Resurrection Man #3 – Review

By: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Fernando Dagnino (artist), Santi Arcas (colorist)

The Story: What did your mother tell you about making deals with intangible, formless entities?

The Review: Here’s a theory about gimmicks: use them judiciously, and they can be an entertaining plot device (Zatanna’s backwards talk, or Dial H for Hero); let them fly without check and now you’ve got a one-note plot that seems repetitive and thin as a result.  At a certain point, readers catch on to the idea, the formula becomes too familiar, and then all the tension that makes a story worthwhile goes out the window.

That’s not quite happening here yet, but this title gets right on the verge of it.  When you have Mitch coming back to life twice in rapid succession, it just emphasizes how much suspense you lose when you have a character who can’t die.  To fill that vacuum, DnA offer instead a roulette wheel of powers our hero can rise again with, but since the ability he ends up with seems pretty random, you don’t get much satisfying speculation out of that either.

Then there are our antagonists, the Body Doubles, who have their own formidable resilience.  Essentially, the action consists of people duking it out passionately, but with no real reason to do so since none of them have any fear of permanent harm.  When Carmen gets a broken jaw, or Bonnie blown through a wall by a sonic wail, or Mitch shot with armor-piercing rounds, you know none of it matters, so you simply move on, unmoved.

About the only time a real sense of peril enters the issue is during Mitch’s rather brief sojourn “in between.”  There, Mitch has no resurrecting body at his disposal, only his immortal soul—which, apparently, can be eaten.  Unfortunately, this precious period of vulnerability gets squandered on a long, rambling monologue full of eye-rolling euphemisms, about how forces “upstairs” and “downstairs” want Mitch for their own because “You keep not dying and it’s causing problems.  Bookkeeping problems.  Columns ain’t balancing.”

None of this, by the way, reveals anything we haven’t already figured out for ourselves or advances any of the storylines at stake: Mitch’s quest for his past; the shadowy people who set the Body Doubles after him in the first place; and not even with the actual running plot thread about Suriel et al’s attempts to capture him.