buried . . . but someone else is “taking over the family business,” so to speak, by wearing an identical or similar costume and continuing the “role.” The replacement may or may not be a close relative of the predecessor. Technically, this isn’t a case of restoring a dead character to life, but superhero comic books are very visually-oriented and fans may be content to see the same colorful costume on the cover even if intellectually they know it’s supposed to be a different face underneath the mask. Sometimes the “average citizens” in the world of the comics are fully aware of what’s really happened, but other times they only see a distinctive costume on the six o’clock news and end up with the impression that it’s just the same old thing all over again.
Many examples are available. Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, persecuted Spider-Man off and on during the 1960s and then died in the early 70s, under circumstances very similar to those depicted in the Spider-Man movie of 2002. At other times during the 70s, Spidey was plagued by two other Green Goblins. Green Goblin #2 was Harry Osborn, the neurotic son of Norman, and #3 was the psychiatrist who had been treating Harry after he was captured. So throughout that decade Spidey actually tangled with three different men in identical costumes, but superficially, it could be argued that all this double-talk about different people under the mask was just an Excuse to have comic book covers show Spidey fighting the “same” villain over and over, even if he’d already died!
(Norman Osborn later came back anyway, but that’s another story, and a dumb one at that!)
On a similar note, Jason Todd, the second Robin, died in action in late 1988. About a year later, a new Robin (who looked very much like the previous one – male Caucasian with fair skin, black hair, blue eyes, about the same age and size) put on the costume for the first time. Thus, fans who had been screaming bloody murder at Robin’s absence from the Batman titles would now relax and shut up, or so DC presumably hoped. I’m not sure about this part, but I believe the typical inhabitant of Gotham City probably never realized a Robin had died at all, since Batman wasn’t in a mood to issue press releases on the subject and had the boy buried under the name of Jason Todd.
14. The Flashback Option
Sir Arthur Conan used this method after he had killed off his own creation, Sherlock Holmes, in a story called “The Final Problem” in which it appeared that the Great Detective and Professor Moriarty had fought a duel to the death at Reichenbach Falls and both took a fatal plunge off a cliff down into the cataract. Classic case of Mutual Assured Destruction, right?
However, a few years later, due to the endless flood of complaints from fans, Doyle tried to placate them with a compromise solution. A “flashback,” by which I mean a novel-length adventure which had allegedly happened well before the tragic events of “The Final Problem.” This novel was “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
The problem with this “solution” was that when you let a shark smell fresh blood in the water, he doesn’t quit and go home. He gets more excited and keeps looking for raw meat to sink his teeth into. In other words, now that the fans knew they could nag Doyle into writing more Holmes material, they just kept nagging and nagging until he finally broke down and brought Holmes back to life for many more stories. Having already used Excuse #14 to justify a “new” Holmes story, he now went for broke and also used #1 on my list . . . we were told there had never been a corpse retrieved; narrator Dr. Watson had foolishly jumped to conclusions when he previously reported that there was no way a living Holmes could have gotten safely off that cliff without being observed; it was a classic case of “Missing in Action; PRESUMED Dead!”
In recent comic book history, Mark Waid’s “JLA: Year One” used the “Flashback” excuse to let him write about the Silver Age versions of Green Lantern and Flash (Hal Jordan and Barry Allen) in a 12-part series set very early in their costumed careers, long before they “died.” (And now I hear that Hal Jordan is coming back anyway, although I don’t know what sort of Excuse will be used to put him back the way he was in the old days. All that shameless nagging from Hal fans has apparently paid off for them. Just as it did for Sherlock Holmes fans, about a hundred years earlier!)
15. Never Apologize; Never Explain!
Do I really have to define this one? It’s very simple. Character X dies. Months or years later, Character X is back in action. Character X feels no particular need to explain how this happened, and neither does the writer. Or perhaps he gives a one-sentence summary of an excuse that is incredibly vague and unconvincing. You’re just supposed to accept it and move on. Or come up with your own excuse if you care so much about it.
One look at the utterly shameless nature of this excuse (or rather, of this total lack of an excuse) is provided in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel “The Rolling Stones.” A humorous subplot running throughout the novel is the way Hazel Stone, mother of Captain Roger Stone and thus the idiosyncratic grandmother of the four members of the youngest generation of the family, supplements the family’s income by writing wildly exciting scripts for a serial drama called “Scourge of the Spaceways.” At one point Roger wants to know how Hazel proposes to get the hero out of the Hideous Deathtrap she had left him in at the close of the previous season - which, at the time, she had allegedly meant to be Certain Death for hero John Sterling, and thus the Grand Finale of the entire series. But money talks and she’s recently been persuaded to write a whole new season of episodes.
“The last episode you showed me, while you had killed off the Galactic Overlord you had also left Our Hero in a decidedly untenable position. Sealed in a radioactive sphere, if I remember correctly, at the bottom of an ammonia ocean on Jupiter. The ocean was swarming with methane monsters, whatever they are, each hypnotized by the Overlord's mind ray to go after John Sterling at the first whiff - and him armed only with his Scout knife. How did you get him out of it?”
“We found a way,” put in Pol. “If you assume--”
“Quiet, infants. Nothing to it, Roger. By dint of superhuman effort Our Hero extricated himself from his predicament and -”
“That's no answer.”
“You don't understand. I open the next episode on Ganymede. John Sterling is telling Special Agent Dolores O'Shanahan about his adventure. He's making light of it, see? He's noble so he really wouldn't want to boast to a girl. Just as he is jokingly disparaging his masterly escape the next action starts and it's so fast and so violent and so bloody that our unseen audience doesn't have time to think about it until the commercial. And by then they've got too much else to think about.”
I should stress that “Never Apologize; Never Explain” is different from cases where the writer has actually worked out a detailed excuse to justify the return of Character X, but he prefers to stretch out the mystery for several months before spelling out the details in plain English. For example, I mentioned earlier the case where Chris Claremont killed off Storm in 1989, brought her back to life as an amnesiac child thief just a few issues later, and then waited an additional year or so before he finally got around to explaining to us (and to her!) just HOW this peculiar situation had arisen.
P.S. The very long storyline about the Death and Return of Superman that was published in 1992 and 1993 in four linked monthly titles (and a few other comics) could provide the material for another very long post, even if I restricted myself to just trying to sort out the initial cover stories and real origins of the four characters who simultaneously burst upon the scene wearing big S-symbols on their chests and being considered (plus the actual return of the real Superman in due course). At different times, the writers seemed to be using or hinting at several of these 15 Excuses in connection with one character or another. Offhand I can remember suggestions of Long Live the Clone, Reincarnation, Act of God, Only Mostly Dead, Continuing the Proud Tradition . . . we even saw the character Waverider toy with the idea of using the Time Travel excuse to save Superman from dying in the first place, although he was argued out of it at the last moment.
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Thank you, Lorendiac, this gas been one if the most imformitable posts in along, both this one and your 10 Motives for Killing a Comicbool character are very good and very helpful to people like me that are wanting to get into writing comics, to set up or learn some of the ground rules for comicbook writing.
And I agree The Return of Superman was a great example of just about all 15 examples, for bringing back a character.
Who knows what is really real..... that's the true question in life.
Heaven Bound- Happy Easter!
I think you got them all. Except for "The Writer Wanted to Cause Chaos"
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
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Thank you. I'd like to be a comic book writer too, and I hadn't really sorted out my own ideas about bringing them back from the dead until I wrote this. Someday, in comics or some other medium, I may find it useful when I'm brainstorming for a plot.Originally Posted by Knightmare
Well, in a previous post about "10 Motives for Killing Comic Book Characters" I tried to give the "real life" motives the writers and editors might have. But here I was trying to switch perspectives and examine the different "In Character" excuses that might be used within the pages of the comic book to justify a return from the dead. If we were going to talk about the "real life" reasons it was being done, we could have such things as . . .
"The writer wanted to cause chaos and upset people"
"A bad writer arbitrarily killed Character X, and a good writer wants to bring him back to prove there's a lot that can be done with him"
"A good writer killed Character X in a very touching dramatic saga, and a bad writer wants to bring him back in hopes of piggybacking on the popularity of Good Writer's work by getting money from fans who would love a sequel"
"The editor is upset because the company still owns Character X, but Character X, being dead and buried, is no longer making money for the company, and that's disgustingly lazy on Character X's part . . ."
"The new writer worshipped Character X when he was just a little kid, and his lifelong dream has been to write about the guy, and who cares if he's supposed to be dead?"
And so on and so forth
Jason Fox tech support
Ma and Pa Kent might fit for the "retconned back to life" option. They had been one of the few comics characters to stay dead, at least in Superman's present (all the Superboy stories/flashbacks might fit the "flashbacks" option), from "Action Comics" #1 all the way until... Byrne's "Man of Steel" revamp brought 'em back to life.
-B.
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I agree. Retconning their deaths out of existence via Crisis was a use of the Retcon Excuse. Come to think of it, I can't remember if anyone else actually came back to life right after Crisis, when they had previously been dead, though. There might be some villains somewhere who had supposedly been dead before 1985, and then bounced back to life in the Post-
Crisis era? I know just about everybody who's a regular villain or supporting character in the Superman books got totally rebooted, old continuity thrown out the window, so I wouldn't be surprised if some "dead" villains managed to come back that way.
Jason Fox tech support
Hmmm...
Lori Lemaris (the mermaid) was declared dead in "Crisis On Infinite Earths" #12, but comes back in the post-Crisis/Byrne revamp world (and apparently had never bought the farm in, well, the post-Crisis version of "Crisis").
The second Toyman (from the 70's, as seen on "The Superfriends") was still dead at the time of Crisis, and now, of course, "never existed".
-B.
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You were cold as ice...
15 very good points, and a very entertaining essay. They all make sense, when you think about some of the characters brought back to life.
I am a bit confused about DC's Retcon habits, though. The Crisis on Infinite Earths gave DC an excuse to kill off certain characters, and then say their deaths never happened. If the Crisis itself never happened, how did Barry Allen die in current continuity? Why did his death stick, but Kara/Supergirl was wiped from existance?
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The way I heard it, Superman's Continuity (including all his regular villains and supporting cast, including his cousin) was a special case. John Byrne seems to have gotten permission from DC to erase EVERY STORY that had ever been done in the Pre-Crisis era in any Superman title. Part of Byrne's idea was to make Superman be really and truly The Last Son of Krypton; that is to say, the ONLY person left alive in the mainstream DC Universe with Kryptonian DNA. This required getting rid of Krypto the Super-Dog, the Phantom Zone criminals who had been featured in the Superman 2 movie a few years earlier, the Bottled City of Kandor, and even Supergirl.
(Marv Wolfman was writing a monthly Superman title at the time of the change from Pre-Crisis to Post-Crisis, but I'm not clear on just how much input he had into what happened. For the moment, let's blame Byrne for everything.)
As far as I know, offhand, the only other Big Name Character in the DCU who was scheduled to get TOTALLY Rebooted right after Crisis was Wonder Woman. Like Superman, all her past continuity got erased from history. Most other DC characters got off more lightly. For example, Batman himself was hardly touched, although his second Robin was changed drastically. The Pre-Crisis Jason Todd (a fairly normal, likeable kid with hair that looked kinda strawberry blond when he didn't dye it) was transformed into a Post-Crisis black-haired tire-stealing juvenile delinquent with a nastier attitude whom Batman had for some odd reason decided to turn into his new Robin. Likewise, Barry Allen was still supposed to have been the Flash, a proud member of the original JLA, for many years before he died during the Crisis.
I've heard that the DC heroes who lived through Crisis are supposed to remember that something happened called "Crisis" that involved two powerful entities called "the Monitor" and "the Anti-Monitor." They may even remember it involved lots of travel through time and space and lots of people dying. They just don't remember there used to be a zillion Parallel Worlds before the Crisis. The Golden Age heroes of the JSA, for instance, don't remember that they used to live on a separate planet from the Silver Age heroes of the JLA, because Crisis somehow retroactively rearranged history so that now they've all lived on the same world all the time.
Kikoutei Densetsu
I don`t know why they even borther killing off char now? The wriiters are gonna bring them back or the fan will force them to bring them back. It anit right.
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