Comic Book Death - Common Retcons

Common Retcons

A common way to reformulate the death of a character is to create a retcon stating that the death scene did take place as seen, but something else took place as well, preventing the character from actually dying. Usually it is a severe near-death injury or situation (for example, an explosion), from which the character is saved (off-panel, detailed in the subsequent retcon) by his powers or skills, by good luck, or by the help of someone else. The death scene may also be a character's deliberate plot that simulates his own death or that of someone else for a certain purpose. In these cases, the death scene may have been staged, or it may have been an illusion of some kind. In other cases, the events took place as originally depicted, but instead of dying the character may be revealed to have been in a coma. This premise is often misused for injuries and illnesses that do not involve head trauma, the primary trigger for coma. Additionally, coma is often misrepresented as allowing a character to instantly resume their lives without the lengthy recovery time needed in reality (although the powers of the individual in question may help their recovery). Variations on this theme include suspended animation and cryogenic suspension, both of which are also used with varying degrees of scientific implausibility, and other types of metamorphosis created for the fictional universe. In more extreme examples, the consciousness of the character may be transferred to another body, human or otherwise.

Another way, in line with the mentioned one, is when a character dies but it is later revealed that it wasn't the real character who died, but someone else posing as him, such as a clone, impostor or shape-shifter. However, once comic book death became a standard, the trick was also used in another way: a character dies and returns, but the impostor ends up becoming the returned character, meaning that the original one remained dead all the time.

Other characters experience real deaths, but some cosmic or magical being makes them resurrect, either intentionally or unintentionally. Those kinds of resurrection may be intended to be either permanent or last only for a single story involving such a being. In those last cases the character may be resurrected as a zombie (for example: the Blackest Night arc in DC Comics, or the Necrosha arc in Marvel Comics) or harmed in some other way. Such beings may also have access to some afterlife where the soul of the character fled after dying (such as fictional variations of Heaven or Hell), and have some limited interaction with the character even while keeping him dead. Time travel, reality manipulation or other narrative tricks may also be used to undo big changes in the fictional universe (such as the death of characters) by setting them out of continuity and restoring things to a previous point.

A less controversial solution is to make a dead character remain dead, and have a similar one assume his super-hero or super-villain identity and replace him as a successor. Sometimes this even leads to the creation of complete successive timelines of people assuming the role, such as Wally West assuming the role of the Flash after the death of Barry Allen (Although Barry was recently resurrected anyway).

The death of characters may also be circumvented by editorial means beyond storyline. Rebooted timelines or recreations of characters in a different fictional universe may introduce dead characters as new, as they belong to the publishing house all the time regardless of their fictional status. Other specific stories may be conceived as not being canon from the start, so that the writers have creative freedom to kill major characters or perform radical changes as they see fit for the narrative, with such changes taking place only in that work and not in the main fictional universe. It can also happen that a writer uses a dead character by mistake, out of ignorance that the character was dead. In this case, the use of that character would become a continuity error until a proper explanation to fix it is given.