Hi all! You must have noticed them by now: the newborn chicks, the stalks of young asparagus, the half-naked yet shivering sunbathers at Castro Beach in San Francisco's Dolores Park—they are all sure-fire signs that Spring has arrived! And with spring comes Easter! Easter Sunday: the day that Christians the world over celebrate the fact that, as it turns out, that guy really wasn't pulling a Criss Angel on them and faking all those miracles, and was ACtually the son of, like, Odin or Zeus or Osiris or... something. I forget. One of the biggies . ANYway—the point is....

It's a holiday! And that means a theme article! And I noticed that, like fools, none of our other columnists—no one in the illustrious five-year history of QEoC—has thought to do a "Best Resurrected Comics Characters" piece! This makes me all kinds of happy since, as we all know, I am an unfailingly lazy writer... and this stuff practically writes itself. Just do an easy-to-break-down list, crack some jokes (about costumes mostly), and don't forget to mention Bucky Barnes. It's a no-brainer—especially at Easter! Couple all this with the fact that Flash: Rebirth is just out recently, and well... boom! Or rather... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! [Insert your favorite choir of angels here.]

And now here you are, not on Facebook for a minute, but still avoiding checking that one voicemail you just KNOW is waiting, and I've given you the perfect excuse to titter away the next 7-10 minutes! That's 7-10 minutes you can be living in my own mildly interesting head without all the drawbacks of having my continually receding hairline. I'd call that a win-win!

So without any further ado (or maybe just a little ado), here is my list of Favorite Dead Comics Characters Who Got Better (and the answer to the burning question "WWJRTR?*")...

What Would Jesus Rate This Resurrection?: The Scale
+++++ five Crucifixes "It's like I'm looking in a mirror!"

++++ four Crucifixes "Nice work! Come over for dinner with my Dad sometime."

+++ three Crucifixes "Points for style, but try harder next time."

++ two Crucifixes "Please see me after class."

+ one Crucifix "Even a crocus can bloom once a year. Next!"

0 no Crucifixes "Where are you on the whole 'lakes of fire and eternal torment' thing?"

BARRY ALLEN, THE FLASH
He's back! The hero of 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths, who was arguably more popular in death than he really ever was in life, has been returned to life this very year. Now, we're not exactly sure HOW or WHY just yet, but Geoff Johns is at the helm, and he has some experience in the resurrection field. A twenty-three year absence (though his character has showed up in almost innumerable books in a flashback capacity) is a long time away, but excitement about the first issue of Flash: Rebirth has been bigger than Jake Deckard on Kryptonian Viagra.

It stands to reason, given Flash's powers and history, that time travel might play some kind of part in the explanation of Barry's return, but given that most of the examples on this list have some kind of deific influence—so my money is on Odin/Zeus/Osiris—or maybe someone from the future'll come back with like a booster shot or something. Who knows?

What Would Jesus Rate This Resurrection? ++ He just sort of "showed up" one day, but then again, Jesus did the same thing to his disciples. Don't think Jesus was outrunning a time-traveling bullet, though. I'll have to get back to you on that.

COLOSSUS
OK, I hear you. Quit your bitching, girls! This happened in Astonishing X-Men, like, four YEARS ago. That's like 14 years in Comic Book Time (aka CBT). It's not a spoiler anymore!

Piotr Rasputin gave his life to put an end to the mutant-killing Legacy Virus, and the entire Marvel Universe mourned his loss. When Kitty Pryde, Peter's long-suffering ex, finds him spry and full of fight in the basement of what turns out to be an alien ship masquerading as a mutant research facility, the look on her face when she opens up his cell and he literally runs right through her was indeed priceless.

So priceless, in fact, that the reader actually forgets for a minute to be mad that, a character whose body we saw die—and be cremated no less!—was somehow surreptitiously snatched from deaths door and cured by... amazing, advanced, alien science? I mean come on, guys. Is it 1963 or something? Is this an issue of Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes? Super-science was a specialite du maison for them. But one expects better from the Great and Powerful Joss.

On the other hand, who minds have a six-foot-six, musclebound metal sex god as an option for your comic-reading pleasure. I know I don't. All is forgiven!

What Would Jesus Rate This Resurrection? +++ Mostly for the "rolling back of the stone at the tomb" way that Kitty released him. The only thing missing was the Angel!

BUCKY BARNES
In the revolving-door milieu of comic book deaths, James "Bucky" Barnes, World War II sidekick to Marvel's Captain America was, for decades, the undisputed exemplar of permanent gone-ness.

It used to be that, when you heard about a character dying, you'd say... "OK, well... are they 'sorta' dead or are they 'Bucky dead?'" Though no body was ever recovered (hmm...) he originally got blowed up real good in the same bomb-on-a-plane that cast Cap himself into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, eventually casting him into suspended animation in a block of ice. Cap was revived years later and helped found The Avengers... but what of Bucky? For decades the answer was: "He's gone. He's gone like any chance that Britney Spears' kids will ever have a normal life." And that, my friends, is as gone as one gets.

That is, until 2005 when Ed Brubaker apparently had a boat payment to make or a bar tab to pay off, and he decided that Bucky had not been blowed up after all, and brought him back in the pages of Captain America. Due to the aforementioned explosion—and some mental manipulation by some commie rogues who rescued him from the frigid waters, post-explosion—he had just forgotten what who he was! Amnesia! Yeah... that's it! If it can work for Days of Our Lives, it can work for Marvel!

The Russians trained Bucky to become their own operative, Winter Soldier, and kept him in his own suspended animation when he wasn't "in use." Hence, he really only aged a few years between World War II and the day that Cap took the... Cosmic Cube and used it to restore his memories? WTF? I wonder if the Greek's had a cube-shape in mind when they designed their first deus ex machina? Nice work, Brubaker. You just couldn't get the 6 foot bass boat, could you? You just haaaad to go for the 12 foot cruiser.

Still, Bucky does make an apt replacement for Cap after his own recent death, and he DEFinitely knows how to rock a black-kevlar-and-sliver-metal uniform in a thoroughly modern way. Ooo.. shiny.

What Would Jesus Rate This Resurrection? + I mean... he didn't really die to begin with, but at least there was some divine intervention involved in his "return." Plus, Jesus loves the Cosmic Cube. I think he's related to it or something.

(Editor: There are more resurrections to come! Well, we’re talking about comics, so it’s neverending, everlasting, afterlifing, well, you know. So get rebirthed this week so that you can enjoy Part II!)