There are certain series in the pile that I don’t notice have finished until I’m portioning out my monthly pulls and notice that one series hasn’t gotten any issues in a bit. Is an inexplicably large portion of the pile made up of series like that because I’m not sure how to keep track of what’s releasing anymore due to the death of Comixology? Perhaps. But at the very least it does line up well as the collected edition of Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma by Ram V, Anand RK, Mike Spicer, and Aditya Bidikar released recently, so it’s a good time to talk about it.

Mitch Shelly grew up to be a lawyer in South Carolina before getting in trouble with the mob. An explosion in his office should have killed him, but instead he survives with no memories of himself before being kidnapped and imbued with nanotechnology that help him cheat death. He’s able to come back from any killing blow with a power based on that which killed him.

But maybe that isn’t actually Mitch Shelley. Maybe that’s Mathieu Salliere. Or maybe it’s Michael Sheldon, or Mark Seivers, or any other combination of names. And what happens when he dies of old age instead of in some climactic fight? It’s here that he sees those names he’s taken on before. The different lives that he’s lived. When he can roll through time in his mind, he can change bits and pieces to put things in place just enough to hopefully keep something great and terrible from devouring our universe. 

There’s a feeling I get when I read through Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma that I felt when I first started renting Vertigo series from the library. I’m confronted with a character I know very little about—maybe a tangential reference in another series or from the original DCAU—but I’m seeing them in a way that’s vastly different from their origin. I don’t know how I know that it’s different, but the presentation of the story gives that impression. What happens throughout this Resurrection Man story is an upheaval of the original canon for something that’s so much more compelling as it opens the character up for dozens of interpretations and permutations as we discover he’s been around since the beginning of time and will likely be there after time ends. While the characters begins as a novelty, this story gives us him as a staple character that can be almost anything.

Even if Vertigo only just relaunched, the spirit of interpolations still persists throughout the Black Label stories. And it feels like those series end up sticking so much more often due to the massive swings they always take. DC and Marvel have these troves of characters that can be whatever a team of creators want them to be, but they just need the space to dive in and find them. Bringing those characters to light and giving us a reason to care keeps them alive for decades to come. 

Get excited. Get returned.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.