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![[Quarter Bin Revolving Door of Death]](../img/rdlogo.jpg)
![[WM in the glory of his 1963 outfit!]](../img/rd0201.jpg)
It shouldn't really seem odd that Marvel's Wonder Man has been rather generously
endowed with numerous trips beyond the veil; after all, the character's
first inception was as a tear- jerk character created to nobly turn against
his criminal circumstances and redeem himself by refusing to do evil, even
with his life in the balance.
Wonder Man's original conception was steeped in pathos and melodrama.
He had been a millionaire playboy, ruined by corruption (now revealed to
have been his own). He had allowed himself to become a costumed goon for
Baron Zemo, whose enhancement treatments had also caused Wonder Man to
become terminally ill; and the Faustian bargain Wonder Man had struck meant
that he had to prolong his life by continuing to allow Zemo to treat him.
Marvel, up to this point, had nobly resisted the temptation of bringing him back to life, though they did do a strange origin of the Silver Age Vision which involved having the Golden Age Human Torch's body (since revised) and a mind created from the template of the dying Wonder Man's brain waves.
The idea of containing a human personality by containing a taped version of a dead man's brain-wave patterns gave the early Vision tales some added tone, and we can credit Roy Thomas with the first Vision story scripts.
![[WM takes on the Vision!]](../img/rd0202.jpg)
Wonder Man first came back, really, as a dead man. He showed up among a
crowd of zombies (zuvembies?) animated by some mid-1970s Marvel Comics
voudoun, perhaps the Black Talon, and spent some time in this state
before being taken (in body) into the Avengers laboratories for study.
His reappearance set off a number of story vectors that still
resonate in The Avengers, vol. III that began at the turn of 1998.
The Vision no longer "owned" his human identity as a copy of Simon Williams
once the original was back, and in the 22 years since WM came back, there
have been numerous incidents of jealousy and rivalry, including the confused
loyalties of the Scarlet Witch, Vision's one-time mate.
Wonder Man spent a string of Avengers comics as brooding and self-pitying, both about the life he had lost and about the not-exactly-human character of himself now that he wasn't exactly dead any more. Soon, however, he became a more upbeat character, in spite of having gone through some really, really awful costumes. Many people consider his original costume an atrocity (although it was a Silver Age Classic in the hands of George Perez and Pablo Marcos). However, what was to come was much worse. For a while, he operated in shades, a black turtleneck, and a stupid red jacket. Then he took to a horrible green body stocking with a "W" on it, a costume so bad that it became part of his continuity that he changed his costume because people asked him to get rid of the horrible thing. Then he began his string of blue/black costumes with red detailing, most of which weren't bad.
Eventually writers considered it time to kill him again.
In at least one (disposable) story from Avengers West Coast, Wonder Man got to die again, in some incident where the Scarlet Witch went insane, then killed a bunch of Avengers, then brought them back to life to show off her powers. The nature of the character, by that point, however, suggests that it might not have been necessary to revive him; after all, he was no longer flesh and blood. I can't say if anyone found this episode a block upon which to build newer, better stories or just an embarrassing lapse of quality control subsequently to be swept under the rug.
The last days of Avengers West Coast, including its (failed) reincarnation as Force Works, began a rather high body count as dropping sales invited gimmickry such as hero deaths to attempt to increase sales. Shortly after Mockingbird got snuffed (probably to justify a caption that said "In this issue AN AVENGER DIES!"), the West Coast Avengers themselves got snuffed by administrative fiat, and their scattered remnant reorganized as Force Works.
In Force Works #1, they killed off Wonder Man again. He's supposed to have bitten it this time from being blown up with a Kree energy cannon.
About the time Wonder Man keeled over again, Marvel entered the fiscal nightmare caused by its overambitious overextension, and Marvel's titles started dropping like autumn leaves. Marvel went through an attempted, but failed, reboot of its superhero concepts in the Heroes Reborn titles. This wasted maybe a year. Then the Heroes Return books appeared, where Marvel has tried to re-revise its superhero universe free of the errors of Heroes Reborn.
All right, so we can consider that Wonder Man was dead again, although the nature of the character implied that death wasn't something that meant much to him in the long run. He was dead before the Heroes Reborn timeline. I can't recall if he appeared alive within Heroes Reborn because I didn't buy that stuff (my tastes being, as they are, retro). Then after a big fight between Dr. Doom and Thor, all the superheroes return to the "real" Marvel Universe.
This brings us to Avengers, vol. III. As soon as the forty-two thousand characters who have been Avengers or hangers-on return to the "real" world, they all get attacked by mythological critters, and Morgan LeFey (or is it LaFey?) drags them all to a renaissance-festival alternate universe she created where they're all her Wackenhut Security Team. Since her power came from a fusion of her own power with an Asgardian artifact and the power of the Scarlet Witch, naturally enough, SW rebelled and managed (somehow) to summon her one-time beau Wonder Man back from the dead, although this time he seems to be a floating cloud of energy.
The most amazing thing about this latest resurrection is that it surprised anyone. After all, hadn't she read that Superboy comic where Erg-1 came back as Wildfire? The "energy being" bit inoculates you from death even better than being part of Marvel Comics does--after all, sometimes non-super characters do stay dead (if they're walk-ons).
By 1998, after all, the hero-back-from-the-dead thing is not novel. The dying thing itself is no longer novel. It was novel in 1977 the second (at least) time that Adam Warlock died. It was novel when Marvel retroactively did in Bucky Barnes. It has lost its drama through overuse, especially when the once-dead return and return to their place around the table with nothing different about them.
We can hope, though, that clever writing does not make this latest return another disposable back-from- the-dead story. Enough incomplete plot strings exist, especially pertaining to the Vision- Scarlet Witch- Wonder Man triangle.
Then again, maybe Marvel should start a magazine about a supergroup composed of dead superheroes who Kicked Death in the Butt. They could sit around and discuss it over a couple of beers. For instance:
Wonder Man: Hey.
Adam Warlock: Yeah?
Wonder Man: You ever been dead?
Adam Warlock: A couple times.
Wonder Man: Hmmm...
Adam Warlock: So what's your point?
Wonder Man: ...well...it's sort of a let-down, isn't it?
Here's to a future where this doesn't happen.
Back to the Comics
Literature Reviewer.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.
