The 5 Best Deaths and Resurrections of Characters in Comics

Comics kill off characters all the time. And why not? It’s a good way to boost sales. It livens things up and gives new creative teams a chance to make their mark on the character (for better or for worse). The fallout from a character’s death can last for a few months or have effects that spark new and exciting turns in the character’s supporting story. Of course, no character can stay dead in comics. It just wouldn’t make sense for a successful character with forty years’ worth of backstory to simply drop off the shelf. Whether the same writer who killed them brings them back or another scribe saddles the task, the comic book hero must always come back to life. Here is a look at five notable deaths and their subsequent resurrections in the comic book industry.

 

Number 5 – Superman

What Went Down: A mindless juggernaut named Doomsday escaped from a secret installation and carved a path towards Metropolis destroying heroes and cities alike to do what everyone thought impossible. He killed Superman. Once thought to only be vulnerable to Kryptonite, Superman was literally pummeled to death. The story built for several issues before culminating in a final chapter where splash pages (comic book panels that take up the entire page) made up the entire issue and ended with the two characters killing each other.

What Resulted: Four different Supermen, including Steel and the current Superboy, rose to fill the void left by the Caped Crusader. Steel is the Tony Stark of the DC Universe, a talented inventor who created a similarly powered suit of armor as homage to Superman. Superboy turned out to be clone who was intended to tear Superman down but ended up siding with good. The split-faced Cyborg Superman eventually went rogue and is now floating around the cosmos as a villain associated with the Sinestro Corps. The Eradicator, an ancient Kryptonian weapon, poses as Superman by putting the stolen corpse of Superman inside a device in the Fortress of Solitude to absorb Superman’s memories (creepy right?).

The Hero’s Return: Superman essentially “escapes” from Heaven to return to Metropolis. Because who wouldn’t want to go to Heaven, right? Clad in black (are we sure it was really Heaven, I thought they wore white), The Last Son of Krypton emerges from a “regeneration matrix” minus his powers to return and set things right. His powers eventually return, and everything is back to normal with a few new friends and villains.

 

Number 4 – Captain America

What Went Down: In an effort to put an end to the Superhero Civil War, Captain America surrenders himself to custody and is put on trial for inciting civil unrest. As he is being marched in handcuffs up the steps to the courthouse where he will be tried, an assassin named Crossbones snipes him through the throat. And while pandemonium ensues, his girlfriend Sharon Carter — acting under the influence of Dr. Faustus’s brainwashing — shoots him several times at point blank range in the stomach.

What Resulted: Iron Man starts trying to fill the shoes of the patriotic hero since it was essentially his fault that Cap was lost. Iron Man was acting Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. at the time as well as the number one enforcer of the Superhuman Registration Act that prompted the Civil War. Many thought that he would repaint the Iron Man armor red, white, and blue and carry the shield himself, but he instead offers the uniform to Hawkeye (who had recently found himself resurrected from his own comic book death). Hawkeye declines and joins an underground team of Avengers. Cap’s long-lost sidekick, Bucky, rediscovered as the Winter Soldier, is set up by Nick Fury to be the next Captain America.

The Hero’s Return: Ed Brubaker had set this up for years. The gun that Sharon Carter used to ice (or rather, re-ice) Cap was created by the Red Skull via the Cosmic Cube. It displaced Captain America in time and space so that he could be thrown off kilter and destroyed more easily. But Captain America recognized the deception, fought his way back to the present somehow, and came back to take the reins at S.H.I.E.L.D. and start a new team of Avengers. The role of Captain America  remains with Bucky until his death in the Fear Itself plotline (his second death; are we seeing a trend yet?)

 

Number 3 – Batman

What Went Down: During Final Crisis, Batman was blasted by Darkseid’s eye lasers and burnt to a crisp. No wait! Really his girlfriend at the time, Jezebel Jet (can you not see that dating a girl named “Jezebel” is a bad thing? You’re the world’s greatest Detective for crying out loud!) discovered that he was Batman and betrayed him to a gazillionaire criminal The Black Hand. No Wait!! Darkseid kidnapped him and had some lackeys brainwash him into forgetting who he is. No Wait!!! Darkseid’s omega beams actually launched him back through time. Sheesh! Grant Morrison proves to the comic book community that he has no clue what he is doing. There is no way to iron out how exactly Batman dies, but we are all supposed to understand that it happened, or didn’t. We all understand that right?

What Resulted: True fans of the Dark Knight officially started hating Grant Morrison.

The Hero’s Return: Dick Grayson, the original Robin, dons the cape and cowl with Bruce Wayne’s son Damian as the new Robin. Meanwhile, Batman fights his way through time at various points in history as Cave- Batman, Pirate-Batman, and (oh God, please stop… nope, they’re going on with this), Puritan-Batman. Eventually DC has to reboot their entire universe with the New 52 because no one gets this. And yet, Grant Morrison continues to work for them.

 

Number 2 – Nightcrawler

What Went Down: The X-men in the San Fransisco Bay area were fighting to keep Hope, the mutant messiah, alive. Terrorists who had activated a new class of Nimrod Sentinels along with their leader, Bastion, were trying to capture and kill her. Cyclops tasked Nightcrawler and Rogue with keeping her away from the fight, but try as they might, they couldn’t teleport her away from harm. When Bastion was about to reach Hope, an exhausted Nightcrawler teleported into it’s way, literally leaping into the Sentinel’s arm. Then he took hold of Hope and teleported her back to safety… with a robotic arm still through his chest! When the dust cleared, Nightcrawler ended up sacrificing his life for Cyclop’s cause.

What Resulted: No one stepped up to replace Nightcrawler, and there wasn’t a lot of explanation to try and make it so this didn’t actually happen or the reader didn’t see what really went on behind the curtains. Instead, one of the most beloved X-men simply died trying to serve their cause. The greatest fallout from his death has certainly been the growing enmity between Cyclops, who essentially tasked him with a suicide mission, and both Wolverine and Beast, who see Cyclops as a warmonger training children to do his bidding.

The Hero’s Return: Hundreds of strange Nightcrawler-like creatures emerge at Wolverine’s new school, though their origin is still mysterious. Wolverine led his Uncanny X-Force team on a mission into an alternate reality that was the aftermath of the Age of Apocalypse. There, they run into Kurt Wagner, alive and well. Wolverine can’t help himself and coerces the Nightcrawler from that dying reality to return with him.

 

Number 1 – Jean Grey

What Went Down: Jean Grey has been possessed by the Phoenix and has died only to come back shortly and be killed again. But that’s not the story that made the list this time. Instead, Jean Grey’s cleverest mental trick led to her death and revival in the thick of a Sentinel attack. Seeing that a Sentinel was about to crush her, Jean used her powers of telepathy to transfer her consciousness into the nearby comatose body of Emma Frost, the White Queen. Her body was crushed by the Sentinel and all thought her lost.

What Resulted: This is hands down the most superb death in comics. Unlike the other deaths on the list where the publishers hyped the death to promote sales, Jean’s demise took readers by surprise. No one was expecting it. Her death happened on the last page of the issue and was overshadowed by the introduction of Bishop. It took a while for her teammates to even realize what happened, forcing them to protect both her and the White Queen until they could be restored.

The Hero’s Return: Jean eventually came back via the same psychic channels that she used in the first place to make her escape. It wasn’t hyped or publicized. It wasn’t long-lasting and didn’t lead to a sidekick replacing her. But this was one of the greatest bait-and-switches pulled off in comic book history.

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