Monday, April 11, 2016

Manic Monday Triple Overtime--Dead Is Dead (Not)!!

Maria Pepeta of Omaha, Nebraska, has a bone to pick with Marvel in the letter column of X-Men #53 (1969):

Yeah, that's a good question--how can you revive Magneto yet let Professor X stay dead?

We saw him die!! We saw his body!! We saw his funeral!! There's no humanly possible or plausible way to bring him back!!

Exactly one year later, Professor Xavier was alive again.

Was this the first time a significant character was retconned back from a "for real, no kidding" death? Let's not count super-villains--they were designed to apparently die and bounce back. Is this the one that opened the floodgates?

Of course, considering some of the character assassination that's been done to Xavier's character in recent decades, Charles would have been better off staying dead...

3 comments:

Bill said...

You know who killed 'em so they stayed dead? The Legion of Super Heros! Proty, one third of Duo Damsel, Karate Kid, Invisible Boy....

Green Luthor said...

Lightning Lad... wait. Unless you count the retcon that Proty's mind was transferred into LL's body, in which case he did stay dead, but then that takes Proty off the list. (But that retcon was stupid.) And when they brought in the SW6 Legionnaires, the rest of that list (along with Ferro Lad) came back as well. (Although I guess the entire 5YL stuff doesn't count at all anymore, after the Zero Hour reboot, then the threeboot, then the "deboot" that brought back the original continuity but before 5YL... gah, Legion continuity is headache-inducing...)

Wayne Allen Sallee said...

Can't forget Reflecto.