Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Resurrection Man

Resurrection Man Vol. 1Resurrection Man Vol. 1 by Dan Abnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every time Mitch Shelly dies, he rises again two hours later with a different super power. He is the Resurrection Man...

In the mid to late 1990s, I was still following comics via Wizard but I'd largely given up buying single issues other than The Maxx and Preacher since I was a poor college student. I remember reading about this book but didn't have a change to read it before now.

Amnesia as a plot device is overused but it works very well here. When Resurrection Man begins, the reader is just as in the dark as Mitch. Over the course of the fourteen issues in this volume, Mitch learns just when and where he got his powers.

Mitch Shelly, the titular character, is a man on the road to redemption for his past misdeeds. Coupling that with his gimmick of repeatedly dying and being reborn with different powers makes a great hook. It also makes it a harder sell for the spandex crowd, which explains why the series didn't last all that long. It feels more like a Vertigo book than mainline DC.

Butch Guice supplies the art here and does it very well. He matured quite a bit since his debut at the helm of The Micronauts and was at the top of his form here, coming off a stint on one of the Superman books.

Abnet and Lanning did most of the heavy lifting, though. The tale was tightly plotted, the first twelve issues being one long arc. Actually, I'm puzzled why #13 and 14 were included. 13 is a standalone tale, possibly my favorite issue in the collection, and 14 is all setup for future tales. Anyway, the tale of Mitch Shelly unfolded one morsel at a time and was masterfully paced. Each issue was part of a greater whole but stood on its own as a satisfying installment. So where the hell is the rest of this run? It doesn't look like it ever got reprinted.

The comics industry almost died in the 1990s but some good works came out of that turbulent decade. Resurrection Man was one of those works. Four out of five stars.

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