Quotes / First Law of Resurrection

Fiction

Those bastards in the Pentagon can't really kill Sue Dibny,
No more they could kill off Lois Lane.

— Four-Color Love Story by the Metasciences

I liked him better before he died.

—McCoy, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Asylum doctor: May I suggest that you stop your friend? If he finds Dana, he's gonna end up dead like the others.
Angel: (glum) Yeah. But he'll just end up comin' back.

—Angel, discussing Spike ("Damage")

"...This is how the monster Doomsday was able to kill him. I'm sorry, not kill—put him into a healing coma."
"Cop-out!"

— DEATH BATTLE!, referring to The Death of Superman

You costumed freaks come back from the dead so often I don't even get to count you towards my quota.

— The Grim Reaper, Super Stupor

Reviews

The solution was to add one more layer of mystery and intrigue, and establish that Gaunt was actually working for someone else, someone he referred to as 'the devil himself.' We had no idea who that would be, but as long as [Editor] Bob Budiansky had any say over it, we knew who it wouldn't be: Norman Osborn. As Budiansky wrote in a memo dated November 9, 1995: 'Norman's death should never be undone, in my opinion. It's too classic… Let him rest in peace.' Ahhhh, the irony!

—Editor/Writer Glenn Greenberg on The Clone Saga

Don’t get me wrong: Most creators go into superhero comics wanting to tell stories, and it’s pretty easy to see the ones that are only in the money, because they end up writing Kick Ass making absolutely terrible comics. For the superhero genre, though, financial success is paramount, because that’s how they continue to exist. Superheroes are, in one respect, meant to be self-perpetuating profit machines, which means that the stories are supposed to go on forever. There’s never meant to be an ending, and a little thing like a character getting old and dying tends to undercut their marketability a little. Even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t get around that one.

—Chris Sims

For some reason, when you put 'superhero' and 'comics' and 'monthly' together, death becomes a hilariously temporary condition. That’s because longevity in superhero comics—in every form of ongoing serial fiction, really—comes down to winning popularity contests. A popular character that dies, or a character involved in a particularly famous death scene, is coming back eventually. People will keep requesting it until some editor breaks down and dreams up a stunt...These fans are, well, idiots. The only death scenes that get retroactively messed with in comics are generally those that were good enough for people to pay attention to in the first place.

...The result of this editorial skew toward the flamboyant is one simple fact: all of the most truly awful, terrible, and damningly stupid comic book deaths are those least likely to be undone by resurrections.

—Topless Robot, "The 10 People Who Have Stayed Dead in Comics

I do really like that Hawkman’s like 'Yeah, I’ve died before. It’s not really a big deal, I’ll be back.' It’s almost like he reads DC Comics.

—ComicsAlliance on Smallville ("Icarus")

Now, admittedly this idea is so common, it's the oldest category in my reviews: 'Lazarus of the Week', from the very first review video that I ever did. It offers two very powerful things: The tragedy of death and all the tragic opportunities that can entail, and then the spectacular defeat of the ultimate foe; that even the Grim Reaper cannot defeat the hero forever. The former shows the nobility, since the hero will often die fighting a hopeless battle or sacrificing their lives for the greater good. The latter shows how truly special they are what no one else is allowed to do. But those two things are largely dependent on that special element of it. If everyone keeps dying and coming back, then it isn't special; then it becomes mundane, even a joke. For instance, in The '90s, there was a grim gathering for Nick Fury's funeral — all except for his closest friends, who were laughing the whole time about it and discussing which ways he wouldn't be dead this time. 'Ohh, clones! Clones are really big now!'

—SFDebris on Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen

"If you want to get really technical about it, every member of the Fantastic Four has died at least once."

—Linkara, shrugging off the death of Johnny Storm, Atop the Fourth Wall

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