The DC Absolute titles may be grabbing headlines right now, but don’t count DC Black Label out. Seven years old and still going strong, Ram V and Anand RK are proving there’s life in the old girl yet—with a hero who can never die. The latest Black Label title, Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma, represents the unlikely—though, truthfully, inevitable—return of a cult classic hero from DC’s grungy, Vertigo-tinged ’90s. A man who wouldn’t really call himself much of a hero at all, if not for his fantastic powers he never asked for and relatively decent morals.

I was once asked which hero has died and come back the most times in comic book history. It’s a fair question in a landscape where death is essentially a long vacation. Since 1997, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Jackson Guice’s Resurrection Man has been the metafictional answer to that question: a hero whose very core is that he dies all the time. And every time he comes back, it’s always with a gift.

The town of Viceroy, South Carolina is famous for two things in the DC Universe: it’s the home of the bottling plant for Soder Cola, the premiere soft drink of the DCU, and it’s also the home of the Resurrection Man. But Viceroy isn’t where our story is set. Resurrection Man is written across America, the story of a man seeking his past, defining his future, and dodging the demons he left behind.

How Mitch Shelley came to his powers is something of a mystery. We get some hints towards the mystical, that he may be the latest in a long line of reincarnated figures through history. But on its face, Resurrection Man’s origin is one of organized crime and super science. But much of the original Resurrection Man series has Shelley, his own memories out of reach, discovering his own origins alongside the readers. As he (and we) eventually learn, Shelley’s former life was as a mob-connected lawyer who was attacked when he threatened to turn state’s evidence for the FBI. The “gas leak” intended to kill him didn’t take his life, but it did take his past, leaving the once successful lawyer a brain-damaged vagrant with no memory of his former self. It’s this nameless, pastless Shelley who was abducted by “The Lab,” an biotechnology organization exploiting the unhoused population as human test subjects for experiments. Experiments, for example, like a symbiosis with a colony of nanomachines called “Tektites” that are designed to keep their host alive through any means necessary.

Of all the Lab’s Tektite subjects, only Shelley survives. Or, we should say, he doesn’t. But he comes back anyway. It’s here that Shelley discovers that any death he might experience is only a temporary setback. And each time he returns, he does so with an unexpected extra superpower.

Though sometimes informed by the circumstances of his death, as if to adapt to the scenario which killed him, other times, Shelley’s powers upon his return are seemingly random. Through the original ’90s run, Shelley generated flight, shapeshifting, pyrokinesis, super speed and more esoteric powers still—such as the ability to convert the emotions of people around him into energy, or to turn anything he touches into glass. Like a morbid revamp of “Dial H for Hero,” the Resurrection Man is a gacha machine where every death comes with a new toy.

Naturally, all this makes Shelley the most valuable asset the Lab has acquired to date, which makes it all the more unacceptable when Mitch Shelley escapes. Shelley’s chief antagonist is the Lab’s director, a man named Hooker. Hooker seeks the same immortality for himself that Shelley has gained against his will. But in his own experiments with Tektites, he only achieved a horrible simulacrum of his abilities. For while Hooker cannot die, he also cannot heal from any sustained injury. And so, we find one zombie in pursuit of another.

If there’s another pair of characters you need to know about from Resurrection Man, it’s probably the Body Doubles: the two assassins hired by Hooker to take Shelley in on his behalf. This scene-stealing pair of a mob boss’s daughter and a former adult film star have achieved arguably greater reach through the DC Universe than even Shelley himself. After all, this world is never short of need for mercenary work from colorful characters.

Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma isn’t a comic with any guardrails, whether you’ve read previous Resurrection Man titles or not. No matter how prepared you think you are, it’s going to blow your mind. If you’d like a closer look at what Mitch Shelley is like, though, you could do a lot worse than to check out both the original 1997 Resurrection Man series and its 2011 follow-up, both available on DC UNIVERSE INFINITE. This is comics, baby. Nobody stays dead forever. The only difference with Mitch is that he doesn’t keep you waiting.
 

Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma #1 by Ram V, Anand RK and Mike Spicer is now available in print and as a digital comic book.

Alex Jaffe is the author of our monthly "Ask the Question" column and writes about TV, movies, comics and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @AlexJaffe and find him in the DC Official Discord server as HubCityQuestion.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Alex Jaffe and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.