Friday's Rant

So, Girl Friday K (I think that's her rap name)(mine being "Mo JF Master Cube a.k.a. Funky Rage") ranted a bit last week about returning characters from the dead, specifically Stephanie Brown aka Spoiler (rap name: "Slim Stephie").

While I'm not particularly knowledgeable about this specific character, I think the matter of resurrecting dead characters is a good topic of discussion. On one hand, yes, it is cheesier to recycle a deceased character than create a new one out of whole cloth, however, there are benefits as well.

1) Bowing to fan pressure. Bringing back the dead is usually a fan pleaser, and can get you a small sales spike. Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle now appearing in Booster Gold is a good example of this. Warlock, now appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy, may not be a good example.

2) Dead characters come with baggage. A benefit of bringing back an established character who seemingly passed away are that these characters already have their characteristics set. Fans already know who they are, what their motivations are. New characters are a blank slate that have to be filled in over time. It takes a real master to fully bring out the characteristics of a character in a 30 page comic. A recent good example of masterful character building from a blank slate can be seen in Avengers Initiative #13, with the introduction of "Butterball". However, this character building takes a lot of room, leading to...

2a) Resurrecting secondary characters keeps the attention on the main character. In the case of the above example, Butterball takes over the entire comic. It takes a lot of room and time to establish a new character. You aren't just informing the reader about how they think and react to the environment, you are showing how the environment reacts to them. Introducing a resurrected character reduces that need for space, allowing the writer to concentrate on the character the reader bought the comic for, whose reactions to the newly undead lead to...

2b) Following 2a, resurrecting a secondary character can show the emotional depth of the primary character. A good recent example of this is bringing Mockingbird back from the dead to show the emotional depth of Ronin aka Hawkeye in Secret Invasion #2. Bringing in a new character to do this (she was my wife...once) always falls flat.

In any case, this is a good topic for discussion. Superhero comics are basically soap operas for adolescent boys, and use the tropes of that genre extensively, so we should never be surprised by the bringing back of a dead character (though it is interesting that bringing back a hero involves much more controversy than bringing back a villain). What we should be concerned about, as Friday says, is the use of this trick out of laziness or bad storytelling.