TheX-Menfranchise’s most recent reset brought back mortal peril to the adventure of Marvel’s mutants, a move that many fans and critics alike believe was necessary to raise the stakes ofX-stories. Following theyears-long Krakoan Era, in which readers grew accustomed to their favorite heroes being routinely resurrected after dying in battle, the X-Men can die again.
In 2019, author Jonathan Hickman launched the most ambitious reimagining ofX-Menlore in the sixty-year history of the franchise. A major part of that was the “Resurrection Protocols.”
This essentially offered blanket immortality to all Marvel’s mutant heroes; while novel at first, this soon came to be widely considered a storytelling problem forX-Men.
X-Men’s “Resurrection Protocols” Gave The Franchise An Easy Workaround For Character Deaths
One Of Many Novel Innovatins From 2019’sHouse Of X/Powers Of X
The Krakoan Era’s “Resurrection Protocols” involved a group of powerful mutants called the Five; with their combined abilities, the Five had the ability to grow an exact duplicate of almost any mutant’s body, which, in the event of their death, would be imbued with a stored copy of the individual’s consciousness kept by Charles Xavier.
Setting aside the existential horror of this concept for the time being, the Resurrection Protocols served a functional purposefor theX-Menfranchise. In essence, it cut out the need for writers to come up with reasons to revive dead characters. It was a smart acknowledgment of the fact that most mutant heroes that get killed off return anyway.
In other words, the Resurrection Protocols provided an in-universe explanation for the ease with which comic book characters navigate the barrier between life and death. The idea was never to undercut the impact of death on mutants, but that is eventually how a contingent ofX-Menfans, and eventually, some writers and editors at Marvel, came to view it.
Like many of theideas Jonathan Hickman injected into theX-franchiseat the start of the Krakoan Era, the Resurrection Protocols were a bold speculative element, conceived of with a sharp eye for decades ofX-Menlore. Unfortunately, in time, the Protocols became something of a scapegoat for the larger problems of the era.
X-MenExplores The Very Meaning Of “Resurrection”
Now, let’s briefly return to that existential horror we mentioned earlier. As a concept, the Resurrection Protocols are fascinating because they raise the question of whatlife and death actually mean in the Marvel Universe, and by extension, the real world. That is, there is a fundamentally unsettling question that the resurrection process raises.
Which is, does a copy of a dead person really count as that person? If Nightcrawler dies, for example, and the Five use the Resurrection Protocols to bring him back, to everyone around him, and by extension the readers, it is like he never left. Yet the previous version of Nightcrawler still suffered the pain of death, and no longer exists.
The new Nightcrawler, more precisely speaking, has been created, rather than resurrected. This is a thought experiment that has beenexplored by iconic franchises likeStar Trek, and many other sci-fi stories, for decades. The Resurrection Protocols was Jonathan Hickman’s attempt to raise this question inX-Menlore, rather than just raise the dead.
And while some exciting Krakoan EraX-Menstories did wrestle with these implications, the full potential of the Resurrection Protocols was never fully explored, especially once Hickman left the franchise midway through the era. Instead, the Resurrection Protocols came to be increasingly maligned, untilMarvel did away with them at the first available opportunity.
The “Resurrection Protocols” Made Life, And Death, Too Straightforward For The X-Men
Lesson Learned: Bringing Characters Back Shouldn’t Be Too Mechanical
The truth of superhero storytelling is that the stakes surrounding death are always artificial. Marvel Comics characters are two-dimensional drawings on a page; they are, first and foremost, ideas and concepts themselves, and anyone who hasreadV for Vendettaknows that “ideas are bulletproof.” So, superheroes’ ability to surmount mortality is a virtue of the genre. A feature, not a bug.
To put it more bluntly: superhero deaths are often a shortcut to drama. Not always, but often Like everything in regard to writing comics, there is an art to killing off characters well, just as there is a degree of nuance to bringing them back. Perhaps that is the “storytelling sin” of the Resurrection Protocols after all.
Not that they made dying too easy for theX-Men, but that theyrobbed characters, and creators, of their own unique resurrection stories.The Protocols made the process rote, at least once it became clear their speculative potential wouldn’t be put to full use. Yes, now the X-Men can die again, but they can also come back in exciting, unexpected ways.
The Krakoan Era is over now, and death is a factor once more inX-Menstories, to the extent it ever was. Still, unlessMarvel tries to institute another “dead is dead” policyfor its killed off heroes, there will still effectively be behind-the-scenes Resurrection Protocols operating among the Marvel creators working in theX-MenOffice.
