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The Unsurprising Resurrection of Elektra

Comics readers found themselves underwhelmed, unsurprised, and unshocked with one of comics' most expected resurrections, said revival involving the seminal character Elektra. For a character that appeared on the comics scene so suddenly, the reaction to her death involved an unexpected intensity; but with this intensity came a rational doubt that Marvel would stick by the commitment it made to leave her dead.

Sure enough, Marvel did not stick by it, and began dropping hints almost immediately that the death hadn't taken.

Elektra Returns, Then Dies

Elektra first appeared in Daredevil #168, during Frank Miller's influential run. Miller's concept included Elektra's roots as the daughter of a Greek ambassador; as a college flame of Matt Murdock during his education, who vanished for years after the assassination of her father; and as an assassin herself in the service of the Kingpin after connections with martial/religious orders like the Chaste (who rejected her) and the Hand (who took her in).

After some carrying on, including emotive encounters between the red-suited superhero and his onetime flame, the Marvel villain Bullseye, himself a sometime assassin, did Elektra in. This death served to move an entire story arc in the Daredevil franchise.

Matt Goes Mental

Post-Elektra, Daredevil enjoyed a number of bizarre funks and idiosyncratic bouts of dementia. More than one player, including Daredevil himself, pursued schemes to exhume Elektra's cadaver, for various, not always rational, ends. Daredevil himself sought to attempt to reanimate her body by means of ninja magics of which his martial arts training had made him aware.

That the death of Elektra had any effect at all on Daredevil readership should have served as a clue that Marvel wouldn't stay with it. Before many comics readers had even heard of Elektra, let alone her death, Marvel's imaginary-story title, What If? began printing stories dealing with Elektra's survival.

Miller began dropping hints about Elektra's resurrection beginning in 1981-1982, after Daredevil's supposedly ineffective resurrection scheme.

The Legend Grows

The Elektra character continued to grow in popularity during her absence in a way atypical of dead superheroes, whose deaths usually only result in grumblings about how lamely creators presented their demise stories, or in skepticism about the publishers' commitments to keep them dead.

In 1986, Miller delineated an Elektra miniseries dealing with Elektra's training and arrival in New York.

Surprise - Elektra Comes Back!

Elektra's return probably represents the least surprising, most foreshadowed return of a "dead" superhero. Fans anticipated it from the earliest phases of her "death;" Miller began dropping hints mere months later about her return.

Then, to fuel interest, Daredevil wandered around as an emotional wreck in the wake of her death, trying, and seemingly failing, to bring her back by means of ninja techniques retconned onto his training in the late seventies.

Some characters had, indeed, had some prospect of remaining dead by the nature of the stories that did them in. For instance, Jim Starlin created a story arc with considerable closure when he lay Adam Warlock to rest, and the character remained dead (probably) from 1977 to 1992, a respectable fifteen-year span. Other characters managed to remain dead because their original appearances meant so little to ongoing continuity in the titles in which they appeared and to the "shared universe" of the company that produced their stories; thus, no great outcry called for the return of Marvel's Wonder Man after his death in 1965 until his return ten years later.

In the other camp, readers knew when Superman "died" in 1992 that this represented a very temporary condition. After all, the premiere character of DC's comics stable, a figure with over fifty years of stories behind him, seemed particularly unlikely to end up in the discard pile.

Elektra, however, had risen very quickly from obscurity to popularity to sudden death. Readers knew that she would return before many of the comics-wise had even heard of her.

In the "Fall From Grace" storyline in Daredevil #318-325, Elektra officially returned from the dead. If anyone showed any surprise, it probably came from the shock that Marvel had taken so long after making its intentions known almost immediately after Elektra's death.

A Textbook Case

Here all the pieces fit the formula for the noncommittal comics death. Readers knew what would happen years before Marvel actually put the stories into print; Marvel began backpedaling only months after the tragic (and, characteristically, temporary) demise of a character snuffed for shock value.

This death served the crass storytelling functions on both ends, first by serving as an attention-getting stunt (consider comics covers with blurbs like "This issue! A HERO DIES!"), then as an unresolved ongoing plot thread for the parent character (Daredevil moping around about Elektra's death, as the character strangely lacked the basic insight available to comics readers who knew she couldn't stay dead), then as another attention-getting stunt (consider comics covers with blurbs like "The senses-shattering return of....!").

Part of what renders this resurrection more annoying involves the central role Frank Miller played. Given his trend-setting, standard- raising history in comics, and his overall role in a medium where his represents one of the central styles to plagiarize, readers must grumble at the needlessness of his working in cliche.

The real tragedy of the story of Elektra revolves around other matters than her temporary and insubstantial "death." After a beginning where she represented a truly unique figure in comics, she ended up the model of cliches: cliches about superhero death, and even cliches of concept, with her role as the model of the uninspired character archetype derisively described as the "nimbo."