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![[Quarter Bin Revolving Door of Death]](../img/rdlogo.jpg)
All things said, Marvel Comics could not let one of the earliest Timely heroes rot in comics limbo, even after declaring the character dead to make room for a younger, more commercially successful namesake. It took close to twenty years, but Marvel, through its proxy, John Byrne, brought the original Human Torch back from the cemetary.
![[Gil Kane's classic cover to Avengers #97]](../img/rd0101.jpg)
It is a characteristically Marvel thing to put its properties through the
Revolving Door of Death. One reason may be because, unlike DC Comics, Marvel
did not buy out (or sue and forclose on) entire lines of comics characters,
such as the acquired properties of Fawcett, Quality, Charlton, and legions
of others they absorbed. This might make them less happy with the decision
to snuff a superhero, since the folks who invented said hero might still
be working, not only in the industry, but within the walls of the company;
also, at one time (before the proliferation of the 3,000 or so X-Men spinoff
books), Marvel actually held less superhero properties than DC.
Such speculation about why Marvel tends to resurrect its dead more often aside, we may consider the case of one of Marvel's earliest characters, including his death and subsequent resurrection.
Marvel Comics #1 is quite a collector's item, as far as comics go. I didn't look in Overstreet, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that it now sells for between 20 and 50 thousand dollars, assuming any copies still exist to be sold. This magazine introduced one of the earliest of the Timely super-heroes, the Human Torch.
This prototype of all modern flaming-guy superheroes did not, evidently, sell as many comic books as some of his contemporaries (such as Superman, Batman, or Captain Marvel). By the time Timely Comics had become Atlas Comics, they had essentially stopped doing superhero comics, and at the turn of the 1960s, one could consider the superheroes of Marvel's Golden Age -- like Captain America and the Sub-Mariner -- officially defunct.
This brings us to the turn of the 1950s. Timely had become Atlas comics in the 1950s, and by the end of the fifties had drifted out of the superhero game, more or less, even as DC's current incarnation was busy having a mini-revival of previously-extinct Golden Age characters, mostly in new incarnations.
Marvel, however, was to the point of ruin. If we believe the legends of the history of Marvel comics, there was a point at which a desperate Stan Lee sat in Marvel's offices, watching the furniture being taken out for non-payment, devoid of distributors and hope, weeping on a desk, when Golden Age comics veteran Jack Kirby walked in and saved everything.
Kirby had been instrumental in putting Marvel back on the charts. He had been involved in creations like the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, which, at various times, became staples of Marvel's sales.
After a couple of years of new success, Marvel even found the confidence to bring back some of its Golden Age characters. Captain America reappeared in The Avengers, and the Sub-Mariner reappeared in The Fantastic Four.
The Human Torch, however, couldn't really reappear, because he had been recycled. A new character with the same name and powers (and, for a stretch in the 1970s, even the same costume) had been created as one of the Fantastic Four. This made reinserting the Golden Age original problematic.
However, by the mid-to-late 1960s, the need for Fantastic Four stories had finally produced a story where the new Human Torch (Johnny Storm) got to meet, confront, and defeat the old Human Torch (Jim Hammond).
As with DC, Marvel's original creations generally vanished without any ado as their sales declined into non-viability, and the Human Torch, who had been out of publication for fifteen to twenty years already had vanished with no explanation (think about it: you stop a book because it's not selling, and if it's not selling, there's no one to explain why the hero is gone to).
Therefore, at a fairly late stage, it became necessary to explain why the Human Torch had vanished from the superhero scene. Some time after the story where the Mad Thinker set the Original Human Torch versus the Marvel Age Human Torch, follow-up stories described how the Torch had seen his powers get out of control and had gone off into the emptiness of the desert to explode in a storm of flames. Within one or two years either way, Marvel had also created the Silver Age Vision, and, in his first origin, had explained that the Vision's body had been the Human Torch's body, modified and given new powers and implanted with the mind of the dead superhero/supervillain Wonder Man. We could call this the second resurrection of the Human Torch, the first having been the incident where the Mad Thinker set him on the Silver Age Human Torch.
If you know about the Silver Age Avengers, you might recall that its best run was (in this author's opinion) when Roy Thomas wrote the magazine, approximately from issue 50 to issue 100. Now one thing that characterizes Roy Thomas' career in the sixties, seventies, and eighties is his usage of Golden Age characters. He was writing the Avengers when the story about the Silver Age Vision's origin appeared. He wrote Avengers story (#97) where Rick Jones summoned avatars of Marvel's Golden Age characters, including one of the Human Torch (see illustration, above). In the 1970s, he wrote for The Invaders, a retroactive continuity comic about a superhero group of Marvel's Golden Age characters. In the 1980s, he wrote All-Star Squadron, a comic about DC's Golden Age characters (with DC's acquired properties from Quality and other companies thrown in for good measure). Thomas' work made Golden Age characters recognizable again, often giving them a popularity they never had in their original titles.
In essense, he may have created a demand for these characters that had become extinct in the 1940s and 1950s, and, in the case of the Human Torch, may have created the interest that brought him back permanently.
By the early 1980s, the Avengers had become two titles: The Avengers and Avengers West Coast. The membership of the two teams tended to bleed from one title to the other, and the AWC contained various stalwarts from the regular Avengers, including, over the years, Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, and others as familiar.
During some point in the regular Avengers title (so I understand), there was a storyline where the Vision found out he was not actually the original Human Torch. This probably tied in with his all-yellow body from the 1980s that replaced his original, poorly colored, green and yellow costume.
In Avengers West Coast, the Human Torch was brought back to life for the third time (or second time, since the second incarnation as the Vision no longer counted). He, like Captain America before him, went through a period of disorientation, although it seems like he was in about a year of Avengers West Coast during his first few days back on-line. It wasn't too difficult, really, to bring him back, because, according to his original concept, he was a man-made construct rather than mortal flesh and blood, so his resurrection does not count as one of the more annoying ones, even though it was handled in a manner that sometimes demonstrated triteness.
Perhaps because of the lateness of his resurrection (1980s instead of 1960s), writers found that the Torch could not be connected to his earlier story history. Consider that a thirty-year old (and that was an old reader) in 1964 who read about Captain America's return would have been old enough to remember Captain America's appearence, decline, and disappearance, these events having occurred between his sixth and twentieth years.
Now consider the return of the Human Torch. Someone who had been six when he appeared in 1939 would have been in his fifties. The crowd of returned Nazi war criminals would have been too distant.
We should therefore not be surprised that the Human Torch was not allowed to remain in his returned form indefinitely even though Captain America and the Sub-Mariner remain eternally youthful almost 60 years after their creation.
They actually found an interesting place for him, even if his corner of the Marvel Universe is not at all prominent. They took his powers away (Marvel, unlike DC, is not willing to have two, three, or four characters with the same name at once). Instead of killing him off in some pathetically tear-jerking saga, they gave him a new place in Marveldom; he founded a superhero agency called Heroes for Hire (in a book by that name), and is now the annoying boss-man to characters like Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and (occasionally) the Black Knight and the Hulk.
Actually, as far as superhero resurrections go, this one has gone fairly well. The rebirth of the character at no time grossly violated existing continuity, nor did it violate implicit promises that the dead character would stay dead. Furthermore, the character was allowed to evolve in ways that were not implied by the original concept.
I'd give Marvel's handling of this one an A-.
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